Miss Emily In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

Does coming from an important and well-off family really mean you’re going to be successful and live up to the family name? In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” we discover that may not always be the case. We also see that Miss Emily may have been traumatized at a young age through what we learn about her in the story. Emily’s actions now may be the result of conflicts with her father in her childhood. She pushes people away and how she handles death, both show that she is stuck in the past. As seen through her aversion of change, her lack of social interest, and her inability to cope with death, Miss Emily is an unfortunate product of her unspoken childhood experiences.
Throughout the story, there are many instances when Miss Emily and her father go against the status quo. As the Grierson’s neighbors choose to relocate, Emily and Mr. Grierson remain the only “lightsome style [house] of the seventies” (52). Gas pumps and cotton wagons take over the once “most select street” (52) of Jefferson, but the Grierson’s nontaxable house remains. Because of a promise made by Colonel

Early in the story when her father dies, she leaves his corpse at the dinner table for three days and repeatedly tells the ladies of the town, the sheriff, and the doctor, that “her father was not dead” (55). Eventually, Emily gave in and let them take her father’s body to buried. Although the townspeople didn’t think she was crazy then, they ultimately realized that something was wrong with poor Miss Emily. At the end of the story when Miss Emily has passed on, the townspeople and relatives clear out the house with the exception of an upstairs room that had been sealed for some forty-odd years. Emily’s cousins had the door knocked in and inside they found a shocking discovery. Homer Barron’s skeleton lay in the fetal position in the bed, and on the pillow next to him was a “long strand of iron-grey hair”