Examples Of Insanity In A Rose For Emily

A Rose for Emily: A Tragic Tale of Southern Stubbornness: Many stories capture time and a general feeling, but few do so as well as William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”. Stories regarding massive changes are a central point of the early 20th Century, as the world modernized, and industrialization became ubiquitous many people born in the mid part or earlier of the previous century felt left behind. The South especially felt this as the mid-19th century led to the humiliating era of Reconstruction and grappling with the reality that the antebellum era in the South was not the fairytale many thought it was. The short story “A Rose for Emily” is an allegory for the struggle of the past in the South and how to reconcile with it, and uses symbolism,

The possible insanity is referenced a few times, which is first referenced when Miss Emily believes she is talking to Colonel Sartoris, who had passed nearly a decade prior. There is another incident where Miss Emily refuses to let the body of her now deceased father leave the house. The insanity in Miss Emily’s character represents the insanity of the glorification of the antebellum South. In historical context, and even to this day, we see many of those who idolize the antebellum South, and Confederacy, are often the poorest residents of the Southern United States. The great irony of this is that most of the people idolizing this ear would have been poor farmers with a life expectancy of under 50 in a brutal backwards agrarian lifestyle. The beliefs that were held in the South in the Post Civil War Era also held back the South from the obvious development it needed, which was the industrialization that set the North decades ahead of the Southern States. The town, despite their weariness to what Miss Emily represents, a monument to an aristocracy which went before many of them were born, still wears the Confederate Uniforms to honor her at her