ROSE FOR EMILY

Rose for Emily

Rose for Emily

Introduction

Emily is the classic outsider, controlling and limiting the town's access to her true identity by remaining hidden. The house that shields Emily from the world suggests the mind of the woman who inhabits it: shuttered, dusty, and dark. The object of the town's intense scrutiny, Emily is a muted and mysterious figure. On one level, she exhibits the qualities of the stereotypical southern “eccentric”: unbalanced, excessively tragic, and subject to bizarre behavior. Emily enforces her own sense of law and conduct, such as when she refuses to pay her taxes or state her purpose for buying the poison. Emily also skirts the law when she refuses to have numbers attached to her house when federal mail service is instituted. Her dismissal of the law eventually takes on more sinister consequences, as she takes the life of the man whom she refuses to allow abandoning her (Morton, 2005) (Morton, 2005).

Scene Analysis for Rose for Emily

The narrator portrays Emily as a monument, but at the same time she is pitied and often irritating, demanding to live life on her own terms. The subject of gossip and speculation, the townspeople cluck their tongues at the fact that she accepts Homer's attentions with no firm wedding plans. After she purchases the poison, the townspeople conclude that she will kill herself. Emily's instabilities, however, lead her in a different direction, and the final scene of the story suggests that she is a necrophiliac. Necrophilia typically means a sexual attraction to dead bodies. In a broader sense, the term also describes a powerful desire to control another, usually in the context of a romantic or deeply personal relationship. Necrophiliacs tend to be so controlling in their relationships that they ultimately resort to bonding with unresponsive entities with no resistance or will—in other words, with dead bodies. Mr. Grierson controlled Emily, and after his death, Emily temporarily controls him by refusing to give up his dead body. She ultimately transfers this control to Homer, the object of her affection. Unable to find a traditional way to express her desire to possess Homer, Emily takes his life to achieve total power over him (Morton, 2005) (Morton, 2005).

Most good stories start with a fundamental list of ingredients: the initial situation, conflict, complication, climax, suspense, denouement, and conclusion. Great writers sometimes shake up the recipe and add some spice. As we discuss in "Symbols, Imagery, Allegory," Faulkner might be playing on the Benjamin Franklin quote, "In this world nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes," in this initial scene. We move from a huge funeral attended by everybody in town, to this strange little story about taxes. The taxes seem tame compared to what comes next. In Section II, we learn lots of bizarre stuff about Miss Emily: when her father died she refused to believe it (or let on she believed it) for four days (counting the day he died); the summer after her father died, she finally ...