William Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily” is a story about isolation, curiosity, and madness It starts off with the death of Mrs. Emily Grierson, A town favorite in the sense that she is mysterious and reclusive, becoming somewhat of an old interest to the town. With this beginning, the narrator begins to tell us the nature of Mrs. Emily and her interactions and presence over the town, as well as her morbid personality. From purchasing the rat poison to the locals finding the preserved body of her long but passed lover, Homer Barron, in her own home. It is the descent into the mind of deranged and unstable woman, a woman who is the main focus of the tale, yet without appearing repeatedly throughout the story, and having the reader hear her thoughts. …show more content…
Miss. Emily Grierson's mysterious and shadowy nature is what keeps the reader engaged. Miss Emily was an isolated individual, sheltering herself from the town and her duties, before she had passed. “After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all.”(Faulkner 80). Because her protective father sheltered her from suters, this quarantined personally began to bloom inside of her. Her father believed that no man was perfect or suitable for his beautiful daughter. “None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such.” (Faulkner 81). When her father had finally passed, his presence still loomed over her, even as she had met Homer Barron, he was still a shadow over her. “Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized”(Faulkner 81). For several days, she would meet the woman of the town at her door, to greet their condolences. It seemed everything would begin to have light in her life, but this was not to be. She began to give painting lessons to some ladies of the town, but suddenly stopped. The isolation, that had once held her as a child, began to grow again. She never paid …show more content…
It started with when she greeted the women of town at her door, when they came to pay their respects to her late father. “ She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days” (Faulkner 81). The reader begins to see that, with the death of her Father, begins to fall into insanity. With the later disappearance of Homer Barron from inside the house “and the only sign of life about the place was the Negro man – a young man then – going in and out with a market basket” (Faulkner 83). When she appears inside the druggist's store, she requests an unusual item. “I want some poison”(Faulkner 82), to which the druggiest questions if she be using it to kill rats. The druggiest begins to ask what the need for such an item to which she replies “I want Arsenic” (faulkner 82). At this point in the story the reader begins to question why the need for such a poison. Some of the townsfolk hypothesize that Miss Emily will kill herself with the poison. The suspense has been building and the reader wants answers, it has turned into a mystery. When it was announced that Miss Emily had passed with “...the town coming to look at Miss Emily beneath a mass of bought flowers” (Faulkner 84). They begin to search the house and come to a room that “no one had seen in forty years” (Faulkner 84). Upon opening the door, the see a man, lying upon the bed. The man in the bed is none other than Homer Barron, frozen
While her father was around, Emily was never allowed to date. Her father thought that no man was good enough for Emily. Once her father passed away, Miss Emily became somewhat desperate for human love. Faulkner first tells us that shortly after her father’s death, Miss Emily’s sweetheart left her. Everybody in the town thought that Emily and this sweetheart of hers were going to be married.
Emily was drove crazy by others expectations, and her loneliness. ““A Rose for Emily,” a story of love and obsession, love, and death, is undoubtedly the most famous one among Faulkner’s more than one hundred short stories. It tells of a tragedy of a screwy southern lady Emily Grierson who is driven from stem to stern by the worldly tradition and desires to possess her lover by poisoning him and keeping his corpse in her isolated house.” (Yang, A Road to Destruction and Self Destruction: The Same Fate of Emily and Elly, Proquest) When she was young her father chased away any would be suitors. He was convinced no one was good enough for her. Emily ended up unmarried. She had come to depend on her father. When he finally died, ...
Isolation dominated the seventy four-year life of Emily Grierson in 'A Rose for Emily' by William Faulkner. Never in this story did she live in harmony with anyone one short time. Even when she died at age seventy four, people in Jefferson town rushed into her house not because they wanted to say goodbye forever to her, but because they wanted to discover her mystic house. Many people agreed that it was the aristocratic status that made Emily?s life so isolated. And if Emily weren?t born in the aristocratic Grierson, her life couldn?t be alienated far away from the others around her.
Upon Miss Emily’s purchase of the poison, it shows her steep transition into obsession of the past. To the public eye it was incredibly out of character in which they believed she was preparing to kill herself after not being able to marry Homer Barron. However, when she fails to prove them right, the disappearance of Homer did not take the public by surprise until the sudden self-seclusion of Miss Emily herself. “Now and then we would see her at a window for a moment, as the men did when they sprinkled the lime, but for almost six months she did not appear on the streets.” (Faulkner 314) It is because of her self-inflicted isolation that Miss Emily dies all alone in a diminished and dilapidated home where “the house is an essence of her crypt, enclosing in its walls all the signs of death, dust, shadows, foul odors, not to mention a corpse that rots into a skeleton.” (Harris 174) Miss Emily’s death signifies her self-inflicted solitude, and her complete and final result of internal and external
After being reclusive for decades, Miss Emily dies in her dusty house at age 74 (305). After her burial, they force entry into the “room in that region above the stairs which no one had seen in forty years” (306). They find the “bridal suite” and remains of Homer laying “in the attitude of embrace” along with evidence that Miss Emily had also been in that bed with him (306). Readers believe that Emily kills Homer with the arsenic. In her mind, she is not going to allow him to leave her. She prefers to have him dead in her house, rather than gone
Miss Emily’s isolation is able to benefit her as well. She has the entire town believing she is a frail and weak woman, but she is very strong indeed. Everyone is convinced that she could not even hurt a fly, but instead she is capable a horrible crime, murder. Miss Emily’s actions range from eccentric to absurd. After the death of her father, and the estrangement from the Yankee, Homer Barron, she becomes reclusive and introverted. The reader can find that Miss Emily did what was necessary to keep her secret from the town. “Already we knew that there was one room in that region above stairs which no one had seen in forty years” (247).
