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In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” Miss Emily Grierson becomes a lost young woman after the death of her father, the only love she has ever known. She does not know any other type of love other than her father’s, or how to express her love to others. During her older years, Emily meets Homer Barron and never wants to let him go. The night before their wedding, Emily finds out that Homer wants to leave her in order to pursue alternate avenues of love. After learning that he is gay and wants to leave, Emily decides to murder him. Faulkner makes it clear that Miss Emily has lost her sense of love, and her conscience when she kills Homer Barron to keep him forever.
During her early life, Miss Emily lives with her father, and he turns away every suitor that was not fit for his daughter. Due to his actions, Emily does not learn how to love another person and never quite figures it out. Hindered by her father’s over protectiveness, Emily does not know how to cope with the emotional hurdles that she approaches, later in life.
After losing her father, Emily is not able to deal with the pain of losing him. This pain is the foremost explanation of her inevitable alienation, because “She is afraid to confront reality (“Alienation”par.1).” Shut away in her home Emily’s future of marriage and children have dwindled into waste “Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized (Faulkner par.27).” Like many people, Emily’s emotional capacity stems from the relationships with her parent. Since her father locks her, up and shuts her off from the rest of the world. She never acquires the potential to grow emotionally further and experience what love can be. Emily endures many trials of her immature emotions, and fails because of her e...
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...Emily the character she is. The townspeople drive her further into madness when they isolate her further than what she has already done herself. Emily is a person who craves love hangs onto the past, and never wants anything to change. Her emotional tear, lack of human contact, and crime drive her to become completely isolated until she dies of a natural death.
Works Cited
"Alienation and Isolation in William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily"" StudyMode.com. 03 2002. 2002. 03 2002.
Binder, Aubrey. "Uncovering The Past: The Role Of Dust Imagery In A ROSE FOR EMILY." Explicator 70.1 (2012): 5-7. Literary Reference Center. Web. 25 Mar. 2014
Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.”
"William Faulkner- Biography." William Faulkner. N.p., n.d. Web. 15 Apr. 2014.
"William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily – Setting Analysis." Online Essays com. N.p., n.d. Web. 16 Apr. 2014.
Life is sad and tragic; some of which is made for us and some of which we make ourselves. Emily had a hard life. Everything that she loved left her. Her father probably impressed upon her that every man she met was no good for her. The townspeople even state “when her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her; and in a way, people were glad…being left alone…She had become humanized” (219). This sounds as if her father’s death was sort of liberation for Emily. In a way it was, she could begin to date and court men of her choice and liking. Her father couldn’t chase them off any more. But then again, did she have the know-how to do this, after all those years of her father’s past actions? It also sounds as if the townspeople thought Emily was above the law because of her high-class stature. Now since the passing of her father she may be like them, a middle class working person. Unfortunately, for Emily she became home bound.
The domineering attitude of Emily's father keeps her to himself, inside the house, and alone until his death. In his own way, Emily's father shows her how to love. Through a forced obligation to love only him, as he drives off young male callers, he teaches his daughter lessons of love. It is this dysfunctional love that resurfaces later, because it is the only way Emily knows how to love.
Emily was drove crazy by others expectations, and her loneliness. ““A Rose for Emily,” a story of love and obsession, love, and death, is undoubtedly the most famous one among Faulkner’s more than one hundred short stories. It tells of a tragedy of a screwy southern lady Emily Grierson who is driven from stem to stern by the worldly tradition and desires to possess her lover by poisoning him and keeping his corpse in her isolated house.” (Yang, A Road to Destruction and Self Destruction: The Same Fate of Emily and Elly, Proquest) When she was young her father chased away any would be suitors. He was convinced no one was good enough for her. Emily ended up unmarried. She had come to depend on her father. When he finally died, ...
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.
One can clearly imagine the timid Emily standing behind her towering father. "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." Emily's father not only dominates the portrait but dominates Emily as well. Emily's father controls her every move. She cannot date anyone unless her father approves, yet he never approves of any of the few men that do show interest in her. "None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such." Unable to find a good enough suitor, Emily has no choice but to stay and care for her governing father.
