A Rose For Emily Loneliness Analysis

Death is an inevitable process of life, when a significant other is lost it can cause a traumatic disruption in the way someone continues living their life. When someone neglects change the feelings of being isolated, may be resulted by self-imposed thoughts of not belonging with society or by being rejected by others leading to the feeling of loneliness. Just as in the short story “A Rose for Emily”, in which William Faulkner conveys the struggle of loneliness and isolation from the inability to adapt and accept change. This is emphasized through the relationship Miss Emily had with her father, Homer Barron, and society itself.
Miss Emily’s father plays a vital role in the development of her character that leads to her loneliness and isolation.
This quote emphasizes her early isolation with the opposite sex and shows how her relations with her father played an early factor in her loneliness. This is vital since her relations with any other male besides her father are non-existent in which will play a significant role in the way she conducts her self when finding a lover. According to a study conducted on adolescent girls, it suggests that fathers’ over-protective relationships had significant negative correlation with daughters’ self-esteem that later effect them during their transition to adulthood. (Mori 46). This is important because it gives context about her damaged sexual self-esteem from her over-protective father and how it later effects her in a negative way. Until Miss Emily’s father’s death, she had never explored her sexuality due to her fathers governing influence. When Miss Emily’s father’s death occurred she refused to accept the facts, in the story it was said, “She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and
Her inability to adapt and accept the change society challenged her with, lead to her isolation from society and overall loneliness. This is accentuated through the use of the first person point of view from the narrator that shows her disconnection, and the various instances were she neglects to accept and conform to new change. The narrator representing the majority of Jefferson’s perspective of Miss Emily’s highlights the events that occurred throughout her life giving the impression of the assumptions society made regarding Miss Emily. She was quite disconnected from everyone yet they knew everything about her or they thought they did. At Miss Emily’s funeral, the narrator notes that, “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town.” (317). This quote reveals her status within the community as they portray her as an object of sort, degrading her existence as she herself had no real connection with the society of Jefferson. Since they consider as an object it shows how her self-imposed isolation resulted in her status within the society of Jefferson. This is interesting because from the narrator’s tale of Miss Emily’s events the people of Jefferson are portrayed to be obsessed with her. Their obsession with the relationship Miss Emily and Homer Barron is key to this