Lafferty 1 Jacquelyn Lafferty Professor DeAnglis ENG 102 6,December. 2015 Mind Over Matter In “A Rose for Emily”, William Faulkner, the narrator creates this image of Emily to only benefit the townspeople and the town. The townspeople continue to torment Emily even when she has passed away. The town try’s to protect their image as a southern knit community, with her inheriting her father’s house, the town feels responsible for Emily at this point. Although they feel for Emily, they continuously …show more content…
They were unsatisfied with the glimpse of her threw the doorway and windows and they go as far as breaking into her house after she passes away. They invade her privacy, but also justify their behavior but waiting the appropriate mourning time before they did break in. There is no real justification for the townspeople behaviors for the violation of Emily’s home and privacy, but they quickly pass judgement with what they find while inside her home. The townspeople are in a way responsible for Emily’s behavior and could have caused her mental instability. ( check citation) These accusations can be supported by others that say “"A Rose for Emily" is about, among many other things, gossip, and Faulkner, through his narrator, tricks us into implicating ourselves as we gossip about his characters in a way that we usually reserve for neighbors--failing to truly understand them, revealing only our own phobias and fascinations. The narrator's comments are vitally important, but whether or not Homer is homosexual is, finally, unimportant, even if--and, perhaps, especially if--we all agree that he is. Perhaps we should approach "A Rose for Emily" by refusing to discuss the characters of Emily or Homer or Tobe, ignoring all temptation to discuss Oedipal complexes, sexual preferences, and scandal, and by leaving these characters alone--all of them except, of course, the narrator. …show more content…
Their behavior is adaptive to their purpose, but Emily’s behavior is not. The town reputation and community was threatening by Emily’s behavior and this is why they protect her as well as the town. Emily tries to keep her true identity by remaining hidden. It states that in the beginning of the story they see Emily as a “fallen monument”(book pg). Her is valued as a valuable asset to this community and town and that is what they want to keep it that way. The townspeople say “Alive. Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation of the town(pg). This quotes are explained by “The complex figure of Emily Grierson casts a long shadow in the town of Jefferson. The members of the community assume a proprietary relationship to her, extolling the image of a grand lady whose family history and reputation warranted great respect. At the same time, the townspeople criticize her unconventional life and relationship with Homer Barron. Emily is an object of fascination. Many people feel compelled to protect her, whereas others feel free to monitor her every move, hovering at the edges of her life. Emily is the last representative of a once great Jefferson family, and the townspeople feel that they have
In the short story of A Rose for Emily, the main character illustrates a disturbed individual that doesn't want to separate herself from a deceased loved one. Everyone knows what its like to loose a loved one, but the town of Jefferson had no idea how hard Emily had taken death until they unraveled her deep, dark secret.
In, 'A Rose for Emily', Emily is being kept and locked away from the world. Her father keeps her isolated with only the company of their servant. The people of the town “remembered all the young men her father had driven away” (Faulkner 219). Because of this, Emily grew well past the age of being courted and finding a husband. After he died, she was left even more alone than before. Her family was not really present in her life ever since they and her father had an argument and did not keep in touch. The people of the town also helped with the isolation of Emily. The people have always regarded the family as strange and mysterious keeping their distance. Emily had “a vague resemblance to those angels in the colored church windows- sort of tragic and serene” (Faulkner 220). She did not leave the house often and when she did, ...