Growing up Emily was an all-around vibrant girl. Over time, she becomes a secretive old woman. In a “A Rose for Emily, “she was described as shuttered, dusty, and dark just like the outside of her home. She inherited mental illness from her father side. “She exhibits the qualities of the stereotypical southern “eccentric”: unbalanced, excessively tragic, and subject of a bizarre behavior” (SparkNotes Editors 2007, pg 4). When her father passed away, she refused to give up his body. In all, Emily is a scared soul whose loneliness and co-dependent upbringing let her to remain socially unfit, and unable to make healthy human connections (Enotes, 2016 pg 1). Her upbringing slowly affected her ability to function like the rest of the townspeople. The townspeople never labeled her with a mental illness, but she was constantly talked about because of the relationship she had with Homer, and curiosity of the way Emily was living got the best of the
In “A Rose for Emily”, William Faulkner uses imagery and symbolism to both illustrate and strengthen the most prevalent theme; Emily’s resistance to change. William Faulkner seems to reveal this theme through multiple descriptions of Miss Grierson’s actions, appearance, and her home. Throughout the short story it is obvious that Emily has a hard time letting go of her past, she seems to be holding onto every bit of her past. Readers see this shown in several ways, some more obvious than others.
Faulkner, William. “A Rose For Emily.” An Introduction to Fiction. 10th ed. Eds: X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New Yorkk: Pearson Longman, 2007. 29-34.
In her earlier years, Emily, grew up with her father who was a wealthy man of the "Old South';. While growing up she was restricted from all people of the opposite sex, and was a cast away from the social nature of life. She was never to date or be seen with a man while her father was around. The day that her father died she did not show a sign of death in soul until a couple of days later.
It was hard for her mother to have a baby at a young age herself and try to make ends meet was not easy. She needed to lean on others for help, which she thought at the time was right thing to do, but got caught up on her new family. This is why Emily had so much resentment towards her mother. This story is a great example of a dysfunctional mother-daughter relationship. The story does great job showing the mother’s anguish over her daughter, and a depressed teen that needed her mother and is struggling to overcome a very unhappy childhood.
Emily’s isolation from the townspeople, throughout her life, would have had many negative effects on her psychological development. Her father had an inflated sense of pride; he perceived an exalted power in the value of his family name. He uses this pride to drive away all of Emily’s suitors, leaving her a spinster at age thirty. When he perishes, the narrator feels pity for Miss Emily, even attempting to rationalize the three days she refused to give up his body for burial, and her insistence that he was not dead. “Emily became an emotional orphan in search of the father who had been taken from her” (Scherting 400). Her father was the only relationship available to Emily, and with his death; she has nothing and no one. This makes her intentions to murder and cling to Homer’s body, an act of control because by committing the act in secrecy, no one can destroy her illusions and take Homer away from her like they did her
In “A Rose For Emily”, by William Faulkner, plot plays an important role in how
Faulkner, William. "A Rose For Emily." The Bedford Introduction to Literature: Reading, Thinking, Writing. Ed. Michael Meyer. 9th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 2008. 91-99. Print.
Emily was kept confined from all that surrounded her. Her father had given the town folks a large amount of money which caused Emily and her father to feel superior to others. “Grierson’s held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (Faulkner). Emily’s attitude had developed as a stuck-up and stubborn girl and her father was to blame for this attitude. Emily was a normal girl with aspirations of growing up and finding a mate that she could soon marry and start a family, but this was all impossible because of her father. The father believed that, “none of the younger man were quite good enough for Miss Emily,” because of this Miss Emily was alone. Emily was in her father’s shadow for a very long time. She lived her li...
Passion is a vital component of Faulkner’s writing and is apparent in “A Rose for Emily” by her love for her betrothed. “I’ve come to know that what we want in life is the greatest indication of who we really are”-Evans This quote identifies what Miss Emily truly wanted, love. Again Miss Emily keeps Homer Barron’s body when he dies, “The man himself lay...