Rose for Emily

Rotten but Not Forgotten: Cherished Corpses in William Faulkner's Short Story "A Rose for Emily" A streak of insanity seems to run through the once-distinguished Grierson family of William Faulkner's mythical town of Jefferson, Mississippi, within his short story "A Rose for Emily." Near the beginning of the story, a surviving, never married Grierson daughter, Emily, is shown demonstrating her extreme reluctance, even three days after her overbearing father's death, to allow his body to be removed by authorities from the house: The day after his death.

Miss Emily met them at the door. 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 knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her. (p.

32) Later, Emily poisons her one-time Yankee suitor Homer Barron, whom the town had conjectured would marry her. After that, as readers learn only at the end, Emily keeps Homer's corpse locked away, decomposing, inside her own bedroom. Emily's reluctance to part with first her father's dead body, and then that of Homer Barron, springs from an understandable effort to control her surroundings and circumstances, as she could not do in the company of either of these men while he remained alive.

At the opening of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," the once-important Grierson family of Jefferson is fast dying out. The reclusive spinster daughter of the family, Emily, having just lost her father, is Jefferson's only surviving Grierson. When he was alive, Emily's father had refused to let Emily date young men. Having never married, then, Emily is now completely alone. Within the town of Jefferson itself, modernization is taking place all around Emily, even as Emily herself remains locked, year after year, inside her impenetrable home.

The town itself is, however, quite literally reinventing itself, thus rendering the Grierson mansion, and the town's memory of its current and past occupants, anachronistic. One day a Yankee named Homer Barron arrives to supervise all the construction going on around the Grierson mansion. Homer knocks on Emily's door, and soon they are seen going out together. But Homer departs from Jefferson at about the time relatives from Alabama come to visit Emily.

After that, people in Jefferson do see Homer return to the town and enter Emily's house, but after that Homer is never again seen. His whereabouts becomes a town mystery, as Emily herself has also become, over the years. The only trace of Homer (and no one knows, then, that it is in fact Homer's rotting body) is a mysterious odor coming from Emily's house.

As Judge Stephens one day asks a young man of the town, who wishes to confront Emily about the smell: "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?" (p. 31). When Emily herself dies years later, her relatives from Alabama return to clear out the Grierson mansion, accompanied now by the Jefferson sheriff. Inside they find, locked in the upstairs bedroom, Homer Barron's rotted corpse, and even a piece of Emily's own "iron gray hair" (p. 36) on the pillow next to Homer.

Perhaps, since Emily could not be assured of having Homer remain with her when alive, she has chosen instead to, at least physically, possess Homer's dead body, with which she has apparently slept, night after night, for years until her own death. In William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" the main character, Miss Emily Grierson, is not only extremely isolated throughout her life, but also apparently insane.

Myriad elements of the story, including the main character's continued isolation from others in the town, even after her overbearing father's death, make Emily Grierson an object of intense mystery and curiosity, to those who may only observe the outside of her house. However, Emily's well-known refusal to pay taxes in Jefferson, especially when she herself makes no contributions whatsoever to the town (as her forbears had once done) and her stubborn unwillingness to mingle with people of the town, also creates a lack of sympathy for Emily.

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