Power In A Rose For Emily

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” starts out at Emily’s funeral and then goes onto a story about taxes, which Miss Emily is exempt from paying for life by Colonel Sartoris. During her life, Miss Emily’s father kept her isolated and ran off any potential suitors with a horsewhip. When her father died, Miss Emily refused to acknowledge the fact for three days. Soon after, Miss Emily met and started dating Homer Barron, “a northerner and a day laborer.” The town goes from being happy about the relationship to thinking of it as indecent. Homer seemingly deserted Miss Emily shortly after she bought poison. All is quiet for the next 40 years until Miss Emily’s death when Homer’s corpse is found sealed in an upstairs room (Faulkner 323-327). This paints a picture of a lonely, desperate woman. Miss Emily was isolated with just a butler for company. That does not make her a murder. Emily Grierson is innocent of murder because any evidence is circumstantial or illegally obtained, Tobe cared for Miss Emily enough to kill for her, and Miss Emily is legally insane.

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a very chilling story that opens with a brief first-person account of the funeral of Emily Grierson who is an old widow. Her father died when Emily was about thirty and she refused to accept that he was dead for three days. Mr. Grierson choked Emily’s social ability. After a life of having potential husbands rejected by her father, she spends time after his death with a newcomer, Homer Barron who is a northern laborer. Emily buys arsenic from a shop in town for no

It is William Faulkner’s unique ability to create a character that the audience will sympathize for but also feel animosity towards that makes “A Rose for Emily” so page-turning. The antagonist, Emily Grierson, is a pretty mysterious woman. Her father dies, she is left with almost nothing, she meets a man, and then she stops leaving her house. In literature, the tone is the narrator’s attitude towards his/her subject. Additionally, the style of a short story is the way the writer structures the plot and the manner that it is conveyed. In “A Rose for Emily”, it is almost impossible to truly look into the mind of this narrator because he informs the audience so many emotions that the general society has towards Emily’s reticent personality. Thus, Emily becomes more and more isolated, in which she takes a step further and stops leaving her house altogether. And the writer does a great job in expressing this. In long, vivid sentences fraught with jarring diction and compassionate tones, William Faulkner exposes the reality of society’s alienation towards a possibly insane individual.

Falling in love can be dangerous; it causes some people to perform impulsive actions. In William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily,” Emily Grierson experiences a number of life changing moments. Her reactions to these moments leave readers with no choice but to question her mental state. Emily’s father had extremely high expectations for whom Emily could love. So when she got the chance, she fell in love with the first man who gives her attention. All the while, she was like a celebrity of her town: she had no privacy. Emily Grierson was the victim of a damaged mind due to the death of her harsh, austere father, unrequited love, and obnoxious neighbors, causing her to commit homicide. The Griersons were of a high social class. Emily lived with her controlling father. He limited the things she could do with extremes. Their family was portrayed as a “tableau” (part II, para. 12). They were a picture perfect family, which is why no man met the standards Emily’s father held. Mr. Grierson dismissed all the young men that attempted to date Miss Emily. When her father died, she became lonely. Emily’s father was the only man that had ever shown her love. She never got the chance to experience love from anyone else. She refused to believe he was dead; “she did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body” (part. II, para. 14). This reflects her mental state Burnett 2 deteriorating. She kept the

A rose for Emily is a sad love story about a girl named Emily who is kept locked up by her father to keep her away from leaving home. The author tells us that Emily has to make a decision in the story. To stay at home, not find a husband and start a family or leave home, find a husband and start a family. The story really puts into perspective how a person can dream and hope, yet always be held back by selfish humility. The story as the writer explains is like God and Satan, Emily knowing she is not supposed to murder, but to marry the man she loves. Faulkner really goes into detail about the story and how Emily has to make moral decisions on top of ethical decisions. The whole situation with murder is totally up to Emily. She could get away

In the short story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, the reader is given a glimpse of the internal conflict of the main character, living in the past, and the involvement of an over involved society causing the reader to look into the consciousness of an individual haunted by a past and lack of a future. The story is set in a post-Civil War town in the South. He is able to give the reader a glimpse of the practices and attitudes that had united the people of the South. Emily is a vibrant and hopeful young girl, whom the town watches become a brittle, rigid, terribly old-fashioned reclusive. “She is unable to move on from events that cause dramatic change in her own life and so becomes a “tragic heroine” (Akers 257). Emily had been “a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town.” In their own subtle, southern way, they cared for her and thusly became overly involved in her life. It is a traumatic event that shows how the sweet girl is in reality a woman of deep, dangerous and ultimately homicidal passion.

