Can you imagine living a life alone, never being allowed the chance of love? While being isolated from others, you can not experience the world. Miss Emily, a recluse in William Faulkner’s story, never had a great relationship with the town. She was always alone and isolated, much like her house that sat apart from others. William Faulkner, author of “A Rose For Emily”, demonstrates the effects of isolation. Miss Emily had lost her mind, she hardly left her home, lost all of those whom she loved, and was always alone with nobody to keep her company.
Miss Emily's relationship with the town was damaged and unable to be fixed. She had connections to older generations that live in her town but, the new generation has not learned to like her as she hardly left her house, rarely making appearances. Miss Emily was not afraid to speak her mind when approached, even to the authority figures. “‘See Colonel Sartoris. I have no taxes in Jefferson!”’ (Faulkner 1). Miss Emily was very independent and was not a force to be messed with from being alone for so long,
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She did that for three days,” (Faulkner 2) After Miss Emily finally broke down they then buried the corpse quickly but did not yet question her sanity. They believed she had to keep his corpse because he was all she ever had, as her father would scare any any men that she would ever meet with causing her to be alone, with her father being the only one to be in her life, without her father there she was completely and utterly alone, he was the last one she had left to hold on to. The townspeople would talk about Miss Emily quite often, mostly repeating the phrase, “‘Poor Emily”’, (Faulkner 3). The townspeople were referring to the fact that she had fallen in love with a man from the North after her finally being allowed the freedom of love, that was previously denied, after her father's
William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is a story that uses flashbacks to foreshadow a surprise ending. The story begins with the death of a prominent old woman, Emily, and finishes with the startling discovery that Emily as been sleeping with the corpse of her lover, whom she murdered, for the past forty years. The middle of the story is told in flashbacks by a narrator who seems to represent the collective memory of an entire town. Within these flashbacks, which jump in time from ten years past to forty years past, are hidden clues which prepare the reader for the unexpected ending, such as hints of Emily's insanity, her odd behavior concerning the deaths of loved ones, and the evidence that the murder took place.
Emily was drove crazy by others expectations, and her loneliness. ““A Rose for Emily,” a story of love and obsession, love, and death, is undoubtedly the most famous one among Faulkner’s more than one hundred short stories. It tells of a tragedy of a screwy southern lady Emily Grierson who is driven from stem to stern by the worldly tradition and desires to possess her lover by poisoning him and keeping his corpse in her isolated house.” (Yang, A Road to Destruction and Self Destruction: The Same Fate of Emily and Elly, Proquest) When she was young her father chased away any would be suitors. He was convinced no one was good enough for her. Emily ended up unmarried. She had come to depend on her father. When he finally died, ...
Because of the way she is raised, Miss Emily sees herself as "high society," and looks down upon those who she thinks of as commoners. This places her under the harsh scrutiny of the townspeople who keep her under a watchful eye. The only others who see Miss Emily as she sees herself are the Mayor Colonel Sartoris, and Judge Stevens.
Isolation dominated the seventy four-year life of Emily Grierson in 'A Rose for Emily' by William Faulkner. Never in this story did she live in harmony with anyone one short time. Even when she died at age seventy four, people in Jefferson town rushed into her house not because they wanted to say goodbye forever to her, but because they wanted to discover her mystic house. Many people agreed that it was the aristocratic status that made Emily?s life so isolated. And if Emily weren?t born in the aristocratic Grierson, her life couldn?t be alienated far away from the others around her.
The protagonist of this story is Miss Emily Grierson, an old maid spinster without family who becomes a “tradition” and a “sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (Faulkner 299). The story begins with the death of Miss Emily, so I will rearrange my analysis of the character to begin with what we first know about Miss Emily.
The end of the American Civil War also signified the end of the Old South's era of greatness. The south is depicted in many stories of Faulkner as a region where "the reality and myth are difficult to separate"(Unger 54). Many southern people refused to accept that their conditions had changed, even though they had bitterly realized that the old days were gone. They kept and cherished the precious memories, and in a fatal and pathetic attempt to maintain the glory of the South people tend to cling to old values, customs, and the faded, but glorified representatives of the past. Miss Emily was one of those selected representatives. The people in the southern small-town, where the story takes place, put her on a throne instead of throwing her in jail where she actually belonged. The folks in town, unconsciously manipulated by their strong nostalgia, became the accomplices of the obscene and insane Miss Emily.
Setting is place and time, and often provides more than a mere backdrop for the action of a story. William Faulkner uses this device in his complex short story "A Rose for Emily" to give insight into the lonely world of Miss Emily Grierson.
William Faulkner takes us back in time with his Gothic short story known as, “A Rose for Emily.” Almost every sentence gives a new piece of evidence to lead the reader to the overall theme of death, isolation, and trying to maintain traditions. The reader can conclude the theme through William Faulkner’s use of literary devices such as his choice of characters, the setting, the diction, the tone, and the plot line.
After her father’s death, the old town government officials exempted Miss Emily from paying taxes, but when new officials came in, they wanted her to pay. “Colonel Sartoris invented an involved tale to the effect that Miss Emily’s father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying.” She did not know any different and did not want things to change, but everyone else pictured it as her being better than them. “I have no taxes in Jefferson,” is what she repeatedly told the officials that came to talk to
This story takes place throughout the Reconstruction Era from the late 1800’s to the early 1900’s in Jefferson, Mississippi. Emily was raised in the period before the Civil War. Her father who was the only person in her life with the exception of a former lover who soon left her as well raised her. The plot of this story is mainly about Miss Emily’s attitude about change. While growing up Emily was raised in a comfortable environment because her father possessed a lot of money. Considering that her father was a very wealthy person who occasionally loaned the town money Emily had everything a child could want. This caused Emily to be very spoiled and selfish and she never knew the value of a dollar until her father left her with nothing but a run down home that started to decay after a period of time. She began to ignore the surrounding decay of the house and her appearance. These lies continued as she denied her father’s death, refused to pay taxes, ignores town gossip about her being a fallen woman, and does not tell the druggist why she purchased rat poison. Her life, like the decaying house suffered from a lack of genuine love and care. Her physical appearance is brought about by years of neglect.
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
away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had
While she is still alive, the townspeople have a certain respect for her because she has been there so long; they do not feel a need to change what has always been. Nevertheless, once she dies what is left of her, such as her house, is a disgrace to the town. “Only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores. Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (Faulkner, “A Rose for Emily” 119). In the same way, the people of the South followed tradition in their lifestyles.
Emily was kept confined from all that surrounded her. Her father had given the town folks a large amount of money which caused Emily and her father to feel superior to others. “Grierson’s held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (Faulkner). Emily’s attitude had developed as a stuck-up and stubborn girl and her father was to blame for this attitude. Emily was a normal girl with aspirations of growing up and finding a mate that she could soon marry and start a family, but this was all impossible because of her father. The father believed that, “none of the younger man were quite good enough for Miss Emily,” because of this Miss Emily was alone. Emily was in her father’s shadow for a very long time. She lived her li...