Use Of Poison And Lime In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

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William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” features anecdotes about Emily Grierson, a woman further labelled as an enigma due to the purchase of poison and the rotting scent from her house. These events introduce two substances in the fiction: poison and lime and the use of symbolism in poison and lime brings forth death as a tool of immortalization. Evidently, poison and lime are two significant substances in the short fiction. Poison is asked by Emily Grierson with an intention to kill, implied by her inability to give a reason for the requested arsenic and the disappearance of Homer Barron. Lime is used by the townspeople to remove the horrible smell at the Grierson’s house. Arsenic is a popular poison due to its tasteless, odorless and colorless properties; like death, arsenic fails to leave trails.…show more content…
In the town of Jefferson, Homer is viewed as a Yankee, a low class man whose physical description matches the physical attributes of a Black man, a slave. Homer is a Northerner, a day laborer not worthy of the Southern aristocratic Emily Grierson. It is revealed that his sudden disappearance and the poison bought are linked by his rotting corpse found at the end; Emily has accepted this rat, the outsider of the image of the South, and keep him, even after his death. Lime, other than its use to hide the smell of a decaying corpse, is used to delay the decomposition of body, aiding in preservation of the corpses. The sprinkling of lime on and around the decaying house by the town, despite how futile the effort, becomes a metaphor of their “preservation” of Emily, of her name and
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