Emily Society

It is proximately infeasible not to examine her in a psychological as well as contextual light. Over the course of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, Miss Emily’s erratic and idiosyncratic comportment becomes outright, and the reader, like the townspeople in the story, is left wondering how to expound the fact that Miss Emily has spent years living and slumbering with the corpse of Homer Barron. Miss Emily is not emotionally or mentally well, the townspeople persist in enabling her to maintain her delusions. In fact, their denial is virtually as pathological as Miss Emily’s own symptoms. The townspeople eschew confronting Miss Emily about any paramount concerns, such as the terrible smell that is emanating from her home, which itself is becoming more “detached, superseded, and forbidding” every

She lived in a timeless world of her own and refused to change with her community. For instance, “when the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it” (Faulkner 57). Her reluctance for change prevents her from being in touch with reality and slowly separates her from the improved and growing world. Miss Emily chose not to change and never tried to hold anyone back, for example when, “the newer generation became the backbone and the spirt of the town,” her previous china painting students grew up and did not send their children to her for painting lessons as they once had (Faulkner 57). Instead of morphing into the modern community, Miss Emily closed her doors for good, refusing to change her perfectly good traditions yet again. Like her house, Miss Emily seems out of place; she is the only remaining symbol of the South’s old values and traditions that also seem out of place in this growing community. The house and Emily were both once beautiful, young, and dignified but have slowly been decaying in the new modern

The true nature of the narrator and other townspeople becomes even more obvious as he lists Miss Emily’s attributes—“dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.” If Miss Emily is so “dear” to the town, why does the narrator also describe her as “inescapable?” Perhaps, he is thinking of her refusal to pay taxes and the impossibility of convincing her to do so or of the impossibility of escaping rumors and speculation about her since both she and the man she employed were uncooperative when asked about her comings and goings. Yet, normally, “inescapable” would mean that someone is trying to get away from her clutches. If this is the intent of the narrator, perhaps he is speaking not of the townspeople, but of Homer Barron who was literally unable to escape Miss Emily.

The story draws from the past a similar situation “That was two years earlier after her fa-ther’s death and a short time after her sweetheart-the one we believed would marry her-had de-serted her” (Faulkner 310). When her sweet heart leaves, she begins periods of seclusion. Tobe, her manservant is described as coming to and fro from the house with the market basket. Her house and property begin to smell bad. For this reason, the townsfolk believe it is due to Tobe being a man does not belong in the kitchen essentially making it foul or he likely killed an animal in the yard. After more complaints and the younger alderman insisting on confronting Emily Judge Stevens responds “Dammit sir, will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?” (Faulkner 311) and he sends men to her property at night to spread lime as not to embarrass her by doing it during daylight. Here is another example of tradition dictating the action and trump-ing modernity. In this light, I get the clear sense the older generation of townsfolk are enablers of Emily. Although the townsfolk knew of Emily’s great aunt going mad years earlier they ignored Emily’s outward signs of a fragile metal state. Thus, they simply chalk it up as southern debu-tante eccentricities of privilege. To illustrate, her denial of her father’s death when “Miss Emily met them at the

The tale summons up the Emily’s through flashbacks of several points, much like every persons mind in life when recalling (Faulkner, pg 56). The speaker talks about how much of a trouble Miss Emily was to the township as a result of her old fashion ways. All through the story, we learn about Miss Emily’s partner standings and isolation. Her character is a very old fashion woman who still believed in the confederate period and was follower to those policies.

Miss Emily’s story is certainly bizarre, suspenseful, and mysterious enough to engage the reader’s attention fully For example, her affair with Homer Barron may be seen as a middle-aged woman’s belated rebellion against her repressive father and against the town’s burdensome expectations. That William Faulkner intended her story to have a much larger dimension is suggested by his choice of an unnamed citizen of Jefferson to tell it. Faulkner never speaks or writes as an individual, never uses the pronoun “I,” always speaks as “we.” As representative of the townspeople, Faulkner feels a compulsion to tell the story of a woman who represents something important to the community. Black voices are excluded from this collective voice as it speaks out of old and new generations.

In “A Rose For Emily,” William Faulkner portrays how crippling alienation and slanderous gossip transform Emily Grierson into an unstable necrophile and murderer. The townspeople regard Miss Emily as a symbol of their dignified past, but become overcritical and apathetic towards her as events unfold. Even though Miss Emily is highly thought of, women in the community display little sympathy or compassion after the death of her father, a reaction that ultimately negatively impacts her ability to behave within an ordinary civilization. However, when the townspeople show a blatant disregard for Emily, they fail to recognize that she is damaged and deranged. They do not consider her feelings in the disastrous life around her, and even exclaim , “... it would be the best thing” if she killed herself (Faulkner). The townspeople discard her as a lost cause, allowing her to harbor the detrimental feelings she has towards the loss of her father. Although many may argue that Miss Emily’s actions are caused by a mental disorder, the townspeople’s apathy, neglect, and inability to recognize her true feelings are the real cause of her scandalous actions.

