Love was finally seen as infatuation when the dead body was found laying in the bed outlasting fake love. People can feel like they truly love someone, but actually they only have a short-lived admiration for that person. Faulkner clearly creates excellent examples of mistaking infatuation for true love. Infatuation can cause people to perform stupid deeds that people normally would not do. In “A Rose for Emily,” Emily Grierson mistakes infatuation for love causing her to buy arsenic poison, kill Homer Barron, and retain his body after his death. Earlier in Emily’s life, she was unable to find love because of the lack of finding or keeping suitors. The reason she could not find or keep suitors was because of her father. Her father did not …show more content…
After the druggist names a couple, he tells her, “They’ll kill anything up to an elephant. But you want is” (paragraph10, sectionIII). Emily cuts him off and tells him she wants arsenic. The druggist tells her she has to tell him what she will do with it, but she just looks at him “…erect, her face like a strained flag” (paragraph14, sectionIII). She continued staring at him and he finally gives her the poison. This shows how Emily was determined to buy the poison no matter what, because she has false love for Homer. Emily bought the arsenic because of her infatuation with Homer Barron. She did not want to lose him because she thought she was in love with …show more content…
Emily was afraid that she would be alone for the rest of her life after she found out that “Homer himself had remarked--he liked men” (paragraph1, sectionIV). Since Homer liked men, he would not marry her and love her the way she wanted to be loved. Even though that was true, it would not stop her from trying to change his mind, even if she had to use the arsenic to do it. Emily was unaware of the things infatuation was causing her to do. Emily, mind truly lost, kills Homer Barron, but before she does she tries to change his mind about liking men. Miss Emily prepares for their wedding, gathering every necessity appropriate. She buys a man’s toilet set in silver with his initials on it and a complete outfit of men’s clothing for him. Homer comes to see Emily one day and that was the last time people see Hogan 3 him. People believe that they are on a long honeymoon, but actually she has him locked upstairs. When Emily realizes her efforts to persuade Homer to return the love has failed, she resorts to poisoning him with the arsenic. She believes this is the only way she can have him forever. Instead of giving Homer a proper burial, Miss Emily keeps his body upstairs, so she can have him for the rest of her
Miss Emily bought some arsenic from the druggist refusing to state her intended use. She also purchased a man's toiletry set and clothing. Everyone assumed that they had been married. Miss Emily had two cousins staying with. After the street work was finished, Homer left and did not return until her family had gone. He was seen entering Miss Emily's kitchen door and was never seen again until his body was discovered years later in an upstairs room of Miss Emily's house.
The meaning of love cannot be defined in one sentence or even in 16 pages. Every human has his or her own definition of what love is. People define love by their own experiences whether as true love or ending in heartaches. In Raymond Carver’s short story, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, he describes what love is, by depicting what it is not. He executes this by portraying the experiences of four people, while using their dialogue and setting in the story to describe how something so beautiful as love can easily become an awkward and repelling subject to discuss.
Emily’s father rose her with lots of authority, he might had ruined her life by not giving her the opportunity to live a normal lady/woman life; but he build a personality, character and a psycho woman. Mister Grierson was the responsible for Emily’s behavior, he thought her to always make others respect her. Homer’s actions of using her as a cover to his sexuality was not respectful at all, Emily did not know any better and poison him to death.
