Love is like no other emotion; it is both felt internally and shown externally. However, love persuades people to take extreme measures that they never would have taken without it. People are encouraged to protect and care for certain people by love. Everyday lives are taken because people are either protecting their loved ones from harm. On the other hand, a person can become jealous of their true love because they are spending social time with others and they love them so much that they kill them so they cannot be with anyone else. Potentially, this type of tragedy could happen in the real world. As in the short story “A Rose for Emily,” and the play Trifles, love is the cause of death for some people.
Love can either make a person whole or break his or her heart into diminutive pieces. In “A Rose for Emily,” Ms. Emily Grierson’s love for a man, Homer Baron, runs so deep in her veins she murders him. “The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love…had cuckolded him” (Faulkner 522). Ms. Emily loves the man so much that she does not want to him with other women, so she poisons him with arsenic. She loves Homer with all she has that when he dies she sleeps with his corpse until the day she dies. “Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indention of a head… we saw a long
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In Trifles, Minnie is married to a man who is controlling of everything she has in her life. John takes all the pure, sweet joyous memories for Minnie and destroys them. “But I don’t think a place’d be any cheerfuller for John Wright’s being in it” (Glaspell 1129). In “A Rose for Emily,” Ms. Emily’s love for Homer was pure until he has affairs with other women. All she wants in life is to have a man to love and cherish. Both Emily and Minnie loved the men they allegedly killed, but they had experienced different circumstances which led to the men’s
She is victimized also by a lover who would leave her, and by a passion, which would murder rather than let him go. "The incestuous image of the father and daughter that suggests the corrupt nature of the new south, is a Faulknerian concern."(Pierce 1362) . When love is gone, and the lover is killed, Miss Emily clings to the illusion of love.
When she finally found a male that showed some interest and emotion, she was attached to them. That’s where Homer Barron comes into the story. He would visit Emily and go for Sunday drives with her. When Homer told Emily that he must move on she found herself on the verge of loneliness once again. If Homer would leave it would be two men that have left her. When she realized that he was about to leave she poisoned him and would keep him forever.
Emily chooses a lover that resembles her father in many ways; Homer is big, strong, outspoken, and domineering. Initially, the townspeople are happy to know that Emily is dating Homer. "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer." When they realize that Emily is serious about him, they have a change of heart. "Miss Emily with her head high and Homer Barron with his hat cocked and a cigar in his teeth, reigns and whip in a yellow glove." Emily does not care about the people's reaction toward her affair with Homer. Emily's affair with a "day laborer" is an act of defiance, toward her father and perhaps, even the toward the townspeople. She wants to show everyone that she is in control of her life and will do as she pleases.
When Miss Emily finds somebody, though, it quickly pushes her to desperation. Her relationship with Homer Barron is a result of the life and death of her father. Ironically, he is a northern, roughneck Yankee, the exact opposite of any connection a Grierson would consider. Unsuspectingly, Emily is attracted to him, which is an oddity itself considering her lack of personality and his obvious charisma, for “whenever you [hear] a lot of laughing...Homer Barron [will] be in the center of the group” (560). He is also the first man to show an interest in her without her father alive to scare him off. The town is doubtful that the pair will remain together, but Emily's attachments are extreme, as seen when she would not surrender her father's body. The circumstance exhibits how her feelings are greatly intensified towards Homer. However, he is “not a marrying man” (561). When it appears as though he will leave her, she kills him with poison. While seemingly the opposite effect of love, killing Homer is quite in line with her obsession. If he is dead and she keeps Homer all to herself, Emily will never lose him; he can never leave her. Other such details that express her extreme attachments appear as she buys him clothes and toiletries before they are even considered married. There is also the revelation at the end of the story that she has been keeping his body for over thirty years and sleeping with it, clearly demonstrating her overt desperation
It is noted in the passage that “Homer himself had remarked--he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club--that he was not a marrying man” (4). First her father runs away men, then when a man finally comes around he is homosexual. One day Miss Emily goes to the druggist and says “I want arsenic” (3). It is after seeing this that the people in town started to think she was going to commit suicide (4). Homer barron leaves and returns after Miss Emily’s two cousins leave. The people in the town never see him again and they say “the one we believed would marry her … had deserted her. The body of Homer Barron was found on the bed with a piece of Miss Emily’s gray hair next to the body.
