A Rose For Emily And Trifles Analysis

America, if not the world, has always been infatuated with murder stories, movies, and shows. There are countless shows that revolve around solving crimes and finding killers and it seems like more and more keep popping up. There’s something about learning about a killers motives and why they’ve committed the crime that draws people in rapidly. Most people would think of killers as psychopaths. There are two stories that we read throughout this semester that, to me, seemed to have a psychopathic or somehow psychologically disturbed killer in them. “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell show us two women who are seemingly harmless that end up being killers.

In “A Rose For Emily” the narrator talks a lot about

how pretty much the entire town thinks that Emily is crazy. The narrator says, “After her father’s death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all.” (Faulkner 31). They even believe that perhaps going crazy is in Miss Emily’s genetics. “People in our town remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were.” (Faulkner 32). A widely known fact about people who may be psychotic is that they are very introverted or spend most, if not all of their time alone and that it can be genetic. Adding that one line in this story about her absence to the public may seem minuscule and unimportant but it actually helps to set up the story and also helps to pull the conclusion of the story together. It makes the reader question whether Miss Emily is actually crazy and secluding herself or if she is just an introvert whose heart was broken so badly that she locked herself away.
Miss Emily had kept herself locked away for many years to the point where she became a mystery to the town she lived in. “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, and the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years.” (Faulkner 30). The town was curious about what was going on with this woman who lived near them. They had only really heard rumors about her so her death seems to have been quite the spectacle.
By the end of the story we realize that Miss Emily’s poor lover had not actually gotten the chance to leave her.

The townspeople were unaware of this. They had thought that the Colonel had left Miss Emily and never showed his face in town again. That’s probably why they were so shocked when they found his body in the upstairs room. The signs all pointed to Miss Emily having killed her lover. If going crazy did run in her family then she must have just snapped when her lover tried to leave her. The town mayor had gotten numerous complaints about an awful smell coming from Miss Emily’s house. No one even thought twice about what the smell could’ve been, instead the narrator says, “ So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily’s lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them performed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder.” (Faulkner 32). The men covered up the smell, which was most likely the horrid smell of a rotting corpse, and once the smell went away, no one thought about it again. Another sign that pointed towards Miss Emily having killed her lover was a strange encounter she had with the druggist in the town. She said, “I want poison” (Faulkner 33) and then went on to say “I want the best you have. I don’t care what kind.” (Faulkner 33). She wasn’t even trying to hide what she was doing. She almost made it sort of obvious, yet no

one in this town even thought twice about it.
In “Trifles” by Susan Glaspell, Mrs.

Wright seems to have suddenly had a psychotic break. She has very strange behavior and is not apparently normal for her. There is incredibly important dialogue between Mr. Hale and Mrs. Wright that show that she’s acting out of character. “I said, ‘How do you do Mrs. Wright, its cold, ain’t it?’ and she said, ‘Is it?’ – and went on kind of pleating at her apron. Well, I was surprised; she didn’t ask me to come up to the stove, or to set down, but just sat there, not even looking at me, so i said, ‘I want to see John.’ And then she – laughed. I guess you would call it a laugh. I thought of harry and the team outside, so I said a little sharp: ‘Can’t I see John?’ No’, she says kind o’ dull like. ‘Ain’t he home?’ says I ‘Yes,’ says she, ‘he’s home.’ ‘Then why can’t I see him?’ I asked her, out of patience. ‘Cause he’s dead,’ says she.” (Glaspell 852). The interesting thing about Mrs. Wright’s conversation with Mr. Hale is that she doesn’t necessarily try to cover up the fact that John is dead. She doesn’t say that she’s killed him or anything like that, but she simply states that he’s dead. She even laughs at Mr. Hale’s persistence to see john, which shows that she may have gone somewhat crazy. She doesn’t seem to feel any

remorse.
Both Mrs. Wright and Miss Emily seem to have snapped. Something went wrong in their relationship with their lover/husband and it drove them to commit murder. Neither one of the criminals are brought to justice. Miss Emily died before they even realized that she had murdered her once lover, and Mrs. Wright didn’t have any evidence against her because the two women that went to her house hid it for her once they saw it. These two stories show that people can be driven to kill by getting their heart broken or by being mistreated in some way. It appears that Both Mrs. Wright and Miss Emily are somewhat psychopaths because they don’t seem to feel any remorse for what they’ve done and they don’t admit to their crimes. Even the most harmless seeming people have a breaking point and both of those women reached theirs.