Lily In Faulkner's Eulogy For Emily

Lily is intrinsically and essentially a displaced person, one unfitted for the realities of life. Homeless and rootless, she yearns to build around herself an environment that will protect and reflect her selfhood. Nothing in her aunt's tastelessly furnished home responds to her sensibilities and she is an outsider everywhere, a temporary wayfarer in the homes of others. Jokingly but meaningfully, she tells Selden that she must marry in order to have a parlor of her own to furnish. Home is an extreme version of what most women need deeply within, an externalization of the self, a validation of the substantiality, which is never granted to Lily.
Lily's persistent confusion of sex with money is deeply rooted in her vision of family affairs. Just as Lily had seen her father exploited by her mother, she later saw Gus Trenor and Geroge Dorset exploited by their wives and she, by
default, expects to exploit her husband when she lands on one. She is accepted in the moneyed society for her ornamental value and her utilitarian value. She knows that nobody will want her if her beauty fails to attract and add to the aesthetic value of a place she is invited to. Men in her society indulge themselves in admiring her beauty and the women like Mrs. Trenor or Mrs. Dorset make use of her to substitute the niche they detest to put themselves in. Treated as a commodity herself, she rarely questions her intention to use others on the same way if necessary. Lily is so calculating about the marriage market that she is just as ready to use men as financial objects as they are to use her as a sexual object
Lacking a constant figure with whom she can attach herself, Lily fails to develop a viable core to her personality.
Inevitably, she seeks out mirrors to check on the continuity of her existence. What raises Lily above her grasping mother is that her father's fondness for poetry which inspires an artistic purpose and which in turn dilutes the family's gross mercantile objectives. Although Lily adopts her mother's values, she adds a few sentiments to them “which gave an idealizing touch to her most prosaic purposes.” (36).With a poetic sensibility, she likes to think of her beauty as a power for good where she will be in a position to influence diffusion of good taste and refinement. Lily is not prepared to marry a man who is merely rich as she is secretly ashamed of her mother's crude passion for money. “Lily’s preference would have been for an English nobleman with political ambitions and vast estates; or for second choice an Italian prince with a castle in the Apennines and heredity office in the Vatican." (36-37).Hence Lily tries to convert the coarse materialism into a vague
sentimentalism.