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Isolation In A Rose For Emily And Miss Brill

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Between William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” and Katherine Mansfield’s “Miss Brill”, both stories make to have an interesting set-up for comparison despite seeming very different. From isolation to the denial both characters face, these things are of similar context amid the two as well as the differences in each of their social involvement.

In “A Rose for Emily”, the story focuses on the death and previous life of a woman named Emily Grierson. Emily is perceived as solitary person, as stated in the beginning with the town's reaction to her death - “... the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant -a combined gardener and cook- had seen in …show more content…

"She wore an ermine toque and was flirting with disrespected when he “…shook his head, lighted a cigarette, slowly breathed a great deep puff into her face, and even while she was still talking and laughing, flicked the match away and walked on." " Another scenario in where Miss Brill and Miss Emily instead differ is in their involvement in the community. In "A Rose for Emily", after the death of her father, Grierson begins to shun society. Not surrounded by loving people and losing the only man she had, Emily had been in a constant state of denial. "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." Her denial was a cycle as was her fear that someone else would leave her. From her father's passing, fiance leaving, suitors gone and the paranoia her lover, Homer Barron, would abandon her as well, Miss Emily had a hard time accepting rejection and abandonment with the lack of love in her life. Miss Brill had her own denial but her involvement in the community contrasts sharply with Emily. Miss Brill

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