A Brief Comparison Between Faulkner's Rose for Emily and Steinbeck's The Chrysanthemums

Even from a glance, the short story titled Rose for Emily written by William Faulkner and The Chrysanthemums written by John Steinbeck have many things in common. The most noticeable one is perhaps the fact that the main character of both short stories are women, and the stories revolve around how these two women live the life they have.



In Rose for Emily, we have Emily Grierson, a woman who isolates herself in her big mansion, whose daily companion is only a male servant. It is implied in the beginning, that Emily's family is used to be wealthy, that the town she lives in was built with help from her family's wealth. And that is why her family is never asked to pay tax—it is as the form of gratitude from the town people for what her family had done to the town. Yet time flies, and the new generation—the generation that do not believe in such stories and only think of it as some myth, dismisses the notion entirely and forces the sheriff to ask Emily to pay her tax, and this seems to be the beginning of the complication in the story.

While on the other hand, in The Chrysanthemums, we get to see Elisa Ellen, a normal housewife who seems to be obsessed with gardening. For a few first pages, we get to hear her describe the flora and plants she has in her garden, and how she cares for them. Then come a traveler, and this is where the main complication of the story arises.

We can also see that in while in the story Rose for Emily, Emily is the main character, she is not the narrator. Instead, all we know about her are only what we can see from the town people's conversations and reference to her. The Emily that we see in the story is the Emily that is seen through the town people's eyes, and while their opinions are not exactly hostile towards her, their opinions are not exactly in a favorable light either. According to them, Emily is such a freak because she refuses to come out of her house, and also because she refuses to interact with other people. She even rejects those who come to her house. To them, she is only a woman who lives alone and dies alone, until after her death, they check out her house and find the skeleton of a man on a bed. While in The Chrysanthemums, Elisa is the main character as well as the narrator of the story. At first, there seems to be nothing wrong with her; but then we get to see her interaction with the traveler, her guest, and we get some hints that may indicate that she is not as content with her life as she pretends to be, if her brief infatuation and momentary lapse when she reaches for the traveler's pants is any indication.

Talking about plot, in The Chrysanthemums, the plot used is quite straightforward, while in Rose for Emily, the plot used is forward-backward, which gives a slight twist and a sense of suspense to the story, because it is not until we get to the ending that we can understand what the story is actually about. And yet, despite their differences, both stories have open-ending, which leave us as the reader to guess just how exactly the stories end.