A Rose for Emily

I felt like Emily was a very mentally ill individual. She came from a fairly wealthy family and lived with her father, who died and left Emily alone which I believe is when her sanity started to deteriorate. The narrator is not a specific person, Faulkner described situations with the word we, which implies that A Rose for Emily is the towns story- as a whole. They did not like her, the towns people, she was stuck up and smelled funny. Neighbors complianed of a strange smell coming from the house, "So the next night, after midnight, four men crossed Miss Emily's lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork, and at the cellar openings," (Faulkner 469). This was a a critical part of the story that does not become resolved until the end of the story, after Emily's death. The story spans out over a number of years, and talks of Emily's relationship with men, "That was two years after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart-the one we believed would marry her-had deserted her. After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all." (Faulkner 469). Clearly Emily did not recieve enough affection from men, and strived for an intimate relationship. I feel like she attempted to sero in on Homer Barron, the "man's man", not the marrying type, and for this reason she had to take matters into her own hands. Emily killed Homer with arsenic, so that she could be with him forever. In the end, the townspeople discover his body in her bed, and finally realize what the strange smell was coming from. The interesting thing is that throughout the story, Faulkner describes the individual times that the people in this small town encounter Emily, as well as her appearance. For example, "When we saw her again, her hair was cut short." (Faulkner 470), by the end of the story, Emily's hair has grayed and she is an older woman. She had kept Homer Barrons decaying body in her bed for about ten years, and slept with it at night. "Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. 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." (Faulkner 474). I like how Faulkner used this as the last sentance of the story, a technique to insure the uneasiness of the reader-like when you watch a good physcological thriller and walk away from the movie feeling shocked, or disturbed; this may sound a little bit morbid, but only means that the story was a good one.