Mental Illness In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is a short story narrated in first person by a townsperson of the small town of Jefferson, Mississippi. The narrator spends nearly the entirety of the story giving his or her account of the story’s protagonist, Emily Grierson. What the audience learns about Grierson from the narrator can be assumed as a general feeling throughout the town, with objectivity likely taking a backseat to gossip. However, Emily’s tendencies as a character require thorough examination to determine her true personality. For one, she refuses to accept death as a natural part of life. Multiple characters she is very close to throughout the story pass away, and her denial of the tragedy stays consistent throughout each one. She also

In Section I, the audience learns that when Emily was young, her father died. Because her father “had loaned money to the town”, Emily was free of paying taxes under Colonel Sartoris. However, the next generation of mayors did not give Emily this freewill, and required her to pay the taxes. “February came, and there was no reply,” Faulkner writes (796). This inability to pay taxes demanded by the town implies a sense of narcissism, one of many symptoms of a personality disorder. In Section II, we learn of Emily’s inability to accept death as a natural part of the life cycle, which is a major factor that leads to her perceived illness. The day after the death of Emily’s father, people of the town greet her at her door to offer her their condolences. Faulkner states, “She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body” (Faulkner 796). Emily’s refusal to believe in death despite the entirety of the town recognizing the truth is another red flag pointing towards a mental separation from reality. In Section III, Emily commences an affair with a man of lower-social status named Homer, whom she ends up poisoning and killing for no particular reason. The story concludes with a townsperson walking into Emily’s old abandoned house, and seeing Homer’s dead body and Emily’s hair remains on a pillow, implying that Emily had been sleeping next to Homer long after his death. In terms of psychopathic tendencies, this action of Emily’s is the most prominent example to infer that she suffers of a mental illness. However, everything she does throughout the story definitely crosses a morally grey line that a normal person would not come anywhere