“A Rose for Emily” is a horror story by Faulkner. Emily Grierson, whose life story is told by an anonymous narrator, who represents the attitudes and ideas of the community. When suppressed by her father until his death, she takes up with a Northern laborer, Homer Barron. When she is faced with desertion from Homer, she turns to murdering him by arsenic. It was later discovered after Emily’s death that Homer’s rotting corpse was in the upstairs bedroom for nearly forty years and lying on the pillow next to him was an iron gray hair considered to be Emily’s.By examining Emily’s relationship with her father, her place in the community, and her problem with distinguishing the present from the past, a lot is revealed about the character of Miss Emily in the story.
The Grierson family had a streak of general insanity along with an insane pride. Miss Emily’s father, a selfish and dominating man, thought that none of the young men who came courting her were good enough for their name. So he discouraged them. When he finally died, Emily was still unmarried and with nothing more than a house.Homer, Emily’s suitor, with his strong masculine presence and whip-welding skills are an interesting resemblance to Emily’s domineering father.
We see Emily’s crime as a final attempt to keep a father figure from deserting her. The tragedy in the story was shown in Emily’s inability to escape the influence of her father. Miss Emily’s relationship to the small town was of great significance in the story. Everyone had looked up the Grierson’s in the small town of Jefferson, Mississippi.
The Griersons’ held their heads high which some of the townspeople felt too high.The feelings of the community towards Miss Emily are very complicated. In the community’s eyes, her story is no more than a case history. Miss Emily is denied normal participation in the life of the community because she represents a traditional aristocracy of a higher social class than most people.
This situation, created by her ancestors, is accentuated by the community, which denies Miss Emily a normal life by regarding her as their symbol of the past. She had become part of the history of the town. She was kind of a monument, a landmark. When Miss Emily dies, she becomes their “fallen monument”.When Miss Emily purchased the arsenic at the drugstore, the news spread rapidly throughout the town. The townspeople believed that she meant to kill herself after the disappearance of her beloved Homer, for an aristocratic lady would prefer death to dishonor.
But she does not kill herself. Emily decides to kill Homer instead of letting him abandon her; she felt it was her only choice. The townspeople just assumed that Homer had left the town for good. Miss Emily’s proud independence and disregard for bureaucratic regulation brought about a certain admiration from the community itself.
Miss Emily’s absolute defiance of what others think, and her insistence to living life solely on her own terms, ignoring the law, ended in a horrifying deformation of her own psyche. The community learns how horrifying only after her funeral when they explored the upper rooms of the house. The townspeople made sure Emily was in the ground before they opened the locked room and what they discovered was what was left of her lover from forty years before. It is as if the town recognized that she had earned a right to this extension of her hard-won and bitterly maintained privacy to wait until she was buried before going through her house.
In conclusion, Miss Emily Grierson is a victim of her own pride. She did not crumble under pressures; she did not give in. She insisted on choosing a lover in spite of the criticism of the town. She refused to be jilted. She was not to be scorned or pitied. She led an idle and useless life.
She was driven to criminal acts in desperate attempts to stimulate something of love’s fulfillment. These acts were neither life giving or redeeming; on the contrary, she was led into a life of frustration, perversion, isolation, and decay.