In the first sentence the reader is informed that the main character, Emily Grierson, has died and that the entire town has attended and everyone for a different reason. The narrator begins a flashback to ten years before her death when the “backbone” of the city began to harass Emily for her taxes; the reader is introduced to a situation. Then flashback another thirty years to when her father passed and that’s when Emily began to live for herself and met Homer Barron. The towns people began to interfere out of jealousy but always stated that it was them having pity on Emily and got her upper class family involved with the socially unacceptable relationship; the reader at this point has received the conflict. The reader receives clues throughout the second flashback to conclude that Emily has killed Homer out of fear; this is where Faulkner provided us with the climax. Years pass and nothing really goes on at the Grierson house which raises the mystery of what is going on behind closed doors; the falling action of the story. Upon Emily’s death the ladies of the town enter her home and discover Homer’s corpse in a shut off bedroom upstairs with one piece of Emily’s hair on the pillow next to him; bringing the story to an end and giving the reader the denouement.
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 on how she kept herself closed for all those years. Many of the town’s women came to her funeral with curiosity about how she lived, 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 years.
Emily, is observed purchasing drugs from the pharmacy. When he goes missing, she starts behaving strangely. People soon became more curious about her life and her actions. After her death, they discovered the corpse of Homer Barron in a locked room on a bed where she kept
William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a short story told from the point of view of an unnamed narrator and opens with the death of Miss Emily Grierson, an elderly woman that the reader quickly learns that the town views more as a character than an actual human being. Through flashbacks, the mysterious and haunting tale of Emily is revealed. As a child, Emily was the member of an aristocratic family, but has now long been living in relative poverty in the former grand home of her family after her father left her with no money. The product of the Civil War South, Emily never moved past the social customs of her youth, and refused to live according to modern standards. This becomes evident when she accepts the mayor’s hidden charity under the guise of her never owing taxes due to a lie that her father had loaned the town money and this was how the town would re...
period in her life. These parts are prime examples of how Faulkner jumps back and forth throughout Emily’s lifetime. Part one begins with Emily’s funeral while part two begins “thirty years before”, “two years after her fathers death and a short time after her sweetheart”, Homer Barron. (93) Part three begins with her meeting Homer. This is interesting because the part before takes place after he dies. This also shows how Faulkner keeps one guessing with his unorthodox plot order. The next part talks of how Emily is planning to supposedly kill herself. It tells of how she buys the...
Emily was kept confined from all that surrounded her. Her father had given the town folks a large amount of money which caused Emily and her father to feel superior to others. “Grierson’s held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (Faulkner). Emily’s attitude had developed as a stuck-up and stubborn girl and her father was to blame for this attitude. Emily was a normal girl with aspirations of growing up and finding a mate that she could soon marry and start a family, but this was all impossible because of her father. The father believed that, “none of the younger man were quite good enough for Miss Emily,” because of this Miss Emily was alone. Emily was in her father’s shadow for a very long time. She lived her li...
A Rose for Emily is a southern gothic story written by William Faulkner about a woman’s life of isolation and her inability to comprehend life after death. From a first person narration, we are able to see Emily Grierson’s life from an outsider’s perspective rather than from her point of view consequently leading us to take the side of the narrator. This paper will argue how through themes of isolation and rebirth, this story implies how Emily’s character deals with seclusion and how she fails to part with death and distinguish time with the men that she has placed great significance in. Out of many of Faulkner’s works, A Rose for Emily demonstrates his detailed style of prose and conveys the emotions of people that have gruesome, complex lives
Miss Emily is an ambivalent lady who was kept away from men when she was a young girl. Her father considered himself a king and thought that no man was good enough for Miss Emily. He tried hard to keep his family close and men away from her. After her father died, she held on to his memories and didn’t want to give him up, “we knew that she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will”. After her father passes away, she meets a man named Homer Barron, who was paving sidewalks in the town.
A Rose for Emily is mysterious short story of affection and death that has many different possible meanings and unanswered questions left to the reader by Faulkner. Emily is one of the strongest, strangest and memorable characters of Faulkner’s short fictions (Kriewald 1) A Rose for Emily would usually fall under the gothic horror category when it comes to determining