What Is The Moral Of A Rose For Emily

“We knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will” (Faulkner). A Rose for Emily is a Southern gothic revolving around the later years of the life of Emily, a woman whose days were filled with heartbreak and emptiness. Her actions cause readers to put her mental health into question, especially with the fact that her family has a history with cases of insanity. Written in 1930, William Faulkner submerges his readers in an ominous tale full of love, loss, death and ignorance. He delivers the story in a unique manner, scrambling the order and recollection of events. Readers are never sure what is past or present, or who the narrator is, generating a plot full of twists and open ended questions.
One of the biggest parts of the plot was the tension between Emily and the officials of Jefferson, a problem Faulkner illustrated to show issues across generations. Faulkner wrote, “Perhaps he considers himself the sheriff . . . I have no taxes in Jefferson” (Faulkner). Upon the death of her father, Emily was promised a waiver from her duty to pay taxes to the city of Jefferson, as committed by Colonel Sartoris, who has long since passed away. The next generation of officials no longer accepts or recognizes the validity of the late Colonel’s terms, and approaches Emily year after year to collect her taxes. She continually shuts them down, refusing to submit to their requests against her outdated guarantee. This is evidence of the moral that promises, beliefs and traditions don’t always translate between generations, and they're the cause of a lot turbulence when there is a push for change. Old habits die hard, and it can be difficult to implement changes to things that have existed for a long time. Additionally, Faulkner embeds morals about emotion throughout his piece. Emily exemplifies the darkest corners of human emotion. Faulkner personified the fact that passion can lead to dangerous things through Emily’s character. He wrote,“breaking down the door...the man himself lay in the bed” (Faulkner). By the end of the plot, it is revealed that Emily murdered her lover Homer and left his corpse within her home for years. She worried that he would leave her behind, so she kills him out of her fear of loss and abandonment. Emily yearns to keep Homer in her life, and the moment she felt he went astray, she killed him so he could be hers forever. The eerily and disturbingly dark morals of these events is that the power of obsession and love can make people go to extreme lengths for a sense of