A Rose for Emily Essay

Littered throughout the story is evidence that the murder took place. When Emily takes up with Homer Barron, a man whom the narrator makes clear was not the marrying kind; rumors start to fly about the two at a time when it was not considered proper for a man and woman to live together. The town, her relatives, and the Baptist minister disapproved of the relationship, and Emily was in danger of loosing Homer. A year after the relationship begins, and the pressures to either marry

When Miss Emily finds somebody, though, it quickly pushes her to desperation. Her relationship with Homer Barron is a result of the life and death of her father. Ironically, he is a northern, roughneck Yankee, the exact opposite of any connection a Grierson would consider. Unsuspectingly, Emily is attracted to him, which is an oddity itself considering her lack of personality and his obvious charisma, for “whenever you [hear] a lot of laughing...Homer Barron [will] be in the center of the group” (560). He is also the first man to show an interest in her without her father alive to scare him off. The town is doubtful that the pair will remain together, but Emily's attachments are extreme, as seen when she would not surrender her father's body. The circumstance exhibits how her feelings are greatly intensified towards Homer. However, he is “not a marrying man” (561). When it appears as though he will leave her, she kills him with poison. While seemingly the opposite effect of love, killing Homer is quite in line with her obsession. If he is dead and she keeps Homer all to herself, Emily will never lose him; he can never leave her. Other such details that express her extreme attachments appear as she buys him clothes and toiletries before they are even considered married. There is also the revelation at the end of the story that she has been keeping his body for over thirty years and sleeping with it, clearly demonstrating her overt desperation

Emily’s father, as well as the people of Jefferson, had always pressured Emily to marry. Her father was never able to find a match for her though, and he eventually passed. Emily then met Homer Barron, a contract worker for the town. They begin to see each other more often, and the townspeople are shocked that Emily would lower herself to being with a man of low class. This shows a bit of irony, in that there has always been pressure for Emily to marry, yet when she finally meets a man she loves, people think she is wrong in her decision. Another piece of irony in this relationship, comes after Emily dies. The body of Homer Barron is found in the attic of Emily’s home. Next to the body are signs that Emily had been sleeping next the corpse. It can be assumed that Emily did murder Homer with the arsenic she had purchased earlier in the story. It

"A Rose for Emily" is a short story divided into five sections: Section one opens with a description of the Grierson home and its setting in Jefferson. The narrator mentions that over the past 25 years Miss Emily’s home has fallen into despair and become "an eyesore among eyesores." The first sentence of the story sets the tone of how the citizens of Jefferson felt about Emily: "When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to the funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant–a combined gardener and cook–had seen in at least ten years.” The narrator also discusses the last time that Emily

After living so long as a victim of loneliness perpetrated by her father, Emily decides that she will be vindicated-she will have her man. She orders a toiletry set to be engraved with Homer's initials, purchases an outfit and a nightshirt for him, and buys the arsenic that is to seal his fate. When the townspeople enter her house for the first time in forty years, they find a bridal tomb: a tarnished toiletry set, a neatly pressed suit, and a rotting Homer Baron clad in the nightshirt wearing a "profound and fleshless grin" (87).

The single gray hair discovered on a second pillow on the bed where the rotting corpse of Homer Barron lay tells the reader that Miss Emily, above all else was desperately lonely.It was because of her loneliness that she could not let her dead father go to his grave without a three day wait."After her father's death, the ladies reminisce: ‘‘We remembered all the young men her father had driven away.…’’ (Faulkner). It was because of her loneliness that she killed Homer Barron rather than allow him to leave her. "Unlike the majority of the ladies in town, Miss Emily experienced neither the joys of marriage nor the fulfillment of child-bearing." (Faulkner).

William Faulkner is known for his Southern Gothic style of writing. One of his short stories “A Rose for Emily” is about a girl who kills that guy that she loves to be with him. Emily killed him by using Arsenic. Even though the story may be a little weird, it is one of my favorite stories by William Faulkner. The first time I read “A Rose for Emily” I became intrigued about arsenic.

