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Melissa Stiglet
English 371
19 April 2017
The Southern Plantation Myth: Gone but Not Forgotten
Southern Literature was focused on the significance of the role of family loyalty,
southern history, and both social and racial class within the southern plantation traditions in the
late-nineteenth century. The destruction of plantation tradition is the subject of Faulkner’s
southern literature. For the purposes of this paper, I will focus on the characteristics that show
the “southern myth” both in attitudes towards history and social class. The characteristics of
William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” and “Barn Burning” are a perfect illustration of
“southern Literature” in its glory days. After the Civil War, southern aristocrats, the people that
worked for them, and the surrounding communities had a difficult time removing themselves
from the traditions that had been the custom for most of their lives. The southern plantation
narrative was ingrained in the very fiber of the society that now needed to transform their way of
thinking to become a part of the social and economic changes in the south. With so many of the
aristocratic southern plantation owners losing their wealth during the Civil War, stubbornness
and bitterness were the predominant attitudes among them.
The short story, “A Rose for Emily”, reflects Faulkner’s Southern roots and the culture in
which he lived his life, as a child of the South, Faulkner could not escape the encompassing
power of the southern myth. The story is written in the southern plantation narrative as told in
gossip form through flashbacks by an unknown narrator who serves as a collective voice for the
town. “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a
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sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the
inside of her house.” (998). In the period after the Civil War, Emily Grierson embodies the
culture of the white, elitist Southerner that can’t seem to accept that the old south is dead, or at
the very least on its death bed. For most of her life, Emily was dominated by her father and never
questioned it because she had to uphold the noblesse oblige to which she was born into. She
epitomized the stubborn refusal to submit to, or even acknowledge, the inevitability of change.
The narrative shows how broken the south was and how the “southern ladies” and “southern
gentlemen” constantly contended with the loss of their stature. The entire region was licking its
wounds and in denial so much that no one knew how to act in the aftermath of the south’s
downfall. The town is trying to figure out its legacy from the Griersons, and what the plantation
myth means in their future, and what it owes to its past. Miss Emily was a “Lady” with all the
