Free Rose for Emily Essays: The Death of Miss Emily Grierson

The Death of Emily Grierson in A Rose for Emily

A Rose for Emily The death of Miss Emily Grierson, was it "A Mystery", was this woman so mysterious that everybody in the community had to come visit her at death. The men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant - a combined gardener and cook - had seen in at least ten years (Faulkner 55). The house was described as being a big squarish house that was slowly decaying. It reminded the town of the seventies and was said to be "an eyesore among eyesores" (55).

The voice of the town identifies Emily as a "tradition a duty, and a care". The men and women of the town act differently to Miss Emily. A sort of hereditary obligation that triggers a memory. In 1894 when Colonel Sartoris had remitted her taxes, but generations change within the story, and their values differ. So the next generation, feeling no hereditary obligation attempts to collect these reportedly remitted taxes.

The encounter between the next generation with its more modern ideas and the aged Miss Emily gives the first visual details of the inside of the house and of her. Inside was a dusty, dank desolate realm dominated by the presence of the crayon portrait of her father. Miss Emily was described as a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare: perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough (55). In the confrontation between the generations when she speaks defiantly to community representatives, her taxes remain uncollected, and she triumphs.

This conquest of the modern generation reminds the narrator of an earlier battle when she had vanquished their fathers thirty years before about the smell. You're directed toward the battle language - "vanquished, horse and foot" and in recalling the early images of Miss Emily in her 30's.