Does Miss Emily Drive Insane

In the story, A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner, main character Miss Emily lives in just a typical life, but usually gets eyed out from the townspeople. She is the only child whose father is a selfish man keeping Miss Emily from getting out of the house. Not only is she being kept from leaving the house but her father is holding back her love life with his strict rules. Her father would keep a gigantic horsewhip around him every time Miss Emily ever disobeys him or even when she brings home someone to the house. Because of her father’s strict ways, this routine had been going on for years up until her father’s death and right when she was in her thirties. I believed that since she was being prevented from loving someone so many times that

What caused her to go crazy to the point where she decides to kill Homer and even sleep with his dead body? I believe that first sign of her insanity was right when her father died. “The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom. Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead” (Pg. 649). At this point, when her father died she was denying that he was dead. She didn’t want to give in his body. Her father was the only person she ever loved even if her father was very strict because her father didn’t let her love anyone. She was stuck with him and knew that her father cared so much for her. The crazy part about all of this is that she kept her father’s body for days and that even it took the law forcers to bust in and grab the body out. This pretty clearly shows that she was going insane. Another piece of evidence that triggered Emily’s insanity was the amount of years she had to go through with her father’s strict rules of not bringing a man into her life. Because of her father, she would get whipped by a huge horsewhip every time she tried to get into a relationship. She had to go through this for years that once her father died, she was already old. No man in the town wanted to get into a relationship with her because they were afraid of her. This soon led her to buy poison, “But the law requires you to tell what you are going to use it for. Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up”(Pg. 651). This clearly shows that she was going insane, not specifying what she was going to use the “best” poison for. Which entirely leads to the last piece of evidence which is right when the townspeople broke into her house and found the deceased body of Homer. What gets more insane was