rose for emily
“A rose for Emily” “A Rose for Emily” is a story about Emily Grierson who kills her Yankee boyfriend Homer Barron and lives with his body in her bedroom for over forty years. However, the story is not really about Miss Emily’s actions, but more about the society that made her into who she is and how it conflicted with the ever changing post southern civil war society. Miss Emily grew up as part of an aristocratic Southern family, with an overpowering father who refused to allow her to be courted by the young men of the town. It is Emily’s father who first elevated her to idol status by keeping her segregated from her peers, and giving her this ego by putting her on such a high pedestal. Emily’s father is a proud man of his Southern heritage and of his family’s status in town, which further perpetuates the legacy and ego of their house hold name. After her father’s death, the town continues to idolize Miss Emily as a monument of their old southern era before the war. Faulkner states this fact at the very beginning of the story when he says,
“Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (Faulkner 29).
Miss Emily did represent a tradition towards the old South and their ways in the eyes of the town. Miss Emily is referred to as an “idol” by Faulkner multiple times to further give the ideal she is a symbol of a certain class of old southern money, which is to be looked up to by the people in the town. Because in the south at the time revered their antebellum ways.
This brings us to the opposing forces that were portrayed between Miss Emily and southern post-civil war society. During the Post-Civil War period the Southerners were being forced to change their way of life, to become more like the industrialized North. As the town begins to change, Miss Emily continues to live much as she did prior to the war and this seems to be okay for both her and the town, for the time being. When her
“Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (Faulkner 29).
Miss Emily did represent a tradition towards the old South and their ways in the eyes of the town. Miss Emily is referred to as an “idol” by Faulkner multiple times to further give the ideal she is a symbol of a certain class of old southern money, which is to be looked up to by the people in the town. Because in the south at the time revered their antebellum ways.
This brings us to the opposing forces that were portrayed between Miss Emily and southern post-civil war society. During the Post-Civil War period the Southerners were being forced to change their way of life, to become more like the industrialized North. As the town begins to change, Miss Emily continues to live much as she did prior to the war and this seems to be okay for both her and the town, for the time being. When her