“A Rose For Emily” is an American short story by William Faulkner. It is set in the old south during the mid 1800s through the early 1900s. The story is about a woman who the people in town are not fond of. She seems to hold herself too highly, and she thinks that she is above everyone else. There are several themes throughout the story that are important to the people of today as well as back then. The first of those themes, and the most important, is that the past will always affect the present. Emily was constantly plagued by her past in this story. Her father had been a cruel, selfish man who wanted to keep her all to himself. According to the author, her father constantly wanted her at home to take care of him and the house. She never developed people skills and when it was time for her to find a husband she wasn’t prepared to make the decision. Once she did find a husband, it was probably a bad one that made her even more upset and led to her attitude during the story. The way her father treated her affected her all the way up until her death, which only serves to say that the past will always affect the present. This theme is still important today because people need to …show more content…
Emily’s father constantly kept her away from other people and the outside world. He only wanted her to take care of the house and him. She spent all of her life being repressed into what her father and society expected her to be. In this story Emily is sort of a hermit. She never leaves her house and does not handle visitors well. When she doesn’t pay her taxes, people go over to her home to talk to her about it. She is very cold and does not listen to what they have to say before she gets someone to show them out. When the bad smell starts to bother other people in the community, they don’t even go into her house to ask her about it. They just sneak over at night and sprinkle lime into the