The Obsession With The Past In Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

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The Obsession with the Past
“Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care: a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (85). Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily took place in a small town in Mississippi the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Faulkner’s life has greatly influenced his stories as he saw his life. The nineteenth and early twentieth century’s culture and history has a lot to do with what we deal with as a nation. The past we have as a country affects us now in the twenty first centuries and many centuries following. In A Rose for Emily, Faulkner’s point is that there is a clear obsession with the past in the story that is expressed possibly by need continue what was started or to correct what could happen in the future. …show more content…
For example, Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind. This story is about a pubescent girl who is in love with her neighbor Ashley and finds out that he is marrying his cousin Melanie. When she builds up the courage to tell Ashley that she loves him, he rejects her and in retaliation she gets engaged to Melanie’s brother Charles, a shy and clueless young boy. This is a story of violence, strength, betrayal, and love all revolving around the Civil War and the Reconstruction. Also John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. This story is about The Joads, an Oklahoma farm family that has been forced from their farm to California. A conflict between the strong and the weak and because of one man powerful reaction to injustice and woman’s long suffering strength, they somehow get through. This is a story of injustice, struggle, and family centered in the years of the Great Depression
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