Rose For Emily Conflicts

The day after her father's death, the women of the town went to give their condolences to Miss. Emily. To their surprise, Miss. Emily was "dressed as usual" and had "no trace of grief on her face (Perrine's 285)." Emily told the women that her father was not dead. Finally after three days of trying to hold on to her father, "she broke down, and they buried her father quickly (Perrine's 285)." The town's people tired to justify Miss. Emily's actions, by saying that she had nothing left, and was clinging to the one thing that had robbed her for so long they convinced themselves that she was not crazy.

Emily’s father considered themselves superior than others in town. . He believed none of the young boys were suitable for Emily, and always chased them away. Her

A reason that is presented as to why she has so little family other than her father is because he once had a falling out with some other relatives in Alabama, so the two sides refuse to come together. Even after Mr. Grierson dies, the Alabama kin “had not even been represented at the funeral.” (Act III) This once again showcases the loneliness of Miss Emily because she did not even have her own family to comfort her in a dark time. By being all alone, her unresolved feelings could have contributed to the abandonment issues. From the suggested abandonment issues, the reader can start to see that possibility of Emily taking matters in her own hand if given the chance. Besides just foreshadowing, her family history can also be argued to be the foundation of Miss Emily’s instability with her loneliness she needs to resolve being a result of their actions.

Miss Emily's relationship with her father is a key factor in the development of her isolation. As she is growing up, he will not let anybody around his daughter,

She, Emily, is physically living but not in the present; she is stuck living in her past. We first see this when her father dies, “She told them 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.” (Faulkner). This depicts that she is enamored of the dead which is why she resists in letting them bury her father. Emily did not want to kept denying her father’s death so she decided to hold onto him. By the description Faulkner gives, one may say Emily just did not know how to adapt to change. With that being said, she feared change so she did not want to let go because she was so dependent on her father and now he was gone. Once Emily passed on and was buried, people from her town go into her house and discover a decomposed corpse along with the strand of gray hair on the pillow next to what was formerly Homer Barron. Faulkner explains in detail yet again what was found, “…What was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt…Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head…we saw a long strand of iron-grey hair”. With this being said it is discovered that she, Emily, had been sleeping next to his dead body for years. These two examples are prime reasons one could conclude that she had an issue letting go of her past. Throughout the short story Emily seemed to not want to

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

Emily’s upbringing is plagued with difficulties. She is the first-born of a young mother and the eldest of five brothers and sisters. As a baby, she is

In “A Rose for Emily”, Charles Faulkner used a series of flashbacks and foreshadowing to tell Miss Emily’s story. Miss Emily is an interesting character, to say the least. In such a short story of her life, as told from the prospective of a townsperson, who had been nearly eighty as Miss Emily had been, in order to tell the story from their own perspective. Faulkner set up the story in Mississippi, in a world he knew of in his own lifetime. Inspired by a southern outlook that had been touched by the Civil War memory, the touch of what we would now look at as racism, gives the southern aroma of the period. It sets up Miss Emily’s southern belle status and social standing she had been born into, loner or not.

Miss Emily is also decaying, but it is subtle and internal--the awful smell that begins to permeate from her dwelling is a reflection of the withering woman within rotting. Perhaps most tragically, Miss Emily’s isolation is far from self-inflicted. Her blind devotion to the ones she loves; her father, her husband, her home; only serves to further condemn her actions. Her neighbors disregard toward her inabilty to let go of her father after his death, despite the delicacy of her being, caused for her madness to fester. “She told them her father was not dead.

Emily's father suppressed all of her inner desires. He kept her down to the point that she was not allowed to grow and change with the things around her. When “garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated…only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps” (Rose 217). Even when he died, she was still unable to get accustom to the changes around her. The traditions that her and her father continued to participate in even when others stopped, were also a way that her father kept her under his thumb. The people of the town helped in

Miss Emily could also have schizophrenia as a response to the demanding conditions in which she was living as a Southern woman from an aristocratic family. Miss Emily decompensated because she was unable to develop healthy and adaptive coping and defense mechanisms. When her father dies, Miss Emily avoids all contact with others and other psychotic symptoms become evident. Immediately after her father’s death, ladies from the town came to Miss Emily’s home to offer condolences and aid, and observe that she had “no trace of grief on her face” (pg. 775). Perhaps, Miss Emily insisted to the visitors that “her father was not dead” (pg. 775).

7) What is the significance of Miss Emily’s actions after the death of her father?

The very beinning of the story is extraordinary. It begins with the burial of Emily, the residents around her coffin did not feel anything, most of them were curious. There were neither friends nor relatives, nobody who was in mouring for her, only inquirers. The readers can ask, what kind of person was Miss Emily? Why the others did not feel sadness? Perhaps there is a bigger question: what was the reason that nobody went to her house more than ten years (except her slave, Tobe).

This reality sends panic and fear through her because now she has nowhere to turn and no one to tell her what to do, no one to command her life. Not only is she stricken with the loss of her father but now she is cut off to the outside world, because her only link has passed on. Emily immediately goes into a state of denial; to her, her father could not be dead, he was all that she had and she would not let him go.

William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily,” was written after the civil war and is often considered a piece of Southern Gothic literature (Davis). Southern Gothic is a subgenre of the gothic culture, which typically relies on the use of supernatural, unusual, and ironic events to drive the plot, all of which can be seen as a driving force throughout the story development of Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” (Davis). Through Faulkner’s ingenious short story, “A Rose for Emily,” he demonstrates the powerful yet internal conflict that comes with change, and the tension it creates between the realms of the past and the future. Upon further analysis, we come to see the story as a representation of the fallen south coupled with societal commentary and a depiction of the characters as spirits from the past stuck in a present time they struggle to come to peaceful terms with. We can see the powerful message Faulkner creates illustrated throughout his use of symbolism, his protagonist Emily, the community that surrounds her, and the incongruent timeline of events he depicts throughout the telling of his story.