ABSTRACT
The story was William Faulkner's " A Rose for Emi ly , " and its one description of Miss Emily as a young girl was as clear as a description could be. The narrator, apparently one of the townspeople, says: "We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door." Faulkner has pictured the Griersons as exactly as a photographer would, but that precision quite disappears when the description passes over into the mind of a reader. I t disappears even i f the reader is as well trained and fairly experienced as the five students of English litera ture who are the subjects of this book. Sam, Saul, Shep, Se bastian, and Sandra (as I shall call them) all spoke about this "tableau."