She murders Homer upstairs with the arsenic, that she bought and did not reveal why she was buying the product. She uses the arsenic to keep him home with her upstairs. Miss Emily keeps Homer’s rotting body and which only left his skeleton, “the man himself lay in the bed,” that was all that was left of Homer (Faulkner 9). There is proof that Miss Emily slept with Homer, “we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head,” the townspeople find “a long strand of iron gray hair,” she may have had tendencies of necrophilia

After living so long as a victim of loneliness perpetrated by her father, Emily decides that she will be vindicated-she will have her man. She orders a toiletry set to be engraved with Homer's initials, purchases an outfit and a nightshirt for him, and buys the arsenic that is to seal his fate. When the townspeople enter her house for the first time in forty years, they find a bridal tomb: a tarnished toiletry set, a neatly pressed suit, and a rotting Homer Baron clad in the nightshirt wearing a "profound and fleshless grin" (87).

There are many ways to look at a work of art. Many people look at abstract paintings and laugh critically at them, denying that they are art at all. While other people can look at the same paintings and find beauty within them that others could not. This goes for every art form, it’s why why some movie can get a 100% rating and a 10% rating at the same time by two different critics. In literature, criticism is centered around the value, and what defines the value of a literary work. With some critics saying literatures value is determined by the effect it has on the reader, while other say value is determined by the moral and political implications the literary work has. There are many different forms of literary criticism, all judging works

Emily and Homer grow closer and the townspeople notice their relationship. They start to gossip and bad mouth them because it’s embarrassing to her family that Emily is dating a man from a lower social class than her. Tired of being ridiculed by the whole town, Emily goes to a drugstore to buy arsenic. The druggist says, “if that’s what you want. But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for.” (Faulkner 213), but Emily didn’t say anything.

It was not long after the summer of her father’s death, that one day the townspeople constructed a contract for sidewalks to be paved. A man name, Homer Barron, a construction worker, had all the tools Emily was looking for in a man. This man took the purity of Emily; she gave up her life for him by giving him a part of herself that tied their souls together. They spent a lot of time with each other until one day he decided to leave her. The thought of her lover leaving her made her furious he was struck by death with a drug, called arsenic, and Emily began to look like death. “"I want some poison," she said to the druggist. She was over thirty then, and still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye sockets as one would imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look. "I want some poison," she said. (Wallace pg. 2185) As time passed, people of the town thought Homer Barron had settled down for the love of

Everyone was sad for Emily when her father died; he left her the house but she had no money. Moreover, when he died she refused to accept the fact that her father died. People from town did not think she was "crazy" but assumed that she did not want to let her father go, although it could be said that he stole her youth. Then, the narrator returns to the period after the death of her father. Emily begins dating Homer Barron, who is in the village for a sidewalk construction project. The people from her neighborhood did not like their relationship at all and take Emily's cousins to town to put an end to it. One day Emily buys arsenic at the drugstore and it is thought that Homer is going to leave her and that is why ‘she intends to commit suicide.’ She bought some man clothes and a wedding dress and people from town thought that she and Homer were going to get married. However, Homer leaves her and then her cousins’ leave, but then Homer returns home. The last time Homer was seen was when he walked into Emily's house. Emily rarely leaved her house, except for a six-year period during which she went to teach painting

In the story of “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, Emily Grierson is the protagonist who also represents the Jefferson communities’ past and present by following her life backward and her house and the people in a community to represent the changes throughout time. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” shows the progress of the small southern town Jefferson through the life of one woman, and the symbols of her father and the house she lives in illustrate that progress and her reluctance to change with the times.

The point of view of a story is the one of the most important decision a writer can make, as the point of view very heavily determines what specific story is told. In the short story “A Rose for Emily,” the narrator does not know absolutely everything about the feelings of Miss Emily, Homer, or the other people living in the town. A very unique point of view is used; it is neither from a typical first person point of view nor from an all-knowing omniscient view. Instead, the various points of the plot are explained by an unknown character, or more specifically, an unknown group of people. It seems to be told from a first person plural point of view, as the narrator uses the pronouns “we” and