In “a romance to kill” the author explains that they believe that the townspeople did not like how Emily was acting when she was with Homer. The townspeople felt that she was just messing around driving around with him out town. The story also shows that the town wanted them to get married but did not like the way they acted. I feel that because Emily grew up in this town and she was high class, people would watch out for her. The town seems to start feeling like they need to just do something to help her along. Emily needed to find love and happiness and start acting like a “lady” in this town. I feel that the townspeople are being frustrated with Emily at this point and need to see her move on but they also seem to gossip about her so often that it seems that they do not like
Finally, in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” the people of the town finally get to see the internal struggles that Emily faces come to fruition. The town gets to see the real Emily, not the hermit they all thought of her. He narrates to the reader the turmoil internal turmoil that she has suffered since she was a child. Unbeknownst to the townsfolk, her misguided thoughts and led her to the drastic actions that she took. The main conflict throughout the story is the internal feelings and thoughts which influence her actions. Emily’s private battles set the stage for the horrifying death of her
Miss Emily’s father restricts the people she is allowed to interact with to the point that she has no social life. So after her father dies, Emily has been isolated so much that she does not know anyone and has no idea how to socialize, and just as Miss Emily is isolated from the townspeople, they feel isolated from her. She becomes not as someone to become close to , but as a person of high society . They view her as "a tradition, a duty, and care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town" (Rose ). Normally, everyday townspeople do not socialize with upper-class citizens, so the people of Jefferson feels like it would be a wrong to converse with Miss Emily. Also, the townsfolk put Emily Grierson on a pedestal of some sort which further sets her apart from the rest of the town. Jefferson looks and treats Emily as a “monument” of the town (Rose ). She is not perceived as a real,
In Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” the main character, Emily last name, is the last aristocratic member of her society. Left with her father’s house and not much else, the town seems to care for Emily, if for no reason other than
It can be observed that Emily, the protagonist of the story, never truly held herself to the same standards as her community. Also, that her community only tolerated her behavior because of who her father was to the town. (FAulkner) In the case of A Rose for Emily, the society rejects the individual, and even further isolates her a little more with every rebellious or questionable action she takes. In the story, Faulkner chooses to write Emily’s actions in a scattered way so that we don’t get the complete picture until the end of the story. This allows us to be able to see her in the way her town did. From Faulkner’s writing style, it can also be observed that the town isolated her and as a result of the isolation, rejected her from their
All things considered, “A Rose for Emily” is only one of Faulkner’s complex literary works using such intricate uses of flashbacks and foreshadowing. Faulkner chose his events and descriptive language well to support key event such as, Mr. Grierson’s death, Emily’s purchase of arsenic, and the odor complaints by the townspeople. All of these events lead up to the ultimate culmination of events that shows the demise of one Homer Barron and Emily
They begin to date and see each other regularly. The narrator reveals that “when she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, [the people of Jefferson] said, “she will marry him” (6). The emptiness that she felt from her father’s death would soon go away because Homer was filling in the empty hole where her father was. The story goes on to read that Homer left town for some time, leaving Emily behind with nobody by her side. “After her father’s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all” (3). The narrator insinuates that Emily becomes a recluse. When Homer finally returns, the narrator’s account of the townspeople’s gossip causes readers to become more suspicious of Emily’s unusual
After all the tragic events in her life, Emily became extremely introverted. After killing Homer, Emily locked herself in and blocked everyone else out. It was mentioned, “…that was the last time we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time” (628). In fact, no one in town really got to know Miss Emily personally as she always kept her doors closed, which reflects on how she kept herself closed for all those years. Many of the town’s women came to her funeral with curiosity about how she lived, as no one had ever known her well enough to know. This was revealed at the beginning of the story when the narrator mentioned, “the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant… had seen in the last ten years”(623). Everyone in town knew of her but did not know her because she kept to herself for all those years.
In Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily,” Faulkner was writes about two lovers, Emily Grierson and Homer Barron, with conflicting personalities that eventually leads up to Emily poisoning Homer in his sleep. In this story, Emily Grierson was the daughter of a wealthy man of high social class in a southern town called Jefferson, and he was a very overbearing man that didn’t allow her to see men for any reason at all. We also see Emily much like the rose, an object of beauty and desire that soon begins to wither and die.
Emily father was highly favored in the town. Faulkner writes in his Short Story Criticism, “The Griersons have always been “high and mighty,” somehow above “the gross, teeming world….” Emily’s father was well respected and occasionally loaned the town money. That made her a wealthy child and she basically had everything a child wanted. Emily’s father was a very serious man and Emily’s mind was violated by her father’s strict mentality. After Emily’s father being the only man in her life, he dies and she find it hard to let go of him. Because of her father, she possessed a stubborn outlook on life and how thing should be. She practically secluded her self from society for the remainder of her life.
The narrator is vague about the intricate details of her life, perhaps because he presents her story as a member of the town, which means he is only able to narrate it from an observational point of view as opposed to an interactive point of view. “‘A Rose for Emily’ is told from a community point of view, so that the narrative voice in the story is the voice of “our town” and “we,” a group .” (Skei, 150). Certain representations of social expectations can be gleaned from parts of the text. This is especially the case when it comes to gender relations and family. William Faulkner’s short story shows how the nineteenth century was set in certain limiting social expectations especially for women, especially
Emily Grierson was a mysterious character. Throughout her whole life she had been secretive and isolated within her own house. Going through a trauma after her father’s death, she received sympathy from the town. As her father had always kept her in isolation, she was never expected to be one of those to go out and date someone. But one day she met Homer Barron, who was not from around Jefferson. They seem to go
Through the use of setting, characterization and theme Faulkner was able to create quite a mysterious and memorable story. "A Rose for Emily" is more than just a story though; her death represents the passing of a more genteel way of life. That is much more saddening than the unforgettable scene of Homer's decaying body. The loss of respect and politeness is has a much greater impact on society than a construction worker who by trade is always trying to change things. Generation after generation Miss Emily happily escaped modernism by locking herself in her house the past.