William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

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In William Faulkner’s story “A Rose For Emily,” the narrator (and the rest of the town he inhabits) tries to explain and understand the increasingly mad mind of Miss Emily Grierson, an antebellum-aged spinner who isn’t too keen on changing with the times. Throughout her life, Emily exemplifies behaviors that are unusually narcissistic, stubborn, controlling, and even necrophilic. These traits were bred into her, and surfaced dramatically as a defensive mechanism when her culture and world begin to shift uncomfortably around her after the war. (Huljich) After the war, the first event to trigger Miss Emily’s slow descent into madness is the death of her father. “After her father’s death,” Faulkner writes, “she went out very little.” (Falkner…show more content…
Emily was royalty, a ruling aristocrat, and would be treated as such. Her presence was a blessing to those around her, she knew. As a result, she had no problem believing the lie she was told when it was said to her that the town owed her deceased father a great debt, and to repay it, they’d prefer to simply remit her taxes. This seemingly bizarre, honor-entrenched ruling was comforting and sensible to her antiquated mind. As Faulkner puts it, “Only a man of [the mayor at the time]’s generation and thought could have invented [the story],” (Faulkner 1) and Emily’s school of thought, conveniently, belonged to that generation as…show more content…
When the next generation of town officials, “with its more modern ideas,” (Faulkner 1) came into power, they attempted to bring her back down to earth with a tax notice or two. She sternly replied to every one of their advances with the same message “I have no taxes in Jefferson.” (Faulkner 2) They caved, and catered to her stubbornness - after all, Miss Emily, in a way that only fed her pride and inherently bred narcissism, had become a sort of duty, care, a “hereditary obligation” of the town, and they weren’t about to kick her out. With any luck, that would have been the last of Emily’s madness. With any luck, she would have returned to her urban hermit hut and shut the blinds on the rest of the world, preferring to imagine that her father was alive, her prior lover was still around, and that black folk still happily* toiled away under the supervision of their masters. But then she met Homer Barron. Homer Barron was an embodiment of all things new, modern, and unfamiliar, yet he still managed to gain entrance into Emily’s life through the power of love. Love, after all, is one of the most appealing things to the damaged, desperate mind, especially a mind like Emily’s, that’s been long thirsty for a lost feeling of control and
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