Snapshots of Miss Emily in William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily

The narrator seems unable to establish direct contact with Emily, either in the recovery center or their home life. The narrator notes how Emily grew slowly more distant and emotionally unresponsive. Emily returned home frail, distant, and rigid, with little appetite. Each time Emily returned, she was forced to reintegrate into the changing fabric of the household. Clearly, Emily and the narrator have been absent from each other’s lives during significant portions of Emily’s development. After so much absence, the narrator intensifies her attempts to show Emily affection, but these attempts are rebuffed, coming too late to prevent Emily’s withdrawal from her family and the world. Although Emily is now at home with the narrator, the sense of absence continues even in the present moment of the story. Emily, the narrator’s central

She, Emily, is physically living but not in the present; she is stuck living in her past. We first see this when her father dies, “She told them that her father was not 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.” (Faulkner). This depicts that she is enamored of the dead which is why she resists in letting them bury her father. Emily did not want to kept denying her father’s death so she decided to hold onto him. By the description Faulkner gives, one may say Emily just did not know how to adapt to change. With that being said, she feared change so she did not want to let go because she was so dependent on her father and now he was gone. Once Emily passed on and was buried, people from her town go into her house and discover a decomposed corpse along with the strand of gray hair on the pillow next to what was formerly Homer Barron. Faulkner explains in detail yet again what was found, “…What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt…Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head…we saw a long strand of iron-grey hair”. With this being said it is discovered that she, Emily, had been sleeping next to his dead body for years. These two examples are prime reasons one could conclude that she had an issue letting go of her past. Throughout the short story Emily seemed to not want to

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.

Homer entered her life by courting her publicly; by not wanting to marry her, he would have robbed her of her dignity and high-standing in the community. The ladies of the town felt that Miss Emily was not setting a good example for the "younger people" and their affair was becoming a "disgrace to the town" (75). The traditions, customs, and prejudices of the South doomed this affair from the beginning. Emily could not let Homer live, but she could not live without him. He was her only love. When she poisoned him with arsenic, she believed he would be hers forever.

Miss Emily?s father used to chase away all of her boyfriends or men she had feelings for. She became adapted to this life of only having her father and when he dies then she feels alone and doesn?t want to ever be alone again and she has not the knowledge to maintain her own boyfriend or husband. So she decides to kill her current crush and she keeps him in a locked room until the day she dies.

In “A Rose for Emily”, William Faulkner uses symbolism, imagery, simile and tone. Faulkner uses these elements to lead his characters to an epiphany of letting go of out-dated traditions and customs. The resistance to change and loneliness are prominent themes within “A Rose for Emily”. Faulkner uses “A Rose for Emily” to caution his readers that things are not always what they appear to be.

With this discovery, Emily knew she could never have him and could not bear the thought of another man that she loved leaving her. This must have been the breaking point for her. Emily was determined not to let another man leave her for the third time. Therefore she purchased the arsenic so she could be with him forever. The last person to see Homer was a neighbor as the Negro man was admitting him in at the kitchen door at dusk one evening. Again, Emily submerged herself into the familiar calm of isolation until her death. After her funeral, the narrator (the town) paints the picture of their discovery in the room above the stairs. A room in which no one had seen in for forty years. “The man himself lay in the bed. For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What was left of him…. Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted

By the story’s conclusion, the reader can go back through the story and identify many episodes where Miss Emily behavior

In “A Rose for Emily” author William Faulkner, uses the literary element, point of view, to show the town’s feelings as it reacts to the events surrounding Miss Emily, create a suspenseful tone, and convey the theme that oppression can cause someone to reach their breaking point.

However, breaking into her home is not the worst thing the townspeople had done. Sometime after her father’s death, Emily and Homer Barron’s relationship became public. The townspeople hate how public Emily relationship is because they feel it is a “disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people.” Although, it is unlikely for Barron and Miss Garrison to get married because Barron “liked men” and is “not a marrying man”, Emily is happy. Nonetheless, the townspeople push for the ideal of marriage and contacted “Miss Emily’s relations in Alabama.”

In Faulkner's story, an onlooker tells of the peculiar events that occurred during Miss Emily's life. The author never lets the reader understand Emily's side to the story. Instead, the reader is forced to guess why Emily is as strange as she is. In the story, Emily had harbored her father's dead body in her house for three days (par. 27). The reader is told of how the town looked upon what Emily had done, but the reader is never able to fully understand Emily's actions until the end of the story.

The townspeople felt bad for Emily and thought the reason for her craziness was because her family had a history of it. Emily also waits three days before revealing the death of her father. Emily allows the dead body of her father to lie in her home rotting away. Another crazy action that Emily does is when she goes to the pharmacy to purchase “rat poison”. When Emily goes to buy the arsenic she doesn’t tell the druggist what exactly she is going to use it for, but stares him down making him feel uncomfortable. “Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up” (213). One of the most extreme actions Emily performs is being responsible for Homer Barron’s death. But, after fully reading the story the reader understands that Emily not only kills Homer but sleeps with his corpse. “What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay… Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair” (215) There the reader’s thought of Emily sleeping with the dead body and her psychotic tendencies is confirmed.

Once Miss Emily’s father died, she didn’t want to let go. She had no one to love and lover her back. The only love and compassion she knew was her fathers. With him leaving this world entirely, I think she didn’t want to believe he was dead. She wanted to hold on as much as she could. “She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days… Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.” Again, Miss Emily’s necessity for love made her unconscious of the real world, wanting to hold on to something that was not there.

Another important character from the story is Homer Barron, a man who develops an interest in Miss Emily, “Presently we began to see him and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable” (519). According to the story, it seems that the whole town was thinking they would get married: “She will marry him” “She will persuade him yet” (520). However, Miss Emily ends up killing Homer by poisoning him. There seems to be two reasons why she did it. One is that she wanted to marry him, but it appears he refused. The other one is that he might be homosexual: “he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elk’s Club, that he was not a marrying man” (520). All these speculations about the principal characters Emily and Homer have one questioning what the narrator’s intention towards them was really. “The narrator wants to trap us in the speculations made about Emily’s and Homer’s characters by making us believe that Emily will kill herself or that Homer is homosexual” (Wallace). He might be right on this statement because this is what one is most likely thinking about through the reading.