Roses for Who Essay Example

whole town" is the subject of the sentence. Faulkner's stylistic choices serve to subordinate ?mily, who is ostensibly the main character of the story, and elevate the town as the true focal point. Interpreting ?mily as a subordinate subject to the town diminishes criticism regarding her actions towards Homer Barron, which has been extensively discussed in scholarly analysis. These motives vary from sexual repression and Oedipal issues to symbolic representation of the shift from the Old South to the new. While scholars have primarily treated the story as a murder mystery and grappled with the revelation of ?mily's "secret," there is a deeper secret at play in the story: why does Faulkner choose to create a narrator with an indeterminate gender to tell this particular story? Until recently, the narrator has been considered of marginal importance in the tale. Hal Blythe's essay from 1988 provides thought-provoking discussion about the narrator, but assumes that the narrator is male. Michael Burduck's essay from 1990 critiques Blythe's article on this very point and argues for a female narrator.

(Blythe, p.4) Both of these approaches maintain the binary significance of words like "male" and "female" in language. Since Faulkner does not specify the gender of the narrator in the text, postmodern critics speculate that he intended either one or the other and part of the enigma of the story is to determine the narrator's gender. Faulkner's "feminism" is an underlying, often unexpressed concern in this search for gender identification.