Miss Emily In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

In “A Rose for Emily”, Charles Faulkner used a series of flashbacks and foreshadowing to tell Miss Emily’s story. Miss Emily is an interesting character, to say the least. In such a short story of her life, as told from the prospective of a townsperson, who had been nearly eighty as Miss Emily had been, in order to tell the story from their own perspective. Faulkner set up the story in Mississippi, in a world he knew of in his own lifetime. Inspired by a southern outlook that had been touched by the Civil War memory, the touch of what we would now look at as racism, gives the southern aroma of the period. It sets up Miss Emily’s southern belle status and social standing she had been born into, loner or not.

Miss Emily is also decaying, but it is subtle and internal--the awful smell that begins to permeate from her dwelling is a reflection of the withering woman within rotting. Perhaps most tragically, Miss Emily’s isolation is far from self-inflicted. Her blind devotion to the ones she loves; her father, her husband, her home; only serves to further condemn her actions. Her neighbors disregard toward her inabilty to let go of her father after his death, despite the delicacy of her being, caused for her madness to fester. “She told them her father was not dead.

When Miss Emily refuses to respond to a government letter regarding her taxes the Board of Alderman comes to visit her. When she comes in she is cold to the gentlemen, showing her lack of social skills which in many cases is a factor in mental Illness. Also before Miss Emily makes the guests leave she tells the, that if they still think she has taxes they need to "see Colonel Sartoris," (Faulkner 149) who has been dead ten years. This statement by Miss Emily could be seen as her minds unwillingness to live in the present. Her mind belives what it wants which is also the case after her fathers death. We see in the book that after her father’s death and her subsequent breakdown, Miss Emily was “sick for a long time." This could mean the state that Miss Emily refused to believe her father was gone. Right after the death of her father, the ladies of the town come to Miss Emily’s home to offer their condolences, and they observe that she had “no trace of grief on her face” (Faulkner 151). The inability to either feel or demonstrate appropriate emotion, is a classic symptom of mental illness. More explicitly, Miss Emily insisted to the visitors that “her father was not dead” (Faulkner 151). For this reason, Miss Emily would not let anyone remove her father's body until three days after her father should have been buried. Finally the third day “she broke down” and let the townspeople remove the body quickly

Any evidence against Miss Emily is circumstantial or illegally obtained. When Miss Emily bought arsenic, the druggist labeled it as being “For Rats” (Faulkner 325). The townspeople assumed it was for suicide (326) but did not question it. The arsenic could have been used for any number of pests around the house. Around Miss Emily’s time, arsenic was being used as part of a beauty regiment

Miss Emily could also have schizophrenia as a response to the demanding conditions in which she was living as a Southern woman from an aristocratic family. Miss Emily decompensated because she was unable to develop healthy and adaptive coping and defense mechanisms. When her father dies, Miss Emily avoids all contact with others and other psychotic symptoms become evident. Immediately after her father’s death, ladies from the town came to Miss Emily’s home to offer condolences and aid, and observe that she had “no trace of grief on her face” (pg. 775). Perhaps, Miss Emily insisted to the visitors that “her father was not dead” (pg. 775).

William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is a tragic tale of a Southern aristocrat, Miss Emily Grierson, who is the subject of a town's obsession.  The narrator, a member of the town, tells the story of what transpires in a decaying old Southern house that is always under the watchful eye of the townspeople.  They witness Miss Emily's life, her father's death, her turn to insanity and the death of both her and her lover.  The theme of death runs throughout this tale, which is understandable considering the events that take place in the story.  Faulkner uses foreshadowing to foretell events that will transpire later in the story.  Because of this foreshadowing, a reader

By the divine right of kings, monarchs with blessed blood hold the right to complete reverence and subservience from their subjects. In the time of William Shakespeare, and for hundreds of years before, European monarchs justified their absolutist rules by reasoning God placed their bloodline on the throne. Encyclopedia Britannica states that, in 1603, the art-loving James VI of Scotland succeeded to the English throne (Mathew); according to Shakespeare Online, he brought Shakespeare’s acting troupe, the Chamberlain's Men, under his patronage and renamed them the King’s men (Mabillar 2000). Three years later in 1606, Shakespeare’s tragedy, Macbeth, released. Macbeth takes place in Shakespeare’s version of monarchical eleventh century Scotland.

