Analysis Of Miss Emily In A Rose For Emily

“A Rose for Emily”, by William Faulkner, Emily Geierson is a woman that faces many difficulties throughout her lifetime. These difficulties define Emily’s fascinating character that is revealed throughout the short story. In the short story “A Rose for Emily”, Miss Emily is characterized as a stubborn, overly attached, and introverted woman.
In the story, Emily can be described as a very stubborn person. This assumption is made “[w]hen the town got free postal delivery” (628). “Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it” (628). While everyone else agreed to free postal delivery, Miss Emily “alone” refused. This reveals Miss Emily’s stubbornness and her disregards of other’s opinion.

At the beginning of the story when her father died, it was mentioned that “[Emily] told [the ladies in town] 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” (626). Faulkner reveals Emily’s dependency on her father through the death of her father. As shown in this part of the story, Emily was very attached to her father and was not able to accept that fact that he was no longer around. She couldn’t let go of the only man that loved her and had been with her for all those years. While this may seem like a normal reaction for any person who has ever lost a loved one, Faulkner emphasizes Emily’s dependence and attachment even further through Homer Barron. After her father’s death, Emily met a man name Homer whom she fell in love with. While Homer showed interest in Emily at the beginning he became uninterested later on. “Homer himself had remarked—he liked men” (627) which had caused Emily to become devastated and desperate. In order to keep Homer by her side, Emily decided to poison Homer and keep him in a bedroom in her home. It was clear that she was overly attached to Homer and was not able to lose another man that she

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 to how she kept herself closed for all those years. Many of the town’s women came to her funeral with curiosity of how she lives, 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