Tucked away at the end of The Rules of Art, is a reading by Pierre Bourdieu of William Faulkner's short story ‘A Rose for Emily’. Rarely remarked on by critics, this analysis is interesting for several reasons. Most strikingly, it is an internal reading of a text at the end of a work that has spent most of its length extolling field analysis, and chiding other modes of reading, from New Criticism to structuralism and deconstruction, for failing to position works in their socio-historical contexts. Indeed, it could be seen as demonstrating effectively what a good ‘internal’ reading can do on its own terms: it provides a key not only for understanding the text we are reading, but also the very process by which we come to an understanding of that text. Bourdieu's argument is that Faulkner's short story is designed as a sort of prompt for the reader to engage in just such a reflection and auto-reflection. This article will take us through Bourdieu's analysis of the structure of ‘A Rose for Emily’ and how it plays on our unquestioned assumptions and expectations, only then to send us back to examine those same techniques and presuppositions. Along the way, Bourdieu's approach to reading this text will be compared with those deployed elsewhere by more established literary critics, notably Jean-Paul Sartre and Roland Barthes.