Miss Emily
Miss Emily in the story named for her is a fascinating case of a character who serves as a metaphor for one thing, but as part of that encompassing metaphor is also a symbol of something specific. As metaphor, Miss Emily’s steadfast refusal to accept change is broadly enough implicated to transform her into a metaphor for the Old South which stubbornly refused to join the rest of the world in the progress of civilization. External to Miss Emily is how the rest of the community treats her in life and even after death long after emancipation, abolition and Reconstruction had forever forced the South to change. By continuing to treat Miss Emily as something more representative of the Confederacy than a woman living well into the 20th century, Miss Emily is also a symbol for how that history and those traditions of antebellum Dixie still—even today—exert a strong and powerful influence upon the culture and conventions of the South.
The de Spain Mansion (Barn Burning)
The mansion that is owned by de Spain is very much of a symbol of class inequality and—more to the point for the narrative—a veritable personification of how that inequality is determined by birth which is, in turn, determined by class. Abner pointedly informs Sarty that this symbol of de Spain’s wealth—and by extension his class—was constructed literally from the sweat of slaves. The mansion at this point becomes a symbol of how exploitation is the real distinction between classes and in that moment of a father sharing information with a son, the mansion actually becomes a symbol of justification: the burning of barns attains moral equivalency with using slaves to build houses.
The Buck (Race at Morning)
The complicated symbolism of the buck becomes much easier to understand when put into perspective by the question that Mister Ernest poses to the young boy: would he prefer to have the buck take the form of hide and meat or an animal to be tracked down against next year. With the answer being obviously the latter scenario, the buck becomes a symbol for everything that anybody has or will ever want so badly, but that is fulfills that desire only by never being possessed. The terms of the former scenario to the question is that possession of the buck actually removes everything from it that makes it an object of desire. Desire can thus be fulfilled only remaining unfulfilled. That’s some potent symbolism!
The Ditch (That Evening Sun)
The ditch in the story “That Evening Sun” is one of the more tangible and perhaps even obvious symbols in a Faulkner story, but the way in which the symbolism is utilized is anything but simplistic. Literally speaking, the ditch represents a borderline between the whites and blacks in the community, but like all locations so separated, the borderland itself turns out to be a complicated commingling of the cultural expectations and prejudices of both sides. The ditch is therefore a sort of strange, almost dreamlike never land where the unexpected is always to be expected.
Drought (Dry September)
The lack of rain becomes by its conspicuous absence the single most powerful symbol in the story “Dry September” and, indeed, the entire collection. In fact, one could argue that the drought by virtue of the fact that the word itself never appears once in the story can be elevated to one of the most powerful examples of how Faulkner uses symbols in his writing. Like the rain in the town and the word “drought” in the text, “Dry September” is a story built upon elements that are notably missing or absent: was Miss Minnie Cooper attacked or not, why does the barber join the others in hitting Mayes, what exactly does happen to Mayes, if McLendon’s problem is merely that he’s a racist, why does he attack his own wife, and does Miss Cooper lose it at the movies as a result of emotional distress over being raped or emotional distress over lying about it. Drought assumes the status of the rain and all the other pertinent information missing from this story to take on the symbolic role of the something that is missing here that allows these people to behave like rational, civilized human beings.