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.

The text “A Rose for Emily,” is a story of a strange southern woman that does not handle death very well and attempts multiple times to keep the dead bodies of her loved ones. The people in her town, Jefferson, never diagnosed her with an illness. Yet, had the townspeople had a chance to speak with her daily and understand her, they would have seen that she was a crazy woman. Rather than just constantly feeling sorry for her the way that everyone did and looking past the idea that it was just her way of coping and handling death. After careful evaluation of the story, using the psychological strategy, the main character of " A Rose for Emily," Miss Emily Grierson is a delusional character.

The pursuit of love changes people. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” presents a story of Miss Emily Grierson’ life through the narrator who portrays the collective conscious of the entire town. The town displays a negative view towards her and through that lense, the narrator describes different parts of her life, particularly her love life. The journey through Miss Emily’s love reveals how past experiences can immensely affect the necessity for one’s actions and fulfillment of her desire. The fantasies of both Miss Emily and the town

The short story by the name of “A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner is linked to a zeal in the name of love through repressions of outside. The main character – Miss Emily Grierson is wounded and defeated by the great impact of a male. For me this narrative became a brilliant example how the story can repel with troublesome and unpleasant topic and simultaneously attract with hard inner world of main heroine Miss Emily.

Growing up, Emily Grierson's father kept her away from love. He rejected all men who wanted to love her, but after he passes, Emily begins to attempt to fill the gap in her life. However, when she finds out that her newly found lover is gay, her love takes a dark turn. In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” the lack of freedom from town expectations, and moods swings erupting upon her father’s death lead her to fall for an emotionally unavailable male. Emily does not know anything about love because her father was very strict about her having relationships. Emily’s mother is not mentioned in the story, thus making it seem she either died when Emily was young or she does not live with the family. This shows that Emily does not have the “mother-daughter” bond that a girl needs. Emily now has a stronger bond with her father. Every male that wanted to be with her, her father ran off. The story quotes, “None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily...Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip...” (paragraph 26). This states that Emily’s father was always in the background watching over her like a small child. Even though multiple men had come to date her, they were never good enough. After her father dies, she now has the freedom to do as she pleases. Even though Emily’s father kept her in the shadows, she still loved him very much. After he passes, she

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” starts out in a very different way than most stories. “A Rose for Emily” is a short story about a spinster woman. The story is told from the point of view of many people in her town almost like gossip. It is continuously shifting from one perspective to the other painting a full picture and time progression for the reader. Faulkner’s story has a twist though, his writing and language suggests that appearances can be deceiving.

Love can distill rage into individuals when it is not mutual. In “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, things begin to go south as Emily Grierson encounters her biggest fear: change. Ms. Emily is viewed as a monument and chore to her community. After her father’s death, her world seems to flow accordingly behind his passing. Meanwhile, her emotional health declines in conjunction with her physical surroundings. Emily Grierson suffers from emotional decay due to isolation by her father, unrequited love, and unrealistic expectations from the townspeople causing her to embrace murder.

In the story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner talks about a woman whom many thought was a monument, others thought she was an outsider. Emily lived in her own world and loved in her own way. In the story, there were a couple meaningful moments that I thought helped boost the dramatic interest of the story. The first part that was meaningful for me was when Emily’s father died. It really caught my attention when Emily said her father was not dead. The narrator says, “We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that.” (34), at this moment the author is boosting the dramatic interest in the story by saying that they didn’t think she was crazy “yet”. The other meaningful moment in the story was when Emily when to the store to buy arsenic, “She will kill herself” (35), the whole town thought about her actions. This is a meaningful moment because the author is trying to show the mental problems Emily had in her head, but the author wasn’t talking about depression problem. A main conflict in “A rose for Emily” is between Emily and herself, Emily has an immoral way of caring for her loved ones. First, not recognizing the fact that her father was dead, and keeping him dead in her house for 3 days. Then killing her lover and leaving him dead in her bedroom until she died. Emily probably feared that Homer was to leave her like her father did, or she heard what the towns people were saying, “…he was not a marrying man.” (35). In her head, the only way to keep

“A Rose for Emily” is one of Faulkner’s most famous short stories. After the civil war, the defeated north abolished the slavery, but the old moral traditions and systems of the Old South based on the puritanism still were deep-rooted. Under such background, the story mainly described the tragedy of a southern aristocratic descendant, Emily Grierson. Being insane, she carried the burden of family glory and lived with the body of her lover in a closed house until her death.