"A Rose for Emily" (1930)

To be clear, my opinion is that the Internet Speculative Fiction Database (ISFDB) basically has it right about this William Faulkner story, which appears in The Dark Descent and is a pretty good Faulkner story. ISFDB, however, classifies it as "non-genre," noting somewhat snippily, "This gothic story has nothing supernatural in it, but has appeared in so many genre anthologies that we want to index its appearance for the purposes of this database." You can feel the skepticism. I'm in sympathy to the extent that I worry editors of horror anthologies too often reach self-consciously for literary credibility. Thank God for Edgar Allan Poe, the go-to win-win (we can talk about the high levels of trash another time). On the other hand, I don't think a horror story has to have something supernatural in it. But it does get to be tricky business out here at the fine edges of sorting and ranking. I'll say I also have my arguments with ISFDB from the other direction. The database for example largely excludes Patricia Highsmith, whose formal specialty is more the crime or mystery genre, that's true. But if your idea of horror does not include the Ripley novels then I am not buying your idea of horror. To be blunt, "A Rose for Emily" is not even remotely my idea of horror. Yet there it is in The Dark Descent along with stories by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, and even D.H. Lawrence for crying out loud. Editor David G. Hartwell really did not need to go to most of these places because he otherwise has impeccable taste in stories that can only be called horror. The Dark Descent is one of the best collections I've come across yet.

In a roundabout way that brings us to the topic of "gothic," ISFDB's term which I probably need to understand better. Starting with the dictionary definition, the third sense in Merriam-Webster gives us "a style of fiction characterized by the use of desolate or remote settings and macabre, mysterious, or violent incidents." Sounds like Wuthering Heights! But we are starting to split hairs fine here as that definition in many ways applies equally to horror. Specific circumstances in "A Rose for Emily" reminded me of the Dickens novel Great Expectations and its scenes with Miss Havisham (perhaps as Faulkner intended?), another reason ISFDB's "gothic" seems right. "A Rose for Emily" tells a gruesomely horrific story, if I'm getting the picture right from the usual Faulknerian fragments: Miss Emily Grierson's father would not let her marry, she was 30 by the time he died and her prospects were limited by then, a Northern laborer was beneath her but even he wouldn't have her so she murdered him and slept next to the moldering corpse for many years.

Again, there's a good deal of overlap between horror and grotesque cruelty, mental aberration, and/or crime, so the argument may be fair that "A Rose for Emily" belongs or fits as horror. But something is missing here that I always find in horror, some sense of the uncanny or mystery of an unknowable beyond. In many ways this story reads like merely straightforward degradation of Miss Emily Grierson, with misogyny supplying some of the energy but much more a kind of resentment from the author, an understandable one too, toward the perversions of the Old South, here made absolutely and quite cynically concrete. To stretch it a bit, Faulkner does indulge one of H.P. Lovecraft's ploys, with an insistence on a penetrating noisome smell, but it doesn't feel derived from Lovecraft, and incidentally makes me wonder if Faulkner was even aware of him, though they were roughly contemporaries. Lovecraft was a little older but only by a few years. My main takeaway from "A Rose for Emily" is that the literary values of horror are best left to sort themselves out. Editors of horror anthologies don't need to drag morbid literary stars into the picture to shore up mainstream credibility (beyond Poe of course). Perhaps because it is a reliable commercial cash cow, perhaps for other reasons, horror will never get mainstream credibility and probably shouldn't. Let Faulkner be Faulkner. Let horror be horror.

The Dark Descent, ed. David G. Hartwell