Compare And Contrast A Rose For Emily And The Outsiders

In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” and Sherwood Anderson’s “Hands,” both authors present main characters who isolate themselves after they are treated as objects of desire. In Faulkner’s work, Miss Emily is an outsider because she is dehumanized after becoming a victim of incest. Similarly, in Anderson’s work, Wing Biddlebadum is also dehumanized when he is beaten up by the town’s people after being accused of child molestation. In this way, both characters are outsiders in their haven because they are deprived of humane treatment. Outsiders are individuals who do not fit the traditional roles they are meant to have in society. Outsiders do not fit within their society and become “a person not belonging to a particular group, set, party, etc.” (Dictionary.com). Outsiders are thought to be individuals who have different taste in fashion or music, but they can also be people who have lived a different life from his/her peers.

Wing knows he must remove himself from the city or else he will die but then he chooses to not speak to anyone in fear that what had happened once will happen again. Emily on the other hand, was raised in isolation from her mother, the town’s people, and men. People were not trying to get to know Wing, but people wished for information regarding Miss Emily. She isolates herself because “Emily’s ‘body’ is experienced as resistant and we read an opposition between the decay of her house and “our most select street”. Remarkably often the outside world tries to penetrate the house/body of Emily”” (van Stralen). She was already penetrated once by her father and now the people of her town desperately try to snoop and gather information from her. She does not choose to be the way she is but it is all she knows, so she remains in her house until the day she dies without any contact aside from her