Acceptance In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

Letting go in life is one of the hardest tasks to overcome. In A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner takes readers back in a journey through time through the eyes of the citizens of a small and decaying Mississippi town, post- Civil War. Miss Emily is a woman of the town who seems to be stuck in her own concept of time, and refuses to let go of her past. A Rose for Emily is a tale of a woman who refuses to accept change, and the refusal of acceptance is shown through the death of Homer Barron, the death of Miss Emily’s father, and the decay of Miss Emily’s house that she simply will not leave. In A Rose for Emily, Emily Grierson was courting with a man named Homer Barron, and readers can see her refusal to accept time through her relationship
Everyone in the town just whispered and said “Poor Emily,” because her father had left her with the house, but no money at all. “She was sick for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance of those angels in colored church windows- sort of tragic and serene,” (Faulkner 302). Miss Emily cut her hair, which the townspeople describe as it making her look younger, like her youth days when her father was still alive. When her father passed away, all of the ladies of the town called her and told her that they were sorry for her loss, and her response was that he was not gone. The people had to wait three days for her to come to realization that her father was gone, just so that they could take his body and bury him quickly. Miss Emily was living in the shadows of her overbearing father the entire time that he was alive, and once he was dead and gone, Miss Emily was beside herself. This is showing that Miss Emily is once again in denial and not wanting to accept reality and
Once, the house was the most beautiful house on her street. After Miss Emily’s father had passed away, her house grew up with ivy and started to decay. Miss Emily was basically a hermit, so she did not keep up on the maintenance of her own home. “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,” (Faulkner 299). Time and life happened, and Miss Emily did not keep up on this house, so “Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps- an eyesore among eyesores,” (Faulkner 299). Emily did not care about the way her house looked after her father had passed away, although it was the only thing that he had left to her. She was basically confined into her home, and she was comfortable because she did not have to step out and face time passing or see all of the change that she knew was happening in the town. Her home was her safe haven, but eventually time took its toll on even the white spires and balconies. A Rose for Emily teaches readers that change is one of the hardest things in life to except; especially the change of time. Miss Emily Grierson had struggled with the change of time with her relationship