Ill-Fated Love In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

In William Faulkner’s story, “A Rose for Emily”, the narrator shares a message of ill-fated love and maladaptation to the loss of love by Emily Grierson. The story is a tragic depiction of a young women who is prevented from dating by her father because he feels that no one is suitable his daughter. Emily also has to overcome the stigma of having a great aunt who has a mental illness. Over thirty, unmarried, father-less, and an instrument of society, Emily falls for Homer Barron, a northern day laborer, who is new to the community. He is seen by the local society as being on a lower social level than Emily and the relationship is shunned by the local elite. On first look, this is a story about Emily and her pitiful life as viewed by the townspeople and her death. The story is actually about the maladaptive coping techniques that Emily has

When her father died, she refused to accept that he was dead and did not want him buried: “She told them 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. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly” (27). Because of this, Emily never had a chance to let go before her father was taken. She has also learned a lesson of not letting them take the body from her. When she meets and established a relationship with Homer, she cannot take being jilted and him leaving her as her father did. This drove her to poison him with arsenic and keep his corpse with her forever: “The man himself lay in the bed” (48). It was even more misguided that she sleeps in the bed with the corpse: “Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indention of a head, one of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a strand of iron-gray hair”