A Rose for Emily and The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

A Rose for Emily and The Jilting of Granny Weatherall

Introduction

The use of characters by the authors resembles the over-flowing imagination and messages that the author wants to deliver. The main character is called as the protagonists wherein the events of the narrative story or plot revolve. The representation of the character has an objective to capture the empathy of the audiences, viewers, listeners, or readers.  In literary art and other related arts like theatre, cinema, or musical, the protagonists call the attention of the people by the structure of their characters. In this paper, the comparison of the protagonist in the “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and “the Jilting of Granny Weatherall” by Katherine Anne Porter are examined.

Emily of “A Rose for Emily”

Faulkner designs this narrative position as a reflection of his own stance toward patriarchal societal structures and toward classic realist fiction. He stands firmly within the constructs, yet by calling attention to this vantage point and its inadequacies, by deploying a bisexual narration into the text, and by presenting Emily’s house both as intimate spaces for the character as well as impregnable barrier to its own author/creator, Faulkner dismantles the structure of classic realist fiction. Both narrator and author participate in an attempt to render beyond the powerful systems that construct them. By not outwardly claiming an engendered visionary stance for his or her embodiment, the narrator also creates a bisexual oscillation in language. This particular narrator creates the “permanent state of tension” defined by bisexual writing: “it is generated and regenerated by an interaction between the feminine and masculine, between self and other”. In such writing, the woman character must “traverse the spaces between presence and absence, between her own subjectivity and her bounded status in male discourse”, and Emily does just that. She abides Faulkner’s attempts to write her life and the narrator’s attempts to speak her life; she lives her life in the white space of the page. While Faulkner busily writes and the narrator dutifully tells, Emily craftily arranges — remember that she has an artistic flair exhibited in her china-painting lessons — skeletal bone and one single hair into an image to display at the end of the story.

Ellen of “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall”

In “The Jilting of Granny Weatherall,” Porter depicts an elderly woman near death looking back on her life. The man who promised to marry young Ellen Weatherall never showed up on the appointed day; she eventually married another and, to all outward appearances, went on with her life. Ellen Weatherall does not overstep the bounds of traditional domestic roles; indeed, she takes on the traditional role with a vengeance–determined to have everything that the jilting would have taken away from her–and she is largely successful. When her husband dies young, she steps into a traditionally male role, laboring to make a good home and future for her children and herself. In spite of her accomplishments, on her deathbed Ellen cannot banish the memory of being jilted.

The Protagonists

Aside from the obvious fact that the two protagonists are women, the roles that they play are somewhat similar. Both characters’ resembles a strong personality as the main characters in the story. Even though the plots, settings, and themes are extremely different, many researchers and book reviews agreed that the Ellen or Granny Weatherall and Emily Grierson share three distinct traits. Both characters are very independent, extremely stubborn, and most of all, a man plays an important role in both their lives to alter it forever.

The combination of Miss Emily’s traits is presented in the story by judging her to be mentally ill. Miss Emily’s erratic and idiosyncratic behavior becomes outright bizarre, and the reader, like the townspeople in the story, is left wondering how to explain the fact that Miss Emily has spent years living and sleeping with the corpse of Homer Barron, the man who supposed to leave without marrying Miss Emily. On the other hand, Ellen Weatherall was forced to marry another man and yet he died in their early marriage and despite of her success as an independent woman, she felts that the humanity failed her. She indeed used the name “Granny” than Ellen to recognize her to avoid being hurt again.  

Conclusion

The strangeness of the two characters made the story more exciting, if not probably intriguing to the readers. In the plot of the stories, the readers are left and wandering to learn more about the characters and to discover the reasons behind their actions which made the readers finish the book in one sitting.  

References:

Article Myriad [Online] Available at: http://www.articlemyriad.com/rose_emily_analysis.htm [Accessed 28 September 2010]

Collins, C., (2003) Jilted Southern Women: The Defiance of Margaret Cooper and Her Twentieth-Century Successors, Studies in the Novel, 35(2): 178+

Curry, R.R., (1994) Gender and Authorial Limitation in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily, The Mississippi Quarterly, 47(3): 391+

 

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