A Rose for Emily - Paper 3

A Rose For Emily "The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, and had cuckolded him" (Faulkner 796). Miss Emily Grierson, the title character in "A Rose For Emily", is certainly a bizarre character. Withdrawn from society, trapped in a world of delusions, Emily never receives any psychiatric help, but she definitely shows symptoms of mental illness. Through the use of repetitive foreshadowing, William Faulkner describes numerous reasons that contributed to Miss Emily's disturbed behavior in the short story. Faulkner not only implies paternal domination, but there is a clear indication of insanity that is inherited through the Grierson family. The narrator notes that Emily is apparently a spinster because of her father’s insistence that none of the young men were good enough for her. Due to the years of isolation and the predominant experiences with her father leads to a shocking conclusion. Faulkner divided the story into five sections, the first and last section having to do with the present, the three middle sections detailing the past. In "A Rose For Emily", Emily was forced to live in isolation which lead her to insanity. Her father did not approve of any of Emily's gentlemen friends. He ran all the men away, to him no one was good enough for his Emily. Perhaps he loved Emily entirely too much. She became more and more withdrawn as the years passed by. Ultimately, Emily lost her sanity along the way. She proved this by poisoning Homer Barron and then keeping his corpse to rot on the bed in which she slept. "One of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair" (Faulker 796). Isolation can have extremely negative effects on a person. The loneliness can become unbearable. Obviously, Emily had her reasoning at one point in her life. The neighbors