Power Of Death In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

In William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily”, the reader is immediately introduced to the scene of a funeral for Ms. Emily Grierson, an old woman from a small southern town who has passed away due to old age. The narrator – one of the townspeople who remains anonymous to the reader – recounts the story of Ms. Emily’s life from a young woman to an old spinster. The narrator relates major events thematically throughout the story that have occurred within Emily’s life that have formed her into the woman she is, including the death of her father and the implied abandonment by her lover/fiancée. Through the use of a thematic storyline, the major plot points and the development of Emily’s character, the reader is shown that the power of death

It is revealed to the reader at the end of the story that Emily had actually murdered Homer using arsenic in his drink and that she kept his body in a locked away room in her home for over 40 years. “Then we noticed that in the pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something . . . we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair” (Faulkner V). These lines are the very last of the story, revealing to the reader that Emily truly has sunken into an eccentric and mentally unbalanced person. Emily exerts her desire for ultimate control onto Homer – a desire left over from her overbearing father – by taking his life and storing the body away where no one can find out what she has done. There was no traditional option to mildly express her desire for control over him as Homer was the eternal bachelor type and was not the type to settle down, because of this Emily creates a sinister plan to keep him eternally by her side. This ending scene is the very last, as well as the most extreme, of the characterizations of Emily’s obsession with necrophilia and desire for control. Emily’s mind has become so twisted throughout the story from her death-ridden life that she has gone as far as to kill a man, hide his body away and still lay by the side of a decomposing corpse in a grotesque fantasy of perfect marital