A Rose for Emily - Essay Example

William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” is nothing like you might expect when you first read the title.  The title makes you ready for something light and maybe romantic.  You may expect to read about the love a young man feels toward a young woman and his attempts to win her love.  You don’t expect to start reading about an old lady whom everyone is half-terrified of even though she’s rarely been seen outside of her large decaying house.  The narrator also doesn’t seem to be necessarily a young man, or even a single person.  It always speaks in terms of ‘we’ and is definitely of a much younger age group than Emily, who seems to be older than the town elders.  Finally, the plotline has almost nothing to do with a love story.

Faulkner introduces Miss Emily Grierson as a woman who has never been provided an opportunity to become comfortable or familiar with the world outside of her father’s old-world ideals.  This created a situation in which Miss Emily “got to be thirty and was still single” (437), forced to live in her maidenhood forever and lacking any connection to the rest of the world.  Her inability to relate to the real world outside her fantasy is seen when she refuses to acknowledge her father’s death.  This reaction was considered strange and unusual by the people of the town who are narrating the tale, but justified by the way in which she’d been treated by this man.  But this strangeness was forgotten when Emily started behaving like normal by dating Homer Barron and her retreat back into her house after he left seems understandable.  The final revelation that she had killed Homer Barron and then slept with the dead corpse for years is surprising, but not out of character.

The idea that this old lady slept with the decaying corpse of the lover she’d killed is really gruesome but makes a lot of sense at the same time.  It seems unnecessary to explain why the story seems very gruesome.  However, it also makes sense as the old people of the antebellum South continued to have trouble adjusting to the changing rules of society.  Miss Emily was forced to become an old maid because there weren’t any more families of the ‘old ways’ that were close enough to her family’s old social position.  By the time her father died, she was incapable of accepting any kind of change like a lot of people of the Old South were.  She tried to break the mold a little bit when she started dating Homer Barron.  He was a northerner and someone of a much lower social class than what Miss Emily had been raised to feel she was, but she had fun with him and began to try changing to fit in with the times.  But when her cousins drove Homer away, she snapped and decided she did not like the changes after all.  The only way she could keep Homer in her unchanging world was to kill him, but as time went on, she discovered that even this couldn’t stop time from changing things.