Relationships in a Rose for Emily William

Relationships in a Rose for Emily William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily concerns the life of Emily Grierson, an eccentric recluse who changes from an energetic and hopeful young girl to a secluded and mysterious old woman. Born into a well respected, well off family her father rejected the potential suitors who entered her life. Alone after her father's death, she becomes an object of pity for the people of the town of Jefferson as her grace and appearance deteriorate with time.

It is Miss Emily's abnormal relationship with her father that drives her behavior and is central to the plot of the story. It is strongly suggested that Mr. Grierson intentionally interfered in Miss Emily's attempts to find a husband in order to keep her under his control. "The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face.

She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly. We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that.

We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will" (651). Miss Emily's father had prevented her from maturing sexually in a normal way.

Faulkner described the relationship between Miss Emily and her father thusly, "In this case there is a young girl with a young girl's normal aspirations to find love and then a husband and family, who was browbeaten and kept down by her father, a selfish man who didn't want her to leave home because he wanted a housekeeper, and it was a natural instinct" (Gwynn and Blotner, 138).

Faulkner says one cannot repress this drive, it may be suppressed, but it will eventually surface somewhere else and very likely in a tragic form. Soon after her father's death Miss Emily meets Homer Barron, a day laborer from the North. They begin to see each other for Sunday outings and become the subject of gossip and speculation.

However, "Homer himself had remarked -- he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club -- that he was not a marrying man" (652-653). Because of Miss Emily's relationship with her domineering and controlling father she was unable to allow Homer to leave her, so she poisoned him and kept him in her bed. Jack Scherting asserts Miss Emily is driven to this act by an oedipal complex.

Her libidinal desires for her father were transferred after his death to a male surrogate, Homer Barron. When the lover/father would not marry her Emily made plans to marry him. She purchased a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H.B. On each piece as well as a complete outfit of men's clothing, including a night shirt, and some arsenic. She both murdered and married Homer. Another theme of the story deals with the last breaths of the antebellum south.

The narrator of the story describes Miss Emily this way: "Alive Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town…" (648). The town of Jefferson is at caught between the future and the past, the diminishing glory of the Grierson home is juxtaposed by a modern, more commercial future. Emily lives in a great house that is slowly deteriorating. Once a beautiful, clean, and well kept property through the years the place began to decay becoming an "eyesore among eyesores." (648).

What connected her to that house was her privileged life and sense of entitlement that showed when she refused to pay her taxes. Not only does she connect with her home through privilege but through the experiences she had in that home. Her life on the high end of society may have contributed to her father's motivation to protect her and as a consequence keep her from finding love. When he died she found that her home was all she really had left.

When she dies it is ironic that the whole town went to the funeral not to see her but, "the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the woman mostly to see the house" (648). The town had not taxed Miss Emily's property due to some forgotten arrangement, yet when "the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors, councilman and aldermen, this arrangement created some dissatisfaction." (648).

The depth of this struggle is revealed in the fact that though the city leaders served Miss Emily with a tax bill, she chose to ignore it, and they chose to do nothing in response. These issues affirm the town's collective resistance to change out of admiration for the past. The relationship of the town with Miss Emily is further explored when the narrator reveals how the town reacted to the smell that came from her house shortly after her sweetheart deserted her.

When neighbors began to complain, the Board of Aldermen could not bring themselves to "accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad" (650) and instead of confronting the issue directly, sent four men to sneak around her house in the middle of the night spreading lime to mask the odor. In a sense one could argue that the town was complicit in the murder of Homer Barron.

By focusing on the simple horror of Emily Grierson, we miss the degree to which the townspeople exhibit obsessive and manipulative behavior of their own (Melczarek). Paul Harris notes the peculiar relation between the narrative voice and Emily Grierson. Time is out of joint in A Rose for Emily. The story involves the conflicts between generations and cultural traditions, and the manner the story is constructed "wreaks havoc with chronology." The conflicts between the townspeople and Emily Grierson are only signs of a.