福克纳小说《献给艾米丽的玫瑰》(4)
Although Faulkner in A Rose for Emily leaves little margin for the representation of the glorious past of the South, the story is redolent of the large plantation which Emily and her ancestors inhabit, and of the immense cotton fields which now have been substituted with “garages”, and the “gasoline pumps”. Faulkner indeed implies the past glory twice in the story. The first time is that when he depicts the original appearance of the house where Emily lives. “It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street”(Wu 273). Another time Faulkner mentions the agrarian past of the South when one of the aldermen sprinkles lime around Emily’s house with “a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder”(Wu 277)—a typical motion of sowing cotton seeds. Faulkner himself is not nostalgic, but he is always conscious of the past. The intention of his portal of the past is to set it in contrast with the present and remind the southerners of the inexorable degeneration of heart-lifting plantations of the old times.
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