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Analyzing The Death Of Emily In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

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Shortly after her father’s death, Emily doesn’t leave her house until she meets a man named Homer Barron. Miss Emily really liked this man and everyone in the town thought that they were going to get married one day. Unfortunately, their relationship only lasted a year and a half and Homer decides he wants to break up with Emily. Homer was considered a Yankee and wasn’t really interested in pursuing a life together with Emily. Emily, having already struggled through loneliness and isolation, decides that she wants to kill Homer. Faulkner shows the murder of Homer by stating, “A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening. And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time” (Faulkner …show more content…

Emily did this so she could still be close to Homer and to have company. Even though Homer is dead, Emily still chooses to sleep in the bed with him at night in her secluded bedroom. His body remains in Emily’s house for a long period of time, but nobody realizes he disappeared. After the death of Homer, a smell starts to make its way around Emily’s house. Unbothered by the smell, Emily continues to live through the smell, but the smell disturbs her neighbors. After Emily’s death, the people of the town discover Homer’s dead body lying in the bed upstairs. The neighbors found out that Emily was sleeping in the bed with Homers corpse after she killed him with poison. “Then we noticed that the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair” (Faulkner 487). Apparently, the smell had been bothering her neighbors for a very long time was Homer’s corpse rotting in Emily’s house. Faulkner uses Emily’s insane and horrific actions to symbolize isolation and loneliness. It is apparent that Emily did not want to be left alone in her house, so the only way for her to not to be lonely was by killing her true

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However, the sudden disappearance of Homer Barron under mysterious circumstances adds to the bizarre surrounding their relationship. The finding was made in response to complaints from the Grierson house's neighbors regarding an unpleasant stink emanating from it. The body of Miss Emily Grierson was found in a walnut bed inside her house, her head found underneath a moldy, yellow cushion that showed no sign of sunlight. Homer’s body was discovered after the two female cousins of Miss Emily were in the process of searching the house, they came across a room filled with mystery and they discovered the withering remains of Homer Barron, which seemed to have been kept throughout time. Since Miss Emily was long believed to be a recluse, many details of her life are unknown, especially those pertaining to her connection with Homer Barron and the events surrounding their deaths.

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Homer’s body was kept in that upstairs room for over fifty years. After losing her father, Emily did not want to lose the only other male figured she had in her life. Emily thought the only way of keeping him with her for the rest of her life was by death and keeping his

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Faulkner later reveals later in the story Miss Emily poisons Homer Barron, giving an explanation as to why Emily’s neighbors didn’t see Mr. Barron coming in and out of the home like he usually does. The neighbors then see his skeleton in the upstairs room following Miss Emily’s death. Second, Faulkner uses foreshadowing in “A Rose for Emily” when Miss Emily buys the arsenic, the townspeople think, “’[Emily] will kill herself’” (Faulkner 6). The townspeople then see Homer Barron and Miss Emily on a Sunday buggy ride with her head held high.

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She lived in an isolated world after her father’s death. Finally, she meets Homer; Homer was a man who knew what he wanted in life, and Miss Emily was not part of it. This drove Miss Emily to do the unthinkable, and she bought rat poison and killed Homer. Years passed, and no one knew that Miss Emily killed Homer and had him lying in the upstairs bed dead. It was intel her death that the towns people realized that miss Emily had become mentally ill with the death of her father and

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She knows that Homer will leave her and decides that even his dead body is enough to fulfill her. Even with Homer dead, Emily still loves him. Her feeling attracted to Homer’s dead body somewhat symbolizes her as a necrophiliac. Long after Emily’s death, the townspeople discover “that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head” and also “a long strand of irony-gray hair”(Faulkner, line 273). Even though there is no proof that Emily had a sexual relationship with Homer.

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To compare, Faulkner shares a slice of evidence as to why Emily has an uncontrollable obsession for the dead, “After her father 's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all.” (Faulkner) Given these points, her father becomes arrogant and isolates her from society, or anyone who is willing to take Miss Emily from him. When her father, the only man in the world who has loved her,

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“We remembered all the young men her father had driven away” (453). Miss Emily’s father drove away young men interested in her, not allowing her to have a love life and therefore a life outside of him. This controlling treatment of Miss Emily by Mr. Grierson coincides with Emily’s fight to control her love life with Homer. “Because Homer himself had remarked - he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club - that he was not a marrying man” (454). If it weren’t for the fact that Miss Emily murdered Homer, he would have left her, therefore she used the murder as a way to keep him close to

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The outcome of her inexperience of life and her dads predominance is what results in Emily’s powerlessness to be able to adapt to society and to have a typical and stable life. Her isolation was especially evident when her father died. After this death Emily became emotionally unstable. Her instability becomes so bad that she refuses to give up his dead body. Soon after his death Emily meets a man named Homer Barron, who, like Emily, was considered to be an outsider and becomes the subject of gossip in their town, but unlike Emily, when Homer came to town he had a charm and quickly became the center of attention.

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Emily held on to people in her life who were dead, just like the house held on to its old-fashioned looks. Secondly, the upstairs bedroom in the house represented death and mental illness. This is where Emily kept Homer’s dead body; it was like she kept him as a trophy. Emily did not want the man to leave her; she preserved him, showing she had a problem letting go of things and people around

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In the story, " A Rose for Emily", William Faulkner wrote about a dark and unforgettable person named Emily. Emily is an older lady and she struggles with necrophilia. Necrophilia is the attraction and sometimes sexual attraction towards dead bodies. This problem Emily has with necrophilia developed after her father died, and then progressed into her killing her boyfriend. This event left the town dumbfounded.

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In the upstairs bedroom, they discover Homer in a nightshirt with a toilet set and a man’s suit, all of which Emily had purchased along with the poison and carefully placed on display in a gruesome bridal shrine. Among these relics and beside the decaying Homer, is a second pillow with the indentation of a head and an iron-grey hair that belongs to the elderly

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. . Then they could hear the invisible ticking at the end of the gold chain . . . Her voice was dry and cold”, The figures of death emerged most frequently: her pallid complexion; her drowned, bloated body; her lost eyes; and the cold, dry voice. Not only had Emily been living with death literally in the form of Homer's corpse, although something essential had died inward her. Death prevails in her appearance, in her attitude, in her archaic shape calligraphy in faded ink and moreover in her decayed house.

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“A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening." but homer was never seen from or heard from again. Although the town had evidence that Miss Emily’s house was the last place Homer was seen, no one questioned Emily or even mentioned the fact that Homer was missing. The town took extreme measures to make sure that Emily’s reputation and name were

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The last paragraph tell us Emily has another personality is different from the one she show to all the town people. Since Emily’s father past away, he left her a house with full of memories when she was a little child. Nobody take care her after that day beside her butler, the day that she can not admit her father’s death. The town people felt sorry for her. Time past, she meet Homer, he came from the South (Old South) and she from the North.

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Emily is dead downstairs, and Homer’s skeleton is found in Emily’s bedroom upstairs room that has been locked for over 40 years and laying there is an indented pillow of a head and a long strand of gray hair. William Faulkner

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