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A Rose for Emily 17

Decent Essays

A Rose for Emily
A Rose for Emily is a story that deals with a women’s sentimental illness caused by isolation. Emily Grierson looses her moral compass, and her trace of reality, her inability to be loved, her desire to be considered as someone important, was never accomplished. The author shows plans of development; using characterization, symbolism, and setting. This is a very symbolic and animatic story. William Faulkner points out his views of empathy towards Emily in the story when he illustrates that Emily had an emotional abusive upbringing with her father. In addition, we see the historical fiction and setting which reflects the racist times that was given in the past. A Rose of Emily is also a symbol of a gothic, and horror …show more content…

Emily’s house symbolizes her state of mind, it was once nice, but then turns into the town most “stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores (140)” The breakage and liberation of her freedom held much imagery through her hair cut. The poison represented revenge against Homer. The story shows archetypes of her emotional state of denial for example, “she told them that her father was not dead (143)”. She denies her father’s death, when clearly doctors and ministers were trying to persuade her to that she needed to dispose of his body. This is a great symbolism of her emotional attachment to her father, and how it affected her state of mind.
The empathy and sorrow sets the atmosphere of Emily’s fallen monument, her emotional breakage into sadness. The setting of “1894” gives the historical fiction and the enveloping action of the racist times in America, “No Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron (140)” At this period America still had a racial mind set, and where the rich were treated differently than the poor. We see the atmosphere of her once upon a time pretty house, described as “squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spices and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies (140).” In addition, this quote also demonstrates local color fiction of the rural areas in southern America, and Faulkner’s regionalism in these

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