The French philosopher Louis Althusser wrote that society transforms individuals into subjects through the use of interpellation. Interpellation is the act of using words and images to both characterize an individual for society, and to enforce the individual to respond accordingly. Perhaps the most interesting thing about William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” is that not only is it a textbook case on how interpellation actually works in society, but it is itself a valuable tool for understanding how literature can work the same way. One of the most prevalent themes taken up by academic criticism of “A Rose for Emily” is Emily Grierson’s stubborn inability to change, yet often overlooked is the fact that this view is based upon a third party’s recollection, and furthermore this third party is attempting to create a universalized characterization of Emily by adopting a communal voice to suggest that he speaks for the entire town.
The opening sentence serves both to place Emily as a subject and the narrator as a collective spokesman for the community. “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral.” At that point the reader doesn’t yet know just how big this town may be, so the implicit assumption is Emily was a figure of major importance. This characterization is explicitly fleshed out just two paragraphs later when she is described as a “tradition, a duty and a care.” That last description is particularly meaningful; to describe someone as a “care” typically indicates a less than flattering portrait. Many of the words chosen by the narrator indicate a view toward Emily that is at the least ambivalent, and most certainly assume an ideological viewpoint that attempts to interpellate her as a subject independent of an objective reality.
Whatever the objective reality of Emily Grierson may have been, the reader cannot be privy to it; all information is filtered through the narrator’s point of view. Indeed, the narrator goes further by consistently presenting his personal view as a communal view, serving to construct a definitive view of Emily while at the same time providing precious little detail about her from personal experience. And yet, there also seems to be precious little need to question whether the narrator actually is expressing the communal view of Emily.
The narrator of the “A Rose for Emily” is constructing Emily as a subject based not upon intimate knowledge of her, but rather upon an already interpellated view. “Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less.” It is only when Emily is seen as poor that she is allowed to become a human. In the preceding paragraph, the narrator confesses that the people of town had actually seen her as a figure in a tableau, forever frozen. In other words, Emily did not possess the ability to change simply because she was not allowed to change. Long before the narrator had put it down in words, the people of her town had committed the societal interpellation of Emily. Emily Grierson’s family is considered upper crust, and the fact that a special tax dispensation is created for her only serves to increase how the other town members come to view her as a subject rather than an individual; that dispensation also serves to inculcate in Emily a need to reproduce and reinforce that view for her own reasons.
At every point, the distinction between Emily and “them” grows starker and she responds by embracing the perspective that she is not just different from the rest, but above them, despite being poor and living in a house that is permeated by an overwhelming stench. Emily refuses to change because the societal assumption is that she has no need; she has special privileges. In concert with that, of course, since she does have special privileges, why should she want to change?
A Rose for Emily” is fascinating both in that it tells the story of a woman who has been locked into a box by a community’s desire to turn her into an ideological subject, as well as by the fact that everything that is actually known about her is only known through a narrator who wants to permanently define that very same perspective of the events.
