William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

Throughout history, women have frequently lived within the standards of an oppressive society. However, what happens when the oppression becomes so unbearable that drives a woman mad? This is the case for Miss Emily. Therefore, this subjection to burdensome and unjust impositions or restrains have caused her to be responsible for incomprehensible behavior. In the story A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner vividly illustrates the short story of a woman who has been isolated from the community after her father’s death. In order to portray Miss Emily’s melancholy through the story, Faulkner used stylistic devices that characterize gothic fiction such as constant decay, eternal seclusion, and strong emotions.

William Faulkner begins by providing

Miss Emily’s father had secluded his daughter from society, so after his death, Emily faced the hardships of being alone. In chapter two, the author uses imagery to depict how Miss Emily’s father is a great imposing figure in her life as he states “Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground.” Additionally, his father had made it impossible for her to leave this state of confinement when “we remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left.” Furthermore, there were times that Miss Emily would not appear in the streets for over six consecutive months, only making few appearances through the window. All the loneliness and isolation from the community -constantly being inside the locked house and not being around people-, creates a complexity of Miss Emily’s character that does not portray the complete side of the story, instead it only gives what the people around her are able to

After her father’s death, Miss Emily was in denial for three days before finally breaking down and being able to bury him. Consequently, this dreadful event led to Miss Emily resorting to any means in order to find someone to fill that emptiness in her life. As in other gothic literature pieces, the protagonist had an overmastering feeling that led her to defy her own common sense in order to pursue her goals. As a matter of fact, there was a time in which the talk of the town was that Miss Emily had found a man, “the one we believed would marry her.” Since it was known that Homer Barron, Miss Emily’s sweetheart, would eventually leave her due to his sexual preferences, Miss Emily decided to do something about it. With this intention, one evening, he was admitted to the kitchen and poisoned with arsenic. Accordingly, a room that had been closed for forty years was opened after Miss Emily’s death, in which they found Homer Barron dead, laying in bed with iron-gray hair by his side. “The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him,” illustrates that his death was not caused by hate, instead it was a passion so strong that it became deadly. Finally, the title of the story itself, A Rose for Emily, demonstrates the strong