Emily Grierson, also referred to Miss Emily in the text, is the main character of the short story "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner. Miss Emily is described as “a small, fat woman” who lived within a modernizing town full of people who saw her as a very cold, very distant woman who lived in her past. Throughout the story, she is referred to by her fellow townspeople as a tradition, a duty, and a care, and is portrayed as a very mean, stubborn old woman. However, as her story unfolds, Faulkner wants readers to sympathize with her because of the amount of loss that she's had to cope with throughout her life.
Character
Miss Emily is a “hereditary obligation upon the town” in which she lived. The townspeople find themselves looking after her after her father's death. Miss Emily is often misunderstood because she is portrayed as being incapable of being alone while also exhibiting a sense of authority over the town by disregarding the laws of which they live by. For example, not paying her taxes, not putting numbers on her mailbox for the federal mail service, not telling the druggist why she needed arsenic, and parading around town with Homer Barron. After purchasing the arsenic the townspeople thought she was going to kill herself, but being the misunderstood character that she is, Miss Emily has other plans. Miss Emily's physical appearance also displays her deeper character. The way that Faulkner portrays her external changes is parallel to how she internally changes. Miss Emily's actions cause readers to view her in a different connotation: a way in which is cautious and apprehensive as a result of her radical behaviors towards the end of her life. Readers will find themselves feeling sympathetic towards Miss Emily in the beginning but much less for her in the end of the story because of her sinister actions and questionable character. Miss Emily's character symbolizes the fall of the chivalric American South as the industrial, modern South begins to rise The description of the decay of both herself and the house slowing becoming “decaying eyesores” add to the imagery of things associated with Miss Emily. These things help show how the surroundings are advancing and Miss Emily, the symbol of the classic South, is stubborn and does not want change. Her character is described as “bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water…her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough”. The reoccurring reminder that Miss Emily is stuck in the past symbolizes that the South is not ready to industrialize and let go of its classic ways.
Miss Emily’s Father
Miss Emily had a father who sought to stifle Emily with his rules, regulations, and demands. This was apparent when Miss Emily was “thirty and … still single.” He believed that no one in town was good enough for Miss Emily and she had to be protected from dishonor and those beneath her. The town “had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her clutching a horsewhip.” Despite Mr. Grierson ruling a huge aspect of Emily's life, it was clear that Miss Emily truly loved and cared for him when he died. “The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house … as is … custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual … with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead.” Miss Emily proceeded to do this for three days until “she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.” This passion and love for her father contributed to the impact that loss had on her heart in the future.
Emily Grierson's Home
Emily lives in Jefferson, Mississippi. Her home "was a big, squarish frame house", and she did not have to pay taxes on it. Colonel Sartoris' decided to allow her to be waived from taxes after the death of her father. The home was described as one "that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies.” As the town began to modernize, “only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps- an eyesore among eyesores.” The house “smelled of dust and disuse—a close, dank smell,” and “was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture.” As the people in the community move around her house, “a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray.” At one point, the townspeople also complained of a mysterious odor coming from her house. They later on find that this odor was coming from the body of Homer Barron, whom was dead and decaying in the house. This home held the body of Homer in a room that was locked up for several years, which was not discovered until the death of Miss Emily, when people began to look through her home.
The Tragedies in Miss Emily’s Life
Death of Her Father
Many people found that when Miss Emily's father died, “at last they could pity Miss Emily.” “Being left alone, and a pauper” Miss Emily was now completely alone in this new and quite foreign society. She feared being alone because her father who was once always there was no longer and she didn't have a companion to fall back on after “all the young men her father had driven away.”
Disappearance of Her Fiancé
In that room, the longest kept secret, and the biggest surprise was then found: “The man himself lay in the bed.” The greatest shock, however, came not from the rotting body but from what they saw next to this decaying corpse. The people in Miss Emily's house “noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head.” After looking closely they then found “a long strand of iron-gray hair.” Miss Emily had loved this man, and loved having him in her life. In order to keep him permanently around, she bought poison from a druggist. Many of the people in the community assumed that this poison would be for Miss Emily to kill herself. The community then realized, after coming upon this secret, that this poison was to keep Homer in Miss Emily's life. One writer, Gary Kriewald, notes that Miss Emily's "strategic retreat into the sanctuary of her house after Homer Barron's 'desertion' of her is as defiant as it is self-protective, an act of passive resistance directed against a society."
Psychoanalysis of Miss Emily's Character
Emily's life was spent mostly in isolation, not only physically but emotionally. Her father's strict, authoritarian parenting style did not let her socialize to meet friends or possible love interests. Once her father passed, Emily felt the loneliest she was in her life, since her father was all she had. She was not close with her townspeople, and constantly was not approved of. When Homer went missing, she once again felt that loneliness. It is suggested that Miss Emily's loneliness caused her to become a stubborn person, which would explain her constant refusal to pay taxes on her home in Jefferson. It is evident that Miss Emily suffered psychological trauma from her relationship with her father, which suggests why she acted the way she did later on in her life, keeping the body of her fiancé after he died. It is possible that Miss Emily suffered from Necrophilia, since she felt so connected still to Homer; enough to keep his body for several years after death. She wanted to be happy with Homer for the rest of her life, could not handle the rejection, so she killed him with poison, and kept his body in her home. Her refusal to give up her father's body for days after his death, then keeping Homer's for years suggests that she feels that she is too stubborn to let go, and that she feels that she can still have a connection with them even after death.
