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In “A Rose for Emily,” William Faulkner three times describes his heroine in terms that recall Poe’s central image in “To Helen”: “Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche/ How statue-like I see thee stand.” On the first occasion, Faulkner places Emily Grierson stone-still in a lighted window after midnight, “her upright torso motionless as that of an idol” [The Portable Faulkner, ed. Malcolm Cowley (1954), p. 493]. Later he describes her [p. 494] as having “a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows,” not unlike Poe’s “statue” in a “brilliant window-niche.” And once again [p. 499], he poses her at her window, “like the carven torso of an idol in a niche.”
Is this repeated similarity a coincidence, or were Poe’s lines in Faulkner’s mind? Consider that symbolically the two heroines are somewhat similar. Helen’s beauty and statue-like serenity in her window remind Poe of the glory and grandeur of Greece and Rome; Faulkner’s Emily, “sort of tragic and serene” [p. 494] and repeatedly posed before a window, is an immobile idol respected as representative of the glory and grandeur of the Old South. In her dark house — “in that region above stairs” [p. 500] as Faulkner words it (compare Poe’s words “from the regions which/Are Holy Land”) — lies the corpse of Emily’s lover, Homer. Let us not call his name a classic touch. Faulkner’s insisted-upon image of Emily as an idol in a window seems likely to have been suggested by Poe’s celebrated image of Helen in her window.
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Associated Article(s) and Related Material:
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[S:1 - PSDR, 1968]