The Subversion of Female Image in A Rose for Emily: The Contrast with the General Female Images

Abstract

William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily deconstructs the binary opposition between traditional submissive femininity and progressive feminist liberation through the tragic trajectory of Emily Grierson, a Southern Gothic anti-heroine whose violent agency destabilizes patriarchal norms. This paper employs Gothic Feminism and Judith Butler's theory of gender performativity to analyze Emily's paradoxical identity, arguing that her transformation from a docile "Southern Belle" to a murderer of her lover, Homer Barron, embodies both a critique and a grotesque perpetuation of patriarchal power structures. Unlike Jane Eyre's rational self-actualization or Nora Helmer's decisive escape in A Doll's House, Emily's performative violence—poisoning Homer and preserving his corpse—exposes the collapse of patriarchal logic when women weaponize its tools. Her decaying mansion, interpreted through Foucault's heterotopia, becomes a metaphor for her fragmented psyche, where societal expectations fester into madness. By situating Emily within the intersection of gender, power, and Southern Gothic tropes, this study reveals how her actions simultaneously subvert and reinforce the very systems that oppress her. The analysis concludes that Emily's "twisted agency" reflects neither rebellion nor compliance, but a tragic third path: a performative enactment of patriarchal scripts that ultimately renders her a symbol of fractured femininity.