A Rose For Emily: An Archetypal Approach

The classical image of Emily in A Rose for Emily is still being studied. The reason is that the characters in this story have a profound meaning and endless connotation. After many data collection and verification, the author believes that the characters in A Rose for Emily correspond to the archetypes of European religious and secular literature, especially cavalier literature in various ways. Thus it is possible to get a fresh perspective by the way of using the cavalier literature archetypes to analyze this distinctive story.Also, as pointed out in the paper, A Rose for Emily is not simply an imitation of the cavalier literature, but a parody of the cavalier literature in the context of modern society. By the way of subversion and deconstructing the value of cavalier spirit as well as the refined love, A Rose for Emily reveals the loss of the sublime ideals and significant meanings, the decline of the ancient and noble spirits in the modern society, and therefore alarms the modern people.This paper is divided into four parts. The first part is the overview of the paper's purpose, theoretical framework and significance. And it is combined with literature review to introduce the current domestic and foreign scholars'studies on the story. The second part is to analysis the various cavalier archetypes used in A Rose for Emily. The third part is to reveal the borrowing of the archetypes and elements from Hebrew, Greek, and cavalier literatures in the story and the parody on the archetypes and elements of those Literatures, especially the parody and subversion on "Knight - Princess" mode, i.e., the salvation theme of that"a beautiful woman was rescued by a hero", the cavalier spirit, and the refined love. Finally, the author of the paper draws a conclusion. This paper argues that the study tries to fill of the gap between domestic and abroad archetypal analysis for A Rose for Emily and parody analysis on its themes, and broadens the aesthetic researches of the story, so that we can have more complete knowledge of A Rose for Emily around.