Final Project

Link: http://www.facebook.com/home.php

A Facebook for Emily
Many people might question my group’s decision to create a facebook based on a piece of literature. Some could even right it off as taking the easy way out, or view it as not being very creative. In truth, the easiness factor came up in the first group discussion. But it wasn’t easiness in the context of work or thought, it was the easiest way to create a project that everyone could access and work on at their own convenience.
Once we chose facebook as the proverbial canvass for our project we needed a subject. We tried to think of the more interesting characters we encountered over the quarter. Personally, I was leaning towards The Cask of Amontillado, but we weren’t sure how to convey the events in that story. We eventually came to the conclusion that Emily Grierson was an interesting character and that the storyline of A Rose for Emily could be conveyed through her status updates.
It wound up being more meticulous than we had originally imagined. We decided to create the profile together in one group meeting and then change her status and respond to her according to the events that transpire in the story. As we began to fill out her information we had to really study the text for details about her life. We had to figure out her hobbies and activities, what kind of movies she would like and her employment history. Some of these we extracted from the text. For example, we realized that china painting was the only work that she did over the course of her life, a detail that I would not remember unless I had done this project.
When it came to other details that weren’t provided in the text we had to get a little more creative. So we based decisions like what her favorite movies, music and activities were on her characterization. For example, we feel that a modern teenage Emily Grierson would be a shy, insecure, “emo” girl trying to rebel against her father. She smokes pot, because it’s an escape and she can do it alone. She likes romantic comedies, and family shows because she is lonely. She watches other movies, like Borat, to seem “cool”. Her choices in music definitely mask her identity. She likes to listen to laid back bands like Bob Marley, Snoop Dogg, and Sublime when she smokes. But the emo rock and “gangsta rap” are things to make her look “cool” and “hardcore” to her peers. Her ridiculous “About Me” paragraph also reflects this insecure, superficial attitude. Basically, we felt that in modern day terms, Emily would be something of a “poser”.
Emily’s loneliness is also the reason that we decided that she would accept any friend requests, even from totally random people. This lead to an incident in which we encountered some disturbing material on a stranger’s profile, and shows that like other insecure teens, Emily would be susceptible to internet predators.
We also thought that Emily would want to seem rough on the exterior because she is rather intimidating in the story. For example, she vanquished a group of men who were authority figures in her city from her house and refused to pay taxes! Clearly, this person has a chip on her shoulder.
Our biggest challenge was definitely trying to decide what order her updates should go in. This area of the project truly brought out the issue of time in the story. Faulkner manipulates time significantly, but I didn’t notice this very much when I first read the story. We observed that it is hardest to distinguish when Emily actually began her relationship with Homer, and when she bought the poison. These were key parts of the plot, but not knowing when she had the poison leads us to the assumption that she poisoned Homer, but there is no hard evidence in the text to support this.
Overall, this project was interesting and helped me to glean many more small details from a text than usual.