A Rose for Emily from the Perspective of Lefebvre’s Space Theory

Abstract

A Rose for Emily is a classic work of American Southern literature, which tells the tragic fate of Emily. Based on Henry Lefebvre’s theory of space production, this paper interprets the collapse process of the power structure of the Old South and reveals the inevitability of Emily’s individual tragedy from the physical space, mental space and social space in the novel and the complex interaction among them. It is found that the space presented in the novel is not only the physical space formed by Emily’s closed house, but also the mental space formed by the traditional ideologies of the South such as patriarchy, the myth of the lady, and class order, and the social space formed by the small town of Jefferson, and the vivid interactions among the three constitute a dynamic framework that reproduces the disintegration and collapse of the power structure of the Old South.