“At first reading, the gothic horror of the tale will likely rule out a heart-lifting experience” (Stranburg). Emily suffers with a mental illness disease throughout the story as she is one of the last members of her family that is still living. When she was a child her father wouldn’t allow her to have social contact. When her father dies he leaves her the house but no money and it sends her into a depressed downward spiral and she refuses to accept his death for three days. "She met the ladies at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them her father was not dead. She told them that for three days" (Faulkner 3). Emily’s response shows the readers how much she has convinced herself that he’s not dead and how bad mental illness can really be. The neighbors do not see anything wrong with her at this point, they just believe she taking the loss of her father hard. Soon she meets Homer who is in town working on a construction project. Shortly sometime after Emily falls for him and they began dating. Homer decided to leave and then comes back and that is the last time he is seen in the story. Emily is so sick and twisted she is willing to kill the people that she loves most, because the fear of being alone is so haunting to her. After she kills Homer the neighbors start to wonder about the stench coming from her house and start to get
Emily has known nothing more than her Fathers strict values and the heavy responsibility of the Grierson name to live up to. People in the town remembered, “How old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (Faulkner 2). The great aunt is in many ways the same as Emily and this proves to be true because of the climactic murder of her lover Homer. However, the reader is unable to make any inferences towards the resolution of the relationship up until Emily purchases the poison which is labeled for “rats”. The narrator goes on to show that Emily provided no suitable need for the poison but was sold it illegally. The story is summed up with the entire town learning of the murder of Homer and finding the grey hair of Emily next to him. This leads to the symbolic ending of the story by showing that Emily had been sleeping with the dead body up until her unending sleep. Most importantly, the hair was strategically placed at the end of the story leaving the reader room to manipulate Emily’s character. Although different motives for committing the murder may surface, it can still be inferred that her poor mental state was the quintessential factor shown by all of the foreshadowing and symbolism leading up to that
Just as in “Barn Burning,” Emily’s father figure had antagonistic traits to him. Though he did love her and was not as short-tempered as Abner, he still could be picked as an antagonist for this story. Emily’s father plays a key role for Emily’s loner tendencies. Growing up, her father kept Emily isolated from much of society and never accepted any guy she brought home. Another antagonist that could be found in the story is Emily herself. Throughout the story, Emily is viewed as the protagonist and attracts a feeling of sympathy from the reader. Faulkner stated, “At last they could pity Miss Emily,” (pg. 80) when talking about the death of her father. As Emily goes through her trials in life she does indeed receive sympathy. However, Emily’s actions throughout the story and especially towards the end can be viewed as self-hindering. Emily locking herself up and never leaving her isolated state to make a positive change in her life, makes me lose sympathy for her. The view of being the protagonist changes once Emily purchases the arsenic at the drug store. Emily then uses the drug to kill her former lover, Homer Baron. Instead of being the poor lady with the sad upbringing of a strict father, Emily becomes a cold-blooded murderer by the end of the story. However, Emily is more of a product of her
On page 303, it says that when Emily got home she opened the arsenic package and it says “For rats.” We, as the reader, are able to identify that Emily used the arsenic to kill Homer Barron. I do not believe that the words written on the box just happened to be there. Their inclusion lets us into the mind of Emily, she saw Homer as a rat. Homer “liked men” and was “not a marrying man” (Faulkner 305). With Emily’s intense feeling toward him, knowing that Homer was not going to stay voluntarily, Emily did the only thing that she knew could make him stay. It is common in our times for an individual to fall in love with someone who had no intention of staying, but this doesn’t rectify murder. No one in his or her right mind would resort to murder in this situation, demonstrating that Emily was clearly not in her right
When her father passed away, it was a devastating loss for Miss Emily. The lines from the story 'She told them her father was not dead. She did that for three days,' (Charter 171) conveys the message that she tried to hold on to him, even after his death. Even though, this was a sad moment for Emily, but she was liberated from the control of her father. Instead of going on with her life, her life halted after death of her father. Miss Emily found love in a guy named Homer Barron, who came as a contractor for paving the sidewalks in town. Miss Emily was seen in buggy on Sunday afternoons with Homer Barron. The whole town thought they would get married. One could know this by the sentences in the story ?She will marry him,? ?She will persuade him yet,? (Charter 173).
