Saturday, February 11, 2012

What happens when the Baptist minister called on Miss Emily?

If only we knew! Faulkner writes this piece of the story enigmatically, so we can guess that the conversation between the Baptist minister and Miss Emily would make so very juicy gossip for the townspeople of Jefferson. All we know is that the minister



 "would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again. The next Sunday they again drove about the streets, and the following day the minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama."



Recall that the women of the town persuaded the minister to visit Miss Emily after she had done several things to rebel against the antebellum spinster role the townspeople had fit her into: she was cavorting with a man, a Northern day laborer beneath her station at that! They also assumed that she had had sex with him: "She carried her head high enough--even when we believed that she was fallen." The Baptist minister is then sent to visit her, presumably to convince her to get herself married or stop riding around in a carriage with Homer Barron. 


How Miss Emily took such a request is impossible to say for certain, but not hard to imagine, having seen her reaction to the alderman who came for her taxes. Certainly she would have been haughty and rude. Likely she would have been offended at the presumption of the minister (not even of her denomination – remember, "her people" are Episcopal) and not afraid to voice her outrage at his visit and the subject. For a man who was not inclined to broach the subject at all with her, it wouldn't take much to scare off the minister and have him outsource the problem to her Alabama relations.   

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