Miss Emily In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” chronicles the life of a southern woman. Without looking much into the story, one might just assume that Miss Emily is a mad woman, killing her lover that plans to leave her. However, if one looks farther into the story, the reader can see that Miss Emily is a very troubled woman. Throughout the story, Mrs. Emily refuses to acknowledge or deal with any kind of change, even that as simple as getting a mail box; her refusal to change is due impart to her overbearing father who sheltered her throughout her life and can also be seen as a symbolic representation of the South and its refusal to change following the Civil War. Right off the bat, the reader can see that Miss Emily does not deal well

The rest of the people in town, seeing as they were from the South, didn’t think it was proper for a woman to be dating a working, Northern man who “himself had remarked that he was not a marrying man.” Homer Baron is representative of “the North and the new generation in Jefferson” (Vartany). Homer and Miss Emily often road around town is his carriage, which the townspeople considered gaudy; “this symbolizes the difference between the town’s old fashioned attitudes (reflective of the Old South) and Homer’s more modern one (reflective of the emerging New South)” (Mosby). Knowing that Homer was eventually going to leave her and not marry her, Miss Emily bought arsenic and poisoned Homer. At the end of the story after the passing of Miss Emily, her cousins go into a room and find a decaying body of a man on the bed, “noticing that in the second pillow was the indention of a head... and a long stand of iron-gray hair.” “The location of the hair was well as its color and length” is indicative of Miss Emily’s interaction with Homer even after his death, “again indicating he refusal to acknowledge death and change” (Mosby). She couldn’t bear the thought of being alone again, so she instead took the life of her