Rose for Emily by William

¶ … Rose for Emily by William Faulkner

Being What Others Expect -- "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner

The ending of "A Rose for Emily" is the most important part of the story, but there are clues throughout the story that help lead up to the sinister information given away at the conclusion. Psychoanalysis of the story indicates that while Emily may have very well been crazy, the townspeople were not much better for not confronting her. They even sprinkled lyme around her house to remove a foul smell instead of investigating where the smell came from...and instead of asking Emily (Faulkner, 2007). Asking her anything about her personal or private life seemed to be taboo, and the townspeople seemed timid and frightened of her, as if she was a witch, or something worse. Because of this, she became in many ways what the townspeople expected of her - a reclusive woman with no friends and a deep, dark secret.

The clues throughout the story are subtle, and a reader who is only taking the story at face value will likely miss most of them. These clues are buried a little bit deeper in the story, and because of this, most readers do not realize until the end what actually happened to the two suitors that Emily had. There is some suspicion that they met with a nasty end, but no proof, and no one willing to ask Emily any questions. The townspeople generally treat her as something of a god among them, to be both admired and feared, and she never pays taxes or does anything of the other things that she does not want to (Faulkner, 2007). Readers are often surprised that Emily gets away with so much, but the townspeople seem powerless to stop her, as if they are under a spell of some kind.

Many of the problems that the townspeople have with Emily are portrayed from their point-of-view, as Faulkner uses one of the townspeople as a narrator. By doing this, he puts a spin on the story and readers are not able to see the other side of the issue (i.e. what's really going on in Emily's house). Point-of-view is extremely important in any story, as who is telling the story can greatly affect what gets told. If Faulkner had chosen Emily or her servant as the narrator, the story would have been very different, and readers would have known what was going on in Emily's house much sooner, but since Faulkner chose a townsperson, the secrets of Emily's disturbed mind remained hidden until the final scene where the rotting corpse of her second suitor is discovered in her bed. The story is much more entertaining this way, because finding out about Emily too early would have made the rest of the story dull and somewhat uninteresting.

Once they make the gruesome discovery, not much more analysis about Emily is needed. Each person in the town had opinions and beliefs about Emily, and the final scene lets the townspeople know whether their opinions and beliefs were correct. The one thing it does not tell the reader is why Emily did what she did. Did she hate the men? Was it a game? Was she crazy after all? Or was she just so concerned about losing the men's affection that she killed them to keep them from leaving her? The reader will never know, and Faulkner does not say. There could be a million different reasons for the deaths that Emily caused, but the story ends without the reader finding out what the actual reason was, and Faulkner does not even really hint at the main reason.