The Concealed Enemy In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily
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The Concealed Enemy
How people react to a certain situation determines how they will survive it. When attempting to overcome challenges, their own actions can cause destruction. As a result, people unknowingly become their own enemy. In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” it is evident that Miss Emily Grierson is her own antagonist through her decisions of locking herself away, committing murder, and letting herself go.
To begin, the story conveys how Miss Emily separates herself from the people in the community. Since there were so many “young men her father had driven away,” it can be inferred that Emily’s father was a very controlling man, making her feel locked away from the world (55). However, after the death of Mr. Grierson, Emily had the choice of escaping this isolation because her father was no longer there to hold her back. Instead, she “went out very little” (53). Because she made the choice of secluding herself from everyone even though her father’s presence was long gone, Emily was creating an enemy upon herself.…show more content… A short while after the death of her father, the townspeople unexpectedly discover Emily’s presence on Sunday afternoons along with Homer Barron. Since she had been kept away from men for so long, they assume that “she will marry him” (56) . Shortly after Emily’s mysterious purchase of arsenic, Homer Barron appears for the last time. At Miss Emily’s funeral some years later, there was curiosity of the room upstairs “which no one had seen in forty years” (58). Upon entering the room, they surprisingly discover that “the man himself [Homer Barron] lay in the bed” beside a “long strand of iron-gray hair” (58-59). Through the external conflict of Homer and Emily, it can be interpreted that Emily was working against herself by taking away the love that she longed