Emily Grierson Mental Illness

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Emily Grierson is the main character in Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily.” To anyone who views her character, she is most likely look to upon being a very introverted and strange character. Throughout “A Rose for Emily”, Emily’s behavior seems to become more and more strange as the story moves along. Readers are left pondering the bizarre fact that Emily has spent years existing in a home with the cadaver of Homer Barron. An important quote from Faulkner’s story exclaimed that the citizens of the town “did not say she was crazy” at initially (Faulkner 2162). Emily was never seen or treated psychologically by any sort of medical official because she never left the house. As a reader looks back and rereads the story, details of an apparent mental illness are present. It could be possible that Emily was suffering from this mental illness because of southern demands of a woman within a very wealthy family…show more content…
Emily resided from a very formal and aristocratic southern family, she was expected to act a certain way and give off a certain impression of others around her. She was viewed to withhold a “hereditary obligation” (Faulkner 2160) to carry along generations of family expectations. Emily’s father carried these transitions along to her and was expecting of her to carry the family traditions along with her, her the father had “thwarted her woman’s life so many times” (Faulkner 2164). An example of this was how her father had practically chased away every man that came into her strict life because he didn’t see them as being good enough for her. This became detrimental to her marital status in her future
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