SOURCE: “Horror and Perverse Delight: Faulkner's ‘A Rose for Emily,’” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 30, No. 4, Winter, 1984, pp. 685–97.

In the following essay, Allen contends that rather than simply horrifying the reader, the grotesque elements in “A Rose for Emily” are designed to fascinate and delight.

Enigmatic and inescapable, Emily Grierson dominates William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily,” and her protean, mysterious nature is nowhere more apparent than in her physical appearance. If her psychology is difficult to fathom, her body is equally rich in ambiguity. Her first direct appearance in the narrative, a flashback to her meeting with the aldermen who have come to discuss her taxes, dramatically conveys her corporeal oddity:

They rose when she entered—a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her...