A rose for Emily

The story begins at the huge funeral for Miss Emily Grierson. Nobody has been to her house in ten years,
except for her servant. Her house is old, but was once the best house around. The town had a special relationship
with Miss Emily ever since it decided to stop billing her for taxes in 1894. But, the "newer generation" wasn't happy
with this arrangement, and so they paid a visit to Miss Emily and tried to get her to pay the debt. She refused to
acknowledge that the old arrangement might not work any more, and flatly refused to pay.Thirty years before, the
tax collecting townspeople had a strange encounter with Miss Emily about a bad smell at her place. This was about
two years after her father died, and a short time after her lover disappeared from her life. Anyhow, the stink got
stronger and complaints were made, but the authorities didn't want to confront Emily about the problem. So, they
sprinkled lime around the house and the smell was eventually gone.Everybody felt sorry for Emily when her father
died. He left her with the house, but no money. When he died, Emily refused to admit it for three whole days. The
town didn't think she was "crazy then," but assumed that she just didn't want to let go of her dad, (even though you
could argue that he had stolen her youth from her).

Next, the story doubles back and tells us that not too long after her father died Emily begins dating Homer
Barron, who is in town on a sidewalk-building project. The town heavily disapproves of the affair and brings
Emily's cousins to town to stop the relationship. One day, Emily is seen buying arsenic at the drugstore, and the
town thinks that Homer is giving her the shaft, and that she plans to kill herself. When she buys a bunch of men's
items, they think that she and Homer are going to get married. Homer leaves town, then the cousins leave town, and
then Homer comes back. He is last seen entering Miss Emily's house. Emily herself rarely leaves the home after that,
except for a period of half a dozen years when she gives painting lessons. Her hair turns gray, she gains weight, and
she eventually dies in a downstairs bedroom that hasn't seen light in many years. The story cycles back to where it
began, at her funeral. Tobe, miss Emily's servant, lets in the town women and then leaves by the backdoor forever.
After the funeral, and after Emily is buried, the townspeople go upstairs to break into the room that they know has
been closed for forty years.Inside, they find the corpse of Homer Barron, rotting in the bed. On the dust of the pillow
next to Homer they find an indentation of a head, and there, in the indentation, a long, gray hair.

Miss Emily is an old-school southern belle trapped in a society bent on forcing her to stay in her role. She
clings to the old ways even as she tries to break free. When she's not even forty, she's on a road that involves dying
alone in a seemingly haunted house. At thirty-something she is already a murderer, which only adds to her outcast
status. Miss Emily is a truly tragic figure, but one who we only see from the outside. Granted, the townspeople who
tell her story know her better than we do, but not really by much. This is why Emily is called "impervious." We can't
quite penetrate her or completely understand her. But, perhaps there is a little Emily in all of us. In the spirit of
finding the human being behind the mask, lets zero in on a few aspects of Emily, the person. As far as we know,
Emily is an only child. The story doesn't mention any siblings. It also doesn't mention her mother. It strikes us as
odd that the narrator doesn't say anything about her mother at all. We can't really think of a reasonable explanation
for this, other than that the narrator wants to emphasize just how much Emily was her father's daughter, and just how
alone she was with him when he was alive. From all evidence, he controlled her completely until his death, and even
continued to control her from beyond the grave. By separating her so severely from the rest of the town when he was
alive, going as far as to make sure she didn't have any lovers or a husband, he set her up for a way of life that was
impossible for her to escape, until her death.

Homer is the man Emily murderers. Yet, somehow, the focus of the tragedy is on Emily. Given the
information we know about Homer, he isn't a very sympathetic character. This is partly because the town, as
represented by the narrator, doesn't like him. Jeffersonians don't like him because he's a rough-talking, charismatic
northerner and an overseer in town working on a sidewalk-paving project. How involved with Emily he was, we
don't know. He may have intended to marry her, but became dissuaded by the wacky antics of her cousins and the
town. Why he went to her house that last time, and how exactly he ended up dead in the bed, we don't know. We
don't even know if he really did, or was about to, break off his relationship with Emily before she killed him.
 Miss Emily's house is an important symbol in this story. (In general, old family homes are often
significant symbols in Gothic literature.) For most of the story, we, like the townspeople, only see Miss Emily's
house from the outside looking in. Let's look at the some of the descriptions we get of the house: It was a big,
squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the
heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton
gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left,
lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps an eyesore among
eyesores. (1.2) The fact that the house was built in the 1870s tells us that Miss Emily's father must have been doing
pretty well for himself after the Civil War. The narrator's description of it as an "eyesore among eyesores" is a
double or even triple judgment. The narrator doesn't seem to approve of the urban sprawl. We also speculate that the
house is an emblem of money probably earned in large part through the labors of slaves, or emancipated slaves. The
final part of this judgment has to do with the fact that the house was allowed to decay and disintegrate. For an idea
of the kind of house Miss Emily lived in, take a look at artist Theora Hamblett's house in Mississippi, built, like
Emily's, in the 1870. Now picture the lawn overgrown, maybe a broken window or two, the paint worn and chipping
and you have a the creepy house that Emily lived in, and which the children of the "newer generation" probably ran
past in a fright. The house, as is often the case in scary stories, is also a symbol of the opposite of what it's supposed
to be. Like most humans, Emily wanted a house she could love someone in, and a house where she could be free.
She thought she might have this with Homer Barron, but something went terribly wrong. This something turned her
house into a virtual prison she had nowhere else to go but home, and this home, with the corpse of Homer Barron
rotting in an upstairs room, this home could never be shared with others. The house is a huge symbol of Miss
Emily's isolation.

Lime and arsenic are some of the story's creepiest symbols. Lime is a white powder that's good at
covering the smell of decomposing bodies. Ironically, it seems that the lime was sprinkled in vain. The smell of the
rotting corpse of Homer Barron stopped wafting into the neighborhood of its own accord. Or maybe the town just
got used to the smell. The lime is a symbol of a fruitless attempt to hide something embarrassing, and creepy. It's
also a symbol of the way the town, in that generation, did things.We lump it together with arsenic because they are
both symbols of getting rid of something that smells, and in the case of "A Rose for Emily," it happens to be the
very same thing. Remember what the druggist writes on Emily's packet of arsenic, under the poison sign? "For rats."
Faulkner himself claims that Homer was probably not a nice guy. If Homer is planning to break a promise to marry
Emily, she, in the southern tradition, would most probably have considered him a rat. The arsenic used to kill a
stinky rat creates a foul stench, which the townspeople want to get rid of with lime. (If you want to read more about
arsenic, click here). We should also note that arsenic is a favorite fictional murder weapon, due to its reputation for
being odorless, colorless, and virtually undetectable by the victim. Director Franz Capra's 1944 film Arsenic and
Old Lace is good example of this.