rose for emily

Almost everyone laments how the world has changed since they were young, how everything is now faster, more complicated, and less friendly. In William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," Miss Emily sees the world change in many different ways, and yet stays the same. In her case, the world she grew up in literally is gone, and she does not posses the skills to change along with it. She is a woman lost in time, with no real place among society, especially not a society who places her on a pedestal, enabling her many questionable actions. The factors of her life and the stigmas placed upon her due to those factors yield to her no choice but the actions which she chose.

Miss Emily's generation grew up in a time when women were expected to get married, have children, and take care of the house. For someone of her status, this would have been the epitome of her adult life. She would be the mistress of a household, leading a life of entertaining and quiet leadership. Miss Emily, however, never married. Her father had never accepted her suitors, meeting them at the door "clutching a horsewhip." He selfishly kept her single all those years, which must have caused immense embarrassment to a woman from her era, whose whole life should have led up to her marriage. She seldom left her house after her father died, further mystifying herself to the town who watched her life from behind their lace curtains.

The Civil War came and went, and Miss Emily still lived in that same house "set on what had once been [the] most select street," "lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps." Miss Emily had once belonged to the most select class, and still stubbornly maintained the image, even though she and her entire town knew the truth to be otherwise. She remained a stubborn product of her times, keeping a manservant who most likely had been with her since he had been a slave, and had stayed out of loyalty to her. She continually refused progress, not allowing them to "fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it" when the town finally got postal service. Time continued ticking on, and yet Miss Emily refused to acknowledge it. She firmly entrenched herself in denial when her father died, telling the townspeople...

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...onument to her town even though they believe that "she was [a] fallen" woman. "She held her head high enough…it was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity." All her life she had been denied happiness, and now she has found it. Unfortunately, this love was doomed to fail. There are too many traditions, customs, and prejudices engrained in Emily, her town, her family, and her love. Homer will not marry her. However, she has finally found love and happiness, and Miss Emily is above the law.

So she poisons Homer Barron and keeps him in a room upstairs. She sleeps with him every night, his body arranged in the "attitude of an embrace," clinging to the idea of a "marriage" that she never had. She is a sad, lonely woman, and if she cannot have this one last chance at happiness, then she will keep it by force. Throughout her life the town she lived in has been her "enabler," allowing her to continue in her unhealthy habits; Emily has no reason to think that what she has done is wrong. She is simply preserving what is rightfully hers; she is holding on to some semblance of happiness that has always been denied her.