A Rose For Emily Southern Gothic Analysis

Faulkner says, Emily buys Arsenic from the druggist and the next day Homer is seen entering her home and that was the last time anyone ever saw him or Emily for some time. No one but the negro servant left the house. (Faulkner 455) Emily kills Homer because she doesn’t want him to leave her. If he’s dead, he can’t run

Not only that, as Homer becomes a popular figure in town and is seen taking Emily on buggy rides on Sunday afternoons, it scandalizes the town and increases the condescension and pity they have for Emily. They feel that she is forgetting her family pride and becoming involved with a man beneath her station. Even though Emily is from the high class family, it does not mean that she is living up to the pleasant lifestyle. As a matter of fact, she is actually living a gloomy and desolate life, which is essentially the opposite lifestyle expected for Emily's rank in society by the townspeople. Although Emily once represented a great southern tradition centering on the landed gentry with their vast holdings and considerable resources, Emily's legacy has devolved, making her more a duty and an obligation than a romanticized vestige of a dying order.

Telling the story in an irregular order, Faulkner develops a sense of suspense by adding details to the mysterious Miss Emily. “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care: a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (451). The reader learns that Miss Emily had been seen as an eccentric woman that the people of the town had to take care of and overlook, ultimately overlooking her as a suspect in Homer Barron’s disappearance. Miss Emily often disappears into her house for months and years at a time,

Conformity is a change in behavior, which is normally caused by another person or a group of people’s thoughts or opinions of someone. When an individual is constantly told that they are a certain way, the individual will eventually begin to believe it and conform to other’s views without even realizing it. This happened to the young Emily Grierson, by a numerous amount of people, and continued to happen until the day of her death. Many can probably say that it was the main reason for her deteriorating mental condition, instability, and the strange approach of how she handled death. “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner is an unusual story about a girl with a troubled mind who is eventually pushed over the edge by the constant gossip of the townspeople and the heartbreak of a lover.

The class system that had separated everyone into Aristocrats and the poor had changed as well. In addition, new buildings were being constructed. Similarly, there is the decay of Emily’s house. The house Emily lived in was in a state of decay just like the south was. It had lost those who took care of it.

In the short story “A Rose for Emily” written by William Faulkner we see how he foreshadows that Emily is the murderer of Homer. Within the introduction we are told that William Faulkner was a Southern writer who loved to write comedy and tragedy. I would definitely consider “A Rose for Emily” one of his best tragedy that he has written as it contains suspense and foreshadowing. Foreshadowing is defined as a literary device in which a writer gives an advance hint of what is to come later in the story.

At the beginning of the story Emily is vibrant and fresh in her youth, however, as the story progresses, she grows older and her spirit more deranged. She descends into madness, not only killing her fiance, but also sleeping with his corpse. She is portrayed as a falling moument. The town, even though it had begun to move away from the Old South, still holds onto a vestige of respect for the southern Grierson family and thus looks at Emily as a sort of monument. She is also a monument because she is the last person of the southern aristocracy in the town.

When Emily met Homer, the love of her life, who at one point “disappeared” in the story, according to the townspeople, she was well seen. Shortly after Homer was last seen, Emily was also unheard of for some time. When Emily was finally next seen miss Emily had changed “she had grown fat and her hair was turning gray” (par. 50). Emily’s physical decline symbolizes a mental decay, as her mental state decayed, her body expressed the toll that was taking on her

The previous lavishness of the “big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies…set on what had once been [the] most select street” (437) indicates that Emily came from a well-off family that was probably highly respected. The whiteness of the house can be taken to symbolize the innocence of her youth, and that as she got older her macabre habits manifested themselves and polluted that innocence, leaving the house dingy and tainted. The condition of the house when Emily dies is that of a worn down vestige to the past, “an eyesore among eyesores” (437), representing how the towns people saw her. She was a curiosity, a clandestine entity that could only be unraveled after her death when there was no one left to safe guard the dark secrets of her house. The house stands as a monument to a lost time and a testament to tradition that has no place in the modern era, much like Emily

The value of romance and mortality resembles the theme of obsession, and is shown throughout the plots, and the characters in, “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and “The Birth Mark” by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Firstly, Faulkner illustrates obsession of romance through mortality. In addition, Emily’s obsessive illness of love over death it often seen throughout the plot. Lastly, Hawthorne demonstrates the obsession of mortality thorough romance, through the main protagonist, Aylmer in “The Birth Mark.” To compare, Emily and Aylmer believe their obsessive consequences was from the heart, despite their obsessive disorders.

Emily Grierson is clearly a very strange old lady even by strange old lady standards. She seems to have a hankering for necrophilia which is what makes her so strange, but I don’t believe that she does for the love of dead bodies but for other reasons. Ms. Emily is the epitome of the old south she has a black servant who does all her work for her, and she does not conform to many things in society. She refuses to pay taxes or even to have a mail box with metallic numbers hung up on her house. She lives in a old grand antebellum home.

This detail suggests the existence of urgency in Emily’s attempt to break the pattern, especially due to her father’s recent demise. Whether or not Emily truly loved Homer is unclear, however she didn't want to lose him. Barron didn't intend on marrying her. Desperate to cling to his presence, Emily poisons Homer and keeps his body in her bed. When Emily passes away, the inhabitants of the town are finally let into the house.

Emily’s father turned away all her suitors and made her undesirable to most, leaving her single and desperate for a physical and emotional connection. With this being the case, she found Homer Barron and married him. To the public, the marriage seems normal until it is revealed that Emily bought arsenic, and she and Homer disappeared into the house. At the latter end of the story, the town discovers both Emily’s and Homer’s dead bodies in the house but in separate rooms. Their seemingly normal deaths turn sinister when the people realize that Homer’s body is partly

Similarly, the protagonist in “A Rose for Emily” is Emily Grierson. The house that she lives in drives her mind to inhabit it in dusty and dark. Miss Emily is a mysterious character. The impression that Miss Emily gives us about her is that she is a “necrophiliac”. Necrophilia means a sexual attraction to dead bodies.

The story is set right after the civil war. Emily and her father are high class people who owned slaves to do all the things around the house. Because of her social status everyone in the town would never think of Emily as someone who would sleep with a dead body. When everyone found out about Emily’s secret it was a shock to everyone. Necrophilia is not something someone who was first class would do.