Some of the townspeople considered this as an inappropriate match for her and said, “That even grief could not cause a real lady to forget oblesse oblige.” Emily could not stand loosing anyone else and murdered Homer. She had missed so many chances of marrying anyone because of her father, so the only resort she had left was to kill homer and hang on to him forever before he would leave her life like everyone else. Once Emily had passed away, the townspeople went inside her house and saw that Homer’s body was there in the bed. Astonishingly they saw “the second pillow (had an) indention of a head… and saw a long strand of iron-gray hair.” Faulkner had described Emily’s hair as iron-gray so it could be assumed that Emily had been lying next to homer all this time.
Emily’s father, as well as the people of Jefferson, had always pressured Emily to marry. Her father was never able to find a match for her though, and he eventually passed. Emily then met Homer Barron, a contract worker for the town. They begin to see each other more often, and the townspeople are shocked that Emily would lower herself to being with a man of low class. This shows a bit of irony, in that there has always been pressure for Emily to marry, yet when she finally meets a man she loves, people think she is wrong in her decision. Another piece of irony in this relationship, comes after Emily dies. The body of Homer Barron is found in the attic of Emily’s home. Next to the body are signs that Emily had been sleeping next the corpse. It can be assumed that Emily did murder Homer with the arsenic she had purchased earlier in the story. It
Once it becomes apparent that Homer is not the marrying type and that he represents everything that she is against, Emily murders him with rat poison. It is revealed that Emily kept Homer’s corpse in her bed throughout the rest of her life, when he is found in the bed by the townspeople after she dies. Homer represented the more modern and industrialized South to come and Emily murdering him
Love is a powerful force that bonds people together through anything and everything. Love will make people do anything for the ones they love and sometimes can’t see the bigger picture. In Shakespeare’s tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, two young lovers in “fair Verona” from rival families come together in love. They instantly fall in love as soon as they lay eyes on each other and have to marry each other after only knowing each other for twelve hours. Romeo and Juliet have no idea what is to come due to their actions. Young love often results in a selfish isolation from the rest of the world which causes impulsive decisions that bring unintended consequences.
Homer entered her life by courting her publicly; by not wanting to marry her, he would have robbed her of her dignity and high-standing in the community. The ladies of the town felt that Miss Emily was not setting a good example for the "younger people" and their affair was becoming a "disgrace to the town" (75). The traditions, customs, and prejudices of the South doomed this affair from the beginning. Emily could not let Homer live, but she could not live without him. He was her only love. When she poisoned him with arsenic, she believed he would be hers forever.
Love can make people do crazy things, especially if it is not returned. In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” he introduces a character named Emily Grierson. Emily was a big component to the city which made the townspeople treat her like a celebrity.She was known to be a “monument” (part I: paragraph I) to the town because her father was a well-respected man. Her father was noted to control her life making it where she could not be with anyone. After his death, she had to become acclimated with the change in her life which actually never happened. Emily falls in love with a man, only for his love to not be returned which caused her to do something unbearable.Emily’s restriction from a loving relationship from a male, other than her
Love is said to be one of the most desired things in life. People long for it, search for it, and crave it. It can come in the form of partners, friends, or just simply family. To some, love is something of a necessity in life, where some would rather turn a cold shoulder to it. Love can be the mixture of passion, need, lust, loyalty, and blood. Love can be extraordinary and breathtaking. Love being held so high can also be dangerous. Love can drive people to numerous mad things with it dangerously so full of craze and passion.
After living so long as a victim of loneliness perpetrated by her father, Emily decides that she will be vindicated-she will have her man. She orders a toiletry set to be engraved with Homer's initials, purchases an outfit and a nightshirt for him, and buys the arsenic that is to seal his fate. When the townspeople enter her house for the first time in forty years, they find a bridal tomb: a tarnished toiletry set, a neatly pressed suit, and a rotting Homer Baron clad in the nightshirt wearing a "profound and fleshless grin" (87).
Although both were considered murderers ,they both had different motives that drove them to commit the act .Here ,Faulkner writes about Emily ,a women who was kept from having a significant other because of her father. When her father died she had no one left and desired to be loved. Faulkner writes, We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that.
The townspeople felt bad for Emily and thought the reason for her craziness was because her family had a history of it. Emily also waits three days before revealing the death of her father. Emily allows the dead body of her father to lie in her home rotting away. Another crazy action that Emily does is when she goes to the pharmacy to purchase “rat poison”. When Emily goes to buy the arsenic she doesn’t tell the druggist what exactly she is going to use it for, but stares him down making him feel uncomfortable. “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” (213). One of the most extreme actions Emily performs is being responsible for Homer Barron’s death. But, after fully reading the story the reader understands that Emily not only kills Homer but sleeps with his corpse. “What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay… Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair” (215) There the reader’s thought of Emily sleeping with the dead body and her psychotic tendencies is confirmed.