blog post #2

Blog post #2

“A Rose for Emily” is a story written by William Faulkner in 1930. The story opens with the scene of the funeral of Emily Grierson, who is the last member of a once great family. Then it proceeds to a series of narrator's memories of Emily's old-fashioned and unusual behavior throughout the years, regarding her father and husband. The story is set in the South after the Civil War, Emily’s family life remains powerful since they refuse to pay taxes to Jefferson and Emily was able to purchased arsenic without offering real explanations. However, the prestige of the family casts controls on Emily’s life. “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town . . .” Emily was never allowed to date anyone with a lower hierarchy by her father, and even after her father is dead, she was also criticized by the townspeople when she was in a relationship with Homer Barron. The superior power of Emily has become a duty and obligation to Emily. Similarly, George Orwell also depicts the power dynamics that have fallen to be a duty and obligation in the story “Shooting an Elephant”.

In “Shooting an Elephant”，the narrator is the police officer of Moulmein, a town in the British colony of Burma. Although he is a military occupier, he wrote: “I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing and the sooner I got out of it the better.” One day, an elephant appeared in the town. It ravaged the bazaar and killed an Indian man. As the ruler of the town, the narrator was forced to kill the elephant with a rifle under the great “expectations” of the local people, despite that he did not want to kill it at all. He described that he was often “an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so”, which makes the killing of the elephant “the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me”. In that situation, his superior power actually destroyed his freedom to follow his will and moral belief. As an anti-imperialist writer, George Orwell used the elephant’s death as a metaphor to symbolize the slow decline of British imperialism in Burma and how they eventually died off by describing the elephant was laying “powerless to move and yet powerless to die.”

In “A Rose for Emily” and “Shooting an Elephant”, although the power dynamics of Southern whites and that of Englishman seemed to be superior compared to the other people in the setting, their power has become a duty and an obligation. The power was conflicted by a new social trend and indicated that the more civilized one would take place of the old-fashioned one someday.