Reacher paper about A rose for Emily - Essay Example

This world of the present with its absence of social propriety is strange and unrecognizable to Miss Emily, who has always been kept strictly within the bounds of Old South expectations. Miss Emily’s relationship with the town is therefore one of superior distance because of her social position and isolation as a result of her strangeness. To more fully understand this unique position she was placed in, it is helpful to understand the various cultures involved and how they each served to influence the other.

To demonstrate how Miss Emily was a woman trapped by her society, it is necessary to examine the Southern culture as well as the Northern culture before it is possible to compare the two and understand the differences in approaches taken by the characters in the story. Faulkner introduces Miss Emily Grierson as a woman who has been strictly contained within the boundaries of her father’s old Southern ideals. “None of the young men were quite good enough to Miss Emily and such. We 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 and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door” (437).

This created a situation in which Miss Emily “got to be thirty and was still single” (437). . “Attitudes about class shaped in southern England and in the border regions of Britain coupled with the appearance early on of race-based slavery would produce a class system that consigned blacks to the bottom and that paradoxically appeared to foster both the idea of equality for whites and large differences between upper and lower class whites in terms of power, privilege and wealth” (Beck, Frandsen & Randall, 2007: xxvii).

The Griersons become the town’s image of the Old South and, as a result, the town cannot think of Miss Emily in any way other than in her association with the values and traditions of these old ways, meaning she is not able to mingle with the common white people of the town and must always be seen to be upholding the ideals of the past for the rest of the community. After her father’s death, Miss Emily is seen to attempt to break out of the mold he has placed her in through her willingness to date Homer Barron and begin adopting more Northern ideals.

The North was founded and characterized by its mostly Puritan founders who had fled England with a vision of a more equal and less socially rigid and materially oriented society (Woodworth, 2000). Once the Civil War was over, the North had little to rebuild and plenty of factories ready to go to work, with increasing numbers of Southerners fleeing the poverty of the war-ravaged South to find work in the Northern cities. Thus, the North was characterized by growth, progress, energy and new ideas such as women’s suffrage.

When Miss Emily is seen in public following her father’s funeral, “her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church