Miss Emily In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

As William Faulkner once said, “In writing, you must kill all your darlings.”As we know William Faulkner, he has a Southern Gothic taste in his writing. This makes his writing creepy and a bit scary. In his “A Rose for Emily”, he includes Miss Emily Grierson or Miss Emily is portrayed as the creppy woman of the town in Yoknapatawpha County. In Faulkners “That Evening Sun” the Compson family and their slaves Nancy and Jesus should be feared for their actions and way of life. Faulkner’s use of Southern Gothic writing puts fear into his readers through his characters in his stories.
In Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” Miss Emily is suspected of acting the way she, because of her father.
“In this case there was the young girl with a young girl's normal aspirations to find love and then a husband and a family, who was brow-beaten and kept down by her father, a selfish man who didn't want her to leave home because he wanted a housekeeper…and a family.”
From this quote we know that Emily’s father would not let her have a boyfriend and would not let her find her true love.
So, Miss Emily had to wait for her father to die. When, she meets a man, Homer Barron, she does not really know what to do with the relationship. Miss Emily is using her past of not knowing what to do with a boy so she gets the wrong idea and kills Homer with Arensenic. While Miss Emily was at the drug store making the purchuse, the clerk knew exactly what arsenic is used for. This is a sense of forshadowing and the use of fear in Faulkner’s writing. Faulkner also uses a suspicious feeling, and suspicion can cause someone fear. In Faulkner’s “That Evening Sun” Nancy and Jesus cause fear among the Compson family. When Jesus found out Nancy was pregnant, but he was not the father; plotted vengence against the man who impregnanted his wife. Faulker is using the fear and suspicion of what Jesus may do to the man that impregnanted his wife. In the begininng of the story, there is a scence of fear about
Nancy: The jailer cut her down and revived her; then he beat her, whipped her. She had hung herself with her dress. She had fixed it all right, but when they arrested her she didn't have on anything except a dress and so she didn't have anything to tie her hands with and she couldn't make her hands let go of the window ledge. … like a little balloon.
This quote illustrates how Nancy lives a life full with fear. She has a desire to kill herself because of her pregnancy, but at the same time, she is too scared to do it. Faulkner writes with fear in his paper, because it was apart of him. He was a part of the Southern Gothic movement in the South, which had lead himt o write like this. He also had a discrimination against black folk in his stories, which would add more character into his stories. Faulkner’s use of fear made him known for his American writing and it is one of the many reasons why people still read his stories today.