SETTING AND PLOT

Setting and Plot

A Rose for Emily

A Rose for Emily

Personal Setting

Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names in the cemetery asleep beneath the yews, where they lay among the graves aligned and anonymous soldiers of the Union and Confederate dead on the battlefield of Jefferson. During her lifetime, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty and a concern, a sort of hereditary hanging over the city since that day when, in 1894, Colonel Sartoris, the mayor - who launched the edict forbidding Black appeared in the streets without an apron -, had exempted from paying taxes, exemption, which dated from the death of his father and extended to perpetuity. Not that Miss Emily would have been one to accept that we made on her charity. Colonel Sartoris invented the complicated history of a loan of money the father of Miss Emily would have made the city and the city, for business reasons, preferred to pay this way. There was a man of the generation and the ideas of Colonel Sartoris had been able to imagine such a thing, and there was a woman for having been thought.

When the next generation, with its modern ideas, in turn, gave mayors and aldermen, this arrangement raised some discontent. On January 1 they sent him a tax form. February arrived without bringing any response. They sent an official letter, asking her to pass, when she saw fit, the sheriff's office.

The following week, the mayor wrote her himself, offering to go to her or send for the drive. In response he received a note which, on paper of an archaic form, and a tiny handwriting in ink past, she said she never went out at all. The tax demand was included, without comment.

Summary of the Plot

In her seventy-fourth year is dying in the city of Jefferson in the State of Mississippi, the unmarried Miss Emily Grierson. Until her death she lived the last scion of a proud and distinguished family alone with a black servant, an old-fashioned house. It is located in an area that was once the best in town, but is now dilapidated.

Emily's time of youth was spent in her father's strict behavior, which made sure that any lover remained at a distance. It therefore has no long lovers. When she gets to the thirties, her father died, and shortly thereafter, the immigrant from the North foreman Homer Barron for lovers of Emily, but Homer proves to be less loyal.

One day Emily goes to the pharmacy and bought arsenic. After that neighbors complain about smells of decay emanating from Emily's house. It is believed that Emily had poisoned rats. But since no one dares to tell her that it smells bad to them, a few men enter on her land secretly and surreptitiously spread lime in the dark. The smell disappears, and Homer is seen no more (Strandberg, 1999, pp. 1000-1001).

Emily goes out less, for a time she moved to girl's lessons in china painting, but eventually no one wants to learn, and Emily is seen no ...