A Rose For Emily Gothic Analysis

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A Rose for Emily: The Heart of Southern Gothic On the backs of slaves, generations of Southern planters lived and died in opulence. After the Civil War, the wealthy plantation families of the South began to crumble and decay during the period known as Reconstruction. In A Rose for Emily, the reader witnesses the fall from grace by Emily, the last daughter of the once wealthy Grierson family. The Griersons were a slaving family and part of the ruling class in the antebellum South. After the Civil War they failed to understand or acknowledge their loss of power, and ensured their own destruction by refusing to adapt. The patriarch of the family was a stern and brutal man who controlled his family with psychological violence, as opposed to the…show more content…
Grierson dies, Emily is now able to pursue the affection she has desired but never been able to obtain. She meets a northerner named Homer Barron, and they begin to date. This is seen as a blight of her pristine family name by the townspeople, as a proper Southern lady like Emily should never date a Northerner. Emily is so starved for love that she throws all convention out the window and pursues her first real happiness in life. She feels she finally has agency and control over her future. Homer, however, is known about town as not someone who is not a marrying man. And as abruptly as it began, Emily’s chance at happiness is extinguished. She is going to lose the only living person she has shared intimacy with. Emily is swift and decisive in what she must do at this point. If not in life, she will have Homer Barron in death. She deludes herself, just as she did with her father that she can be with Homer and be in control of their relationship despite him being…show more content…
The only time she had experienced control in a close relationship was when her father died, and she refused to admit he was dead. So when Homer Barron told her that he would not marry her and was leaving for good, there was only one way to be with him. That, for her was a much better alternative than to not being with him at all. Killing Homer was the natural extrapolation of the domineering care her father had exerted over her for her entire life until he passed. The parenting was not that of a madman, but that of a man who was like many others in the antebellum South, so many of them slavers and plantation owners. Emily’s necrophilia was borne into reality via the violent dissociation curated by those who bought and sold humans for a living. It is but a symptom of the diseased tradition of old Southern aristocracy, exhibited in an extreme exemplification of these values. When Emily Grierson died, she was not just a sick individual who died, but also the last true pillar of the Southern slaver class crumbling to dust. Surely racism itself was alive and well, and still is, but racism does not need slavers to
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