Within the story, Emily has the need to control loved ones from leaving her. Unfortunately for Homer Barron, Emily could not accept that Homer did not want to be with her, which led to his expiration. “What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed which he lay; and upon him, the pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient biding dust” (1109). To control Homer from moving on and finding someone else to love, Emily believed killing him was the only way to be together forever, even if they could not get married. With all the year’s homer laid dead in Emily’s bed, this was her way of controlling homer from leaving, and controlling the loneliness she felt that she could never get rid of because of the controlling lifestyle she continued to
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
The readers understand that when he was alive that he ran away all of the young men that she was interested in, so of course when he died she had no other love to lean on. Emily was so attached to her father that after he died she refused to allow his body to be taken away for three days. This is how the readers are introduced to Homer Barron. It is learned that he was part of the lower class, but Emily loved him even though she was taught that she was above others. Or did she only love the way he filled that void for her that her father left? Homer left when some of Emily’s family from Alabama came to stay with her after the town’s minister’s wife wrote to them; and when they left, back came Homer a few days later. When he returns, that is when Emily decided she was going to make sure that he did not leave her again. “I want arsenic” (102). Foreshadowing us to what was to come between the relationship of Emily Grierson and Homer Barron. She feared going through another loss of a man she loved and there was only one was to guarantee he would not be taken away. However, Matt’s relationship with Richard was based solely on the fact that his son, Frank, dated Richard’s wife while they were split up. Mary Ann had a way about her that drew not only Frank and Richard towards her, but Matt as well. “[A]nd the long brown legs he loved to look at” (115). Words spoken from Matt’s point of view, which gives us a clue to just how much power, this young girl who had been through so much made the men feel like they had just by being around her. Although Matt had a relationship with the girl who was the root of his son’s murder, he had no prior contact to Richard before his decision to seek revenge on him. Frank was the only true link between the two of them and when the link was taken out then one of the other’s had to go
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).
At the beginning of the story when her father died, it was mentioned that “[Emily] told [the ladies in town] 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” (626). Faulkner reveals Emily’s dependency on her father through the death of her father. As shown in this part of the story, Emily was very attached to her father and was not able to accept that fact that he was no longer around. She couldn’t let go of the only man that loved her and had been with her for all those years. While this may seem like a normal reaction for any person who has ever lost a loved one, Faulkner emphasizes Emily’s dependence and attachment even further through Homer Barron. After her father’s death, Emily met a man name Homer, whom she fell in love with. While Homer showed interest in Emily at the beginning he became uninterested later on. “Homer himself had remarked—he liked men” (627) which had caused Emily to become devastated and desperate. In order to keep Homer by her side, Emily decided to poison Homer and keep him in a bedroom in her home. It was clear that she was overly attached to Homer and was not able to lose another man that she
He worked on construction and sidewalks. Everyone was appalled by the fact that she finally found love in a man of lower class than herself. The whole town knew the standard that her father held her too. They felt that her tautness was immature and naïve. She spent lots of unsupervised time with him and all of the town could see it. Every Sunday they would spend time together. All the time that they spent together, she grew fonder of him. She contracted feelings for a man for the first time in her life. Emily, a 30-something year old female, pursued her desire for love and sex. She found love in Homer. He started to pull away. He became more distant, but she was not having it. When she thinks Homer is about leave her, she does not want to be alone. She has felt the feeling of being alone when her father left her and that is a feeling she despises. In a zealous way, she plotted to kill him. She made her way to the drug store for poison. “I want arsenic,” she said. When she was asked what it was for she stated, “For rats (Faulkner)”. She believed Homer was a rat indeed. It is not told, but Hal Blythe advances that Homer may be a homosexual, and has drawn critical rebuttals for his theory. His view fuels further queries about what this untypical love affair may actually involve (Argiro). “Rat” is also used as a slang term for a man who cheat on his lover (Burduck). Emily did whatever was necessary to keep him by her side. She would not let him be with
...er. Upstairs in her bedroom, lie Homer’s decomposed body wearing remnants of the suit she had purchased for him many years ago. The indentation of a head on the pillow case and the strand of gray hair next to the body, gives us the impression that Emily laid there before her death. These clues give the reader a second and final rectification that Emily had necrophilia.