Blog Post #2: topic 1

            Faulkner’s piece, “A Rose for Emily”, tells the narrative of Emily, a high-class southern woman who. After the death of her father, she is distraught and one could even argue that she goes “crazy”. Orwell’s “Shooting an Elephant” is about an English police officer in a Burmese colony. He is requested to kill an elephant that has been destroying the villages and killing the indigenous Burmese people. Race plays a key role in either of these stories, but I think it is presented as more of an issue in Faulkner’s piece as opposed to Orwell’s.

In “A Rose for Emily”, the issue of race is hardly directly addressed, but I think this is because it is not seen as an issue. Even though it is set in post-Civil War period, racism, segregation and inequality was still very much prevalent, especially in the south where this story takes place. Emily has a black servant, but throughout the story, he is not addressed by any name, but instead by “the old Negro” (38). This completely invalidates his individuality and worth. The narrator is not willing to use his name, limiting his existence to simply being the “Negro”, ignoring anything else he might have to offer.  Emily’s father makes a statement about the black women. He states that, “no Negro women should appear on the streets without an apron-remitted her taxes” (37-28). At this point, slavery has ended, but the mentality of the white people in the south was that black people should still to be seen as “slaves” in a sense. This asserts white superiority and the belief that black people should remain as servants to them. These racist notions are not emphasized or discussed by the narrator, making it clear that they do not see it as a problem. Instead, the racism seen here is just the way of life; it is so normalized that it is not even worth mentioning.

            On the other hand, in Orwell’s short story, we notice that Orwell is in fact aware of the racist societal structure. He admits to himself, “I had already made up my mind that imperialism was an evil thing” (44). Orwell is at least recognizing the racism system that is in place and even acknowledges that it is wrong. He does refer to the indigenous Burmese people as “yellow faces” (44), so it is not that Orwell himself is not racist. He clearly knows he is superior in thinking that “a white man mustn’t be frightened in front of ‘natives’” (47). In addition, when he is about to kill the elephant, he worries “that if anything went wrong those two thousand Burmans would see me pursued, caught, trampled on… like that Indian up the hill” (47). This is ironic because he wants to think that he is superior to the natives, but at the same time does not want to embarrass himself in front of them. Also, Orwell is apparently more worries about the Burmese people seeing him die then dying itself. I think this is in efforts to poke fun as the social structure put in place where he is the one supposedly in power, but in this situation the Burmese people are in control.

The first step in deconstructing a racist social and political system is admitting that there is one. With that said, it is evident that Orwell did a better job at addressing the racism he witnesses and even contributes to. This differs from Faulkner’s story where the racism is brushed over in a way that makes it seem acceptable. This could be due to the fact that it is clear to Orwell that the English took over an area that people already inhabited. It seems wrong because he knew that the English oppressing the Indians on their own soil. It is different in America because black people were in America from the beginning. The racist and oppressive system is the only thing that white and black people in America know. With that being the case, white people in America truly believed that black people were meant to be inferior. In either story, this oppressive system is evident and neither one deserves to be praised for the way they treated the minorities.