Essay On A Rose For Emily Grierson's Death

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Antebellum Death In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” Miss Emily Grierson is well known around town for her decaying antebellum house and more importantly for her genteel, old Southern father. In this small southern town, appearances were everything. What people did not know is that she held a wicked, sickening secret, finally revealed after her death, that she had killed Homer Barron and slept beside him until she died herself from natural causes. The backwardness of the town, her controlling, over whelming father, and the fact that Miss Emily was not self-sufficient all propelled her into dementedness or was Miss Emily to become insane because she was raised repressively to behave like a lady and as fading Southern belle? As the town …show more content…

She did, though, she poisoned him with arsenic and kept his body to sleep beside. In this pre Civil War period, in order to get arsenic, the druggist/ pharmacist had to know the intended use whether it be small rodents or in Miss Emily’s case humans. When the druggist asked Miss Emily what her intended use was, she was silent in her reply so knowingly the box was marked “… for rats” (734). This little dialogue from the story is very satirical as Miss Emily is referring to men, all men in her life, as rats. Homer’s refusal to marry her, not her virginity, and the fact that all men have deserted her is the issue.. On the one hand, all aristocratic, well bread southern ladies are married but on the other, Miss Emily believes she will relinquish what control of her life that she has gained by her father’s death. It is as if she is in a damned if you do and damned if you don’t situation that the town and generation after generation has trapped her. She wasn’t going to have another lover walk out her life, so she poisoned Homer Barron before he had the chance to leave as no well bread southern woman is divorced. Faulkner used the evolving town to isolate Miss Emily as she portrays the aristocratic south, unable to move beyond the antebellum past to reach the future until

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