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The townspeople wants to preserve the values of the old South embodied in Emily as a representative of idealized southern womanhood (Dilworth, 2003). Huang Xuee mentions in her study that in the interaction with townspeople, Emily is put in an invidious position and if the townspeople treated Emily as an ordinary women but not a rigescent heredity of aristocrat culture, Emily would not drive to a tragic end (Huang, 2003). Wang Wen studies the attitudes of the townspeople and finds that the privilege noble families used to enjoy is diminishing and Miss Emily remains the centre of attention but is viewed in a disrespectful way (王雯, 2010). To some extent, the tragedy of Emily should be attributed to townspeople’s attitude towards her as they regards Emily a monument that has no feelings rather than a poor bereft female aristocrat who needs to pour out her woes. It seems that old moral values are also rooted in the mind of townspeople but they don’t totally stick to it. If they had profoundly recognized her as a monument, they would have respected her and wouldn’t have accused her of the smell of her house. There might be other problems in the Southern society that the townspeople have in common.
Zhang Meiqin analyzes Faulkner’s stories and finds that in his novels human nature was distorted and alienated (Zhang, 2006). Emily is almost a wordless female character in the story. All of her thoughts and behaviors are reasoned by others, without her voice. She is never given a chance to explain why she refused to dispose of her father’s body, refused to pay tax and why she expected to marry Homer (Zhu, 2011). The townspeople are not likely to have an amicable relationship with Emily and their attitudes towards Emily again imperil her after she become free from the cage made by her father. Their attitudes also need to be further researched.
Besides her father and townspeople, researchers also find her lover has an impact on her. The death of her lover is the most sufficient evidence to the pain Emily suffered and the existence of serious problems in the society. About Emily’s motive, Faulkner later spoke ambiguously: in March 1957, he said that Emily realized she had broken the law of her tradition and murdered him to expiate her crime (Gwynn et al. , 1959). Emily’s bold act of being together with Homer is an expulsion from the upper class (Zhu, 2011). Homer is the first person who Emily is eager to interact with on her own initiative after the death of her father. But when she devotes everything to their love, she finally finds that she can not abdicate the honor that her figure as a monument brought. The research on miserable love between Homer and Emily can also help expose the problems in the society.
This paper seeks to explore the social cause of Emily’s tragedy by analyzing the attitudes and behavior of her relatives and townspeople, in which the problems in the Southern society are to be revealed.
2. Fogyish moral values
2.1 Patriarchy
Patriarchal societies are where an elder man is prior to all others. Emily’s family consisted of only two people: Emily and her father. Her father, with a patriarchal value, had definite authoritative power over Emily which had a negative impact on the cultivation of Emily.
It’s without denying that among all kinds of human ethic relations, parent-child relationship is of vital importance because this relationship plays a crucial role in the cultivation of children. Born in an aristocratic family with the absence of her mother, Emily is totally hidden by her father’s shadow. There is a vivid plot about the relationship between Emily and her father.
None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door (Faulkner, 1931).