Essay On Miss Emily In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

Who is Miss Emily? In the short story "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner, Miss Emily was a classic outsider who controlled and limited the town to access her true identity and she did this by remaining hidden and away from everyone. She was a very muted and mysterious person. Emily lived a very hard life being under control of her father until his death. The townspeople of Jefferson were also people who kept their eyes out for her as well. Emily was the type of person who was set in her ways and she did not want to listen to what others had to say. If Emily was raised in a different type of environment where her parents loved, adored and cared for her, her life would have been much different than it turned out to be. When reading the story “A Rose for Emily,” you begin to feel sorry for her because of the type of life she lived. Emily was kept away from male callers because her father didn’t want her to have any, she is also kept away from the towns people. Emily’s father was a very dominant and controlling type of man who could make you feel like he was very brutal, even toward his own daughter.
She was appointed in a way of life that she would never outgrow until the death of herself. After Emily’s father passed away she went into denial because she did not want to believe that the only man she loved was not there anymore. She did not want to believe that her father passed away. Many people in the town especially the women heard the news of her father and wanted to offer Emily their condolences but she would just deny that her father was no longer there anymore. The towns people worried about Emily and would beg her to let them take her father’s body and dispose of it. After her father passed away Emily was left without any essentials to live on so she was forced to figure out her own way to live. The narrator of this short story interprets Emily as one who does not live in reality and is most of the time stuck in the past more than in the present. She was a person who enforced her own senses of law and conduct like when she refused to pay her taxes. Emily also would not let them add numbers or a mailbox to her house when the mail services were introduced. The narrator also portrays Emily as a monument but also as a type of person who is irritating and annoying because she demands to live her life on her own terms and does not want to live how everyone else does. After Emily started to make herself more present in town because of teaching people to paint china. She was excepted into the community and managed to find her first love who was Mr. Homer Barron. Emily eventually grew closer to Homer but found out for herself that he was not the type of person to get married to. Homer’s actions pushed Emily over the edge to where she made her way to the drugstore to buy some things one of which being arsenic. Emily was a very suspicious person and people thought that she was troubled and was going to end up committing suicide. However, this was not true she just ended up murdering Homer. When Homer was nowhere to be found the town’s people found that Miss Emily disappeared for a while as well. Upon the death of Emily at the age of seventy-four many of the townspeople were allowed to enter the home that Emily self-isolated herself in and where the body of Homer Barron was found.
The bed that Homer was found in there was a single grey hair on the pillow that was next to his body. No one will ever know if it was one of Emily’s grey hairs. However, with the mental state that the narrator plays Emily to have it very well can be hers. This was Emily's way of keeping Homer form ever leaving her again, he was hers for life. After her death, her only family she had left was notified. Her cousins came to town and started to go through the house that was such a mystery. They found that Emily left a legacy, a legacy of what she was, human. She only wanted to be loved and in her own warped and twisted mind she felt that she had that with Homer even if he was
deceased.