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...
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…
