Rose for Emily and Emilys Life - Essay Example

? Rose for Emily Tradition in the antebellum South was the thing most admired, most sacred and most impossible to escape. Things were done the same way generation after generation, values were well honed, true and not to be tampered with, everyone knew their place in society and people relished the simple complexities of their lives. Enter Emily, the stone faced, strong willed ex-southern Belle who was determined to hold on to her traditions irregardless of the passage of time or the pull of the rest of the South to move forward in their history. The war was over, the South was recovering from a resounding defeat, trying to pull itself up by its bootstraps, trying to move forward, but old habits die hard, and time alone does not erase the traditions some hold so dear. There are several themes that weave their way through William Faulkner’s Rose for Emily, and one of the central ones is the fact that Emily is set in her ways, nostalgic for the past and will do anything to keep her life the way she has always known it. Miss Emily, as she was called, was a stubborn woman. When “garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names” (Part I) in the neighborhood, there was Emily’s house, standing stoic in the midst of change. So much did Emily relish the past, she didn’t repair her house, or add anything to it so as to make it an example for the town, instead it fell to ruin along with the buildings around it. Nothing was allowed to change, and that is how Emily liked it, the dust was allowed to keep accumulating, the old servant coming and going until at long last he was needed no more, the father, long since dead still ruled the house and it’s occupants, and no way was made for progress, not even for the mail to be delivered (Part IV), or taxes to be paid. (Part I). Miss Emily is portrayed as an outsider, someone who the other townsfolk could ridicule, in private, of course, and someone who because of her differences and oddities was much feared in the town. The Colonel was bullied into submission in regards to the unpaid taxes; the druggist into giving her arsenic without the required statements (Part III), the townsmen into getting rid of the smell on their own accord (Part II), and the Baptist minister vowing to never go back into the house after being forced by his womenfolk to do so (Part IV). Miss Emily was not going to change a thing, so the people in the town worked around her, partly because of the wrath they thought they would incur if they did not. Another theme flowing through the story is one of profound loss. Miss Emily lost her father, the one who dictated the tenets of her life and hovered over her, perhaps thinking he was protecting her. He was such a forced presence in her life, that she would not realize his death for three days, acting like all was right with the world; her life would go along like it always did. (Part II) Her sweetheart “the one we believed would marry her… had deserted her” (Part II) and after this, she shut herself off from the rest of the world, with only the servant coming and going, because, after all, servants never leave, not in the world Miss Emily was living in. Homer Barron was a Yankee, and to a Confederate supporter like Miss Emily, he’d be the enemy. Couple this with the fact that he was helping the town to change by being the foreman of the sidewalk paving, and it is difficult believe that it is he who Miss Emily chose to be her beau. The busybody townsfolk even wondered, with “do you suppose it’s really so?” (Part III) although they were happy for her in thinking she had found happiness, it is tempered with disbelief. It could be that Miss Emily wanted the aforementioned arsenic to actually kill rats in the house, but the thinking is that she murdered Homer in an attempt to keep him with her always. Or perhaps it was to stop him from changing her world, or some sort of revenge for the loss of the war. It isn’t clear if Emily and Homer ever actually got married, there was never a public wedding or any attempt to invite ‘friends’ into the house in any celebratory way, so we can either assume that they did get married or we can assume that something happened to Homer before any wedding could take place. Emily certainly could have been trying to make the townsfolk think she was about to be betrothed, the public knew she was buying a silver toilet set and an outfit for her ‘beloved’, but he could have already been deceased. Could this have all been an act? Surely for someone so housebound to suddenly be seen out and about buying items that would send tongues wagging could have been a calculated move on Emily’s part, and another example of the hold she had over her fellow citizens. Whatever the reason for murdering Homer were, Emily took great care in arranging Homer’s room and his belongings to reflect the fact that they were indeed married to anyone who would find it after her death. We are told that the room was “furnished as for a bridal” (Part V), perhaps they were indeed happy there once? No one would know at the time of her death, as the door to the ‘tomb’ was secured too tightly that they had to use violence to gain entry. It would seem that no one had been inside for many years, not even Miss Emily. We are led to believe that Emily had been in the room with Homer since she left an indented pillow and a strand of hair, but we can’t be sure how often or for how many years she did this, maybe she longed for something she could only get in death since other men had been elusive for her. Emily at the end of her life moving down to the first floor of her house may suggest that she had finally given over to Homer’s death, he had served his purpose and now all was settled, her current affairs had finally caught up with her life plan and she was happy to let him lie, enclosed in his room. Emily’s life wasn’t an easy one to live, she was ostracized by her peers and deemed a crazy lady because of her choices, all she wanted was for nothing to change in her world, and she wanted the values and traditions that she had been brought up with to endure in a world that was rapidly changing. Read More