In the story, Faulkner depicts Emily as a woman who suffers from several from several years of heartbreak and despair. Ranging from the emotional abuse of her father, to the rejection of her lover, Homer Barron. As far as her character, Emily’s appearance resembles a “small, fat woman in black whose skeleton was small and spare” (Beers and Odell 721). Faulkner also describes her as “bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water and her eyes looked like a lump of coal pressed into dough” (Beers and Odell 721). These character qualities symbolize Miss Emily’s personality as well as her physical appearance. Emily’s personality presents as tiresome, and bitter because of the damage she inflicts in her lifetime. Moreover, when the contemporary officials of the town visit Emily, she lectures to the new leadership that “she has no taxes in Jefferson” and finally insists on their dismissal by her house servant, Tobe (Beers and Odell 721). Emily’s impolite behavior traces back to her personality and the devastation it ensues over the years. Furthermore, Jack Sherting argues that “Faulkner, through his narrator, is obviously describing a psychotic personality;” accordingly, Faulkner depicts Emily as a character that has extreme mental health issues through character qualities.

It is a fact, that the narrator makes judgments both for and against the protagonist and also present outsides observations when he stays “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition , a duty , and a care ; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town “(Faulkner,82) being this to emphasize the responsibility that the people of the town felt whit her and stays also his point pf view in the situation . The narrator is sympathetic to Miss Emily, never condemning her actions. Sometimes unabashedly and sometimes grudgingly, the narrator admires her ability to use her aristocratic bearing in order to vanquish the members of the city and an example is when she go to buy the arsenic and the druggist ask her to tell him for what she is going to use it ,and she just look him eye to eye and the man go and give her the arsenic without ask her anything else . As we could see it is hard to determine the gender of the narrative voice because is talking as the people and never use a word for describe himself . He uses the words “we” and “they” and changes it continuously because he does not want to be involved in all the things the community did and he is blaming the community for Emily’s behavior. Faulkner uses the perfect kind of narrator for develop his genre , a mysterious and creepy narrative voice to develop

“So, she vanquished them, horse and foot, just as he had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell” (Faulkner 629). Sartoris, the mayor had devised a plan to make sure that Emily was taken care of for the rest of her life by saying her father had loaned the town money, so she never had to pay taxes. This tale, “Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it” (Faulkner ), continued to perpetuate the belief that woman were simple-minded. While the story is written in a series of flashbacks, the reader can see that Emily has been with an attitude towards men for decades. This sort of behavior is one that Faulkner would disagree with; As it looks like Emily found the voice and status she was looking for, it can also be said that the blatant disrespect to patriarchal society and the disregard for them can cause you to stay an old maid, alone. Women were supposed to follow certain rules, and men were the stronger sex.

The neighbors are always waiting for Emily’s appearance to see what’s next for her to do. Although they speak down on her amongst each other, it never affects her character or the pedestal she has been placed on. This is because they have become so accustomed to praising her family, there is nothing she can do that will take away her overall greatness. Thus, Emily takes advantage of her privilege knowing that the society that spoils her will never investigate her thoroughly, and also take pity for the death of her

Fetterley contends that the story is that of a male dominated past and future, and a woman who is oppressed and victimized by her society systems. In life, Miss Emily’s father had been able to keep her as a possession and control her life. In his death, the community of Jefferson stepped into that role. Miss Emily was more considered as an object than a person to most everyone her entire life. Fetterley points out the real wrong done to Miss Emily was in making her a “Miss”. In the act of making Emily a lady certain characteristics and beliefs are immediately associated with Miss Emily. It is these beliefs of what a lady is and does that allows Miss Emily to murder Homer with poison bought at the drug store without so much as a raised eyebrow. The thought of a lady committing murder never crosses the community’s

In “A Rose for Emily”, the townspeople have treated Emily as though she were a commodity that could be viewed and critiqued. Their failure to help Emily holds them responsible for the aftermath, because if they had forced her to pay her taxes, treated her like she was a part of the town, and put her before their reputation, the outcome of this Southern gothic would be entirely different.

The community that Emily is a part of it is predominantly based on a typecast, which consists of an upper class in which Miss Emily clearly is a part of and the working class of the citizens of that modest town. The proletariat’s attitude towards Emily is contradictory; there are moments where the townspeople think highly of her and can see through her eyes her miserable

Her room is like a “tomb”: dark, gloomy, and frightful and covered with dust and cobwebs. She inherits from her father “a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies” (28). The whole antiquated house is seen as a symbol and of patriarchal society. It inhibits Emily from going outside or meeting people. Actually, Emily lives under shadow of male-dominated world and awaits her doom. “She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue” (32). In it, she passes through her youthful days, happiness, and freedom. In her life, she has tended to surrender herself to the patriarchal power. Her father’s influence on her is profound that she is hard to extricate herself. Spiritedly, she slowly becomes a “monument” of ancient tradition in town but she has also involuntarily extricate relegated herself to the