When the new generation came to power they sent Miss Emily a tax statement every year hoping that she would pay it; they even tried visiting with her to explain that there were never any payments or deal done with the town for her to be tax-free. She didn’t care because once upon a time she was told she didn’t have taxes. She would still dismiss this fact and acted as if she were above all in the town.

The town that Emily lives in knows all her business, even talking about when she had a meeting in her house about her taxes with the city officials. They explain how the city authorities went to Emily’s house to ask about taxes only to get kicked out. Emily had told them that Colonel Sartoris said that she has no taxes even though the Colonel has been dead for several years(539-540). In the beginning, Emily is not secretive at all and the town knows her. This is when her insanity was starting to appear.

The narrator describes Miss Emily Grierson as a “ a small, fat women in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist”(Faulkner 1). After her father’s death Miss Emily refused to acknowledge the fact that her father was dead. Her father was very strict about dating men and soon after, Emily met a northerner named Homer

She holds so dearly onto the things in her life that no longer exist. As Thomas Dilworth so succinctly puts it in his review of “A Rose for Emily,” “she idolized and idealized her father and Homer Barron, even to the point of endowing them with fictitious life beyond death.” Emily Grierson is “…weighed down by the pressures of time, and forced into a transformation that she resists with all her heart—even to the point of putrefaction” (Fitzpatrick). What Emily does not see is that through all her attempts at stopping time, to hold onto the way life used to be, she is altering it. Perhaps if Emily had embraced the change in, and participated in, the Reconstruction of Jefferson, she could have kept her family’s perceived legacy alive.

Some of the townspeople considered this as an inappropriate match for her and said, “That even grief could not cause a real lady to forget oblesse oblige.” Emily could not stand loosing anyone else and murdered Homer. She had missed so many chances of marrying anyone because of her father, so the only resort she had left was to kill homer and hang on to him forever before he would leave her life like everyone else. Once Emily had passed away, the townspeople went inside her house and saw that Homer’s body was there in the bed. Astonishingly they saw “the second pillow (had an) indention of a head… and saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.” Faulkner had described Emily’s hair as iron-gray so it could be assumed that Emily had been lying next to homer all this time.

During the conversation Miss Emily tells the men “See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson” (31). Colonel Sartoris has been dead for almost ten years. Emily’s behavior not only shows mental instability but also that she may be delusional and confused.

She is a visible holdover into the modern South of a bygone era of romance, chivalry, and the Lost Cause. Early, the narrator invokes such concepts as tradition, duty, hereditary obligation, and custom, suggesting a continuation of idea in the community consciousness of those old values. The community’s sense of time is mostly for the most part a record of events starting with the earliest and following the order in which the events occurred, but it is also like Emily’s, the confused, psychological time sense of memory. Like many women of the defeated upper class in the Deep South, Miss Emily withdraws from the earliest time of reality into the timelessness of illusion. Immediately after Faulkner refers to Miss Emily as being like an “idol” and to her great-aunt

“A Rose for Emily” is a Southern Gothic short story written by William Faulkner. The main character, Miss Emily Grierson, has a story and personality that can be analyzed from many different viewpoints. Focusing more on the psychological perspective, Miss Emily is very erratic and idiosyncratic in behavior. She isolates herself in her home and locks up her house to prevent anyone from coming in. Her home hides many secrets, but the one that stands out the most is the corpse of Homer Barron, Miss Emily’s lover. For years, Miss Emily has lived and slept with the corpse, which was unknown for many years by all the townspeople. After this is discovered, Miss Emily’s mental health and stability became the main topic of interest to both the townspeople and the readers of this story.