How Does A Rose For Emily Grierson Change

Characterization of Emily Grierson in “A Rose for Emily” William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a profound short story about Emily Grierson, who is a woman in a southern county after the Civil War that grew up under her father’s strict social dictatorship. The story, narrated by a member of the community, follows Emily Grierson as she copes with the death of her father and the abandonment of her husband. Later leading to the crude conclusion of Emily poisons her fiancé’ and preserving his rotten body in the bed in which she sleeps. It was Emily’s personality traits that formed her to kill and preserve her fiancé in order for her to keep a man in her life. Emily Grierson’s various emotions and actions come from her unwillingness to change and insanity. Throughout the story, Emily Grierson shows multiple signs of not changing with the community. “A Rose for Emily” states that when the county receives free postal service, “Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal

Growing up with only her father, she was under the strict rule of him having complete control over her. He raised her in a household that “…believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were” (Faulkner 41). Emily’s insanity towards the men in her life started with her father decisions of “none of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such” (Faulkner 41). After her father’s death, her form of coping showed the initial signs of her insanity in which she “dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead” (Faulkner 42). With Emily’s insanity of obtaining control after the death of her father and the murder of her fiancé, Paul Harris proposes that “death has ‘cuckolded’ Homer. In other words, Emily is not a necrophiliac who sleeps with Homer Barron’s dead body, but one who embraces death”