Emily Grierson Tableau

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Miss Emily is hidden in the fragmented description of William Faulkner’s story. She left an ineffective impression to people even though there are only few appearances of her in William Faulkner’s story “A Rose for Emily” and those outside characterizations of Miss Emily highly indicate her inner status. She is a “tableau”, a topic that people living in Jefferson will talk about on street, a symbol of a fallen nobility, “dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse”.
Emily Grierson was born in a southern influential family, which was reputable in a southern town of Jefferson in Yoknopatawpha. When Emily was in younger age, she was the living in people’s illusion as William Faulkner wrote: “We had long thought of them as a tableau, …show more content…

When approaching middle age, Emily met and easily fell in love with Homer Barron, a worker came from Northern American to build the rail way. For Emily, love was the only reason to step out the “big, squarish frame house that had once been white” house. At first, she held her head high sitting on the chaise with Homer crossing the streets while people living in the town were all whispering “Poor Emily” and she even carried her pitiful dignity after he finally left her. As William Faulkner wrote: “She carried her head high enough even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson; as if it had wanted that touch of earthiness to reaffirm her imperviousness.” After that, people saw her again when she was buying poison. “She was over thirty then, still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye sockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper's face ought to look.” As the druggist asked her the purpose of buying arsenic, “Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up.” Dignity is for people to see. Miss Emily only longed to love, but if she could not have love, then she kept it with

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