Rose for Emily\" Emily Takes the Life

¶ … Rose for Emily" Emily takes the life of her lover, Homer Barron, by poisoning him with arsenic. By doing so, she erases any hope that she has for getting married and having children. Most analyses of the work focus on Emily as a victim to explain her motives for murder. However, Judith Fetterley takes a more novel stance by emphasizing Emily's intelligence and ability to turn discrimination against the perpetrators. Given Emily's strong independent nature, Fetterley's view holds the most merit for explaining Emily's murder of Barron.

Symbolism associated with description of a picture of Emily's father, "Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door" is highly illustrative of the lack of control in Emily's life.

A slender figure in white represents a vulnerable version and her position in the background signifies subordination. In contrast, Emily's father assumes the dominant position and the horsewhip denotes power and control. Her father's authoritarian nature, dominance and pride had destroyed her chances for marriage. Through the murder of Barron, Emily can be viewed as trying to take back control of her life. She's afraid that under Barron's hands she'll suffer the same repression that she encountered from her father.

The murder of Barron could be an attempt by Emily to reconcile her conflict between marrying a man who may not be worthy of a Grierson as reinforced by her father and the need for physical and emotional intimacy. The ladies of the town said, "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer" and the older people, representative of the Old South, stated, "even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige -- without calling it noblesse oblige

The later statement elevates Emily's position because of her Old South lineage, showing the importance of this to the town members. While Emily rebuffs criticism by them, the taboos of this relationship established by her father must have taken their toll. It's almost as if Emily is married to the now dead Barron who is waiting to embrace her. In the rose-colored room where Barron's body lies, the room is both a bridal chamber and a tomb and Barron is both a groom and a corpse.

Emily lived in the past, symbolized in the story by Colonel Sartoris, the old Negro servant and the Board of Alderman. Symbols of the new world are Barron and the new Board of Alderman. Emily might have murdered Barron to keep him from escaping from her world into the new world.

Her refusal to dispose of the body even after the smell became so bad that neighbors were noticing the stench is yet another example of how she can't move forward into the future.

Author Hal Blythe surmises that Emily murdered Barron because she discovered that he was a homosexual and that she needed to save face once she found out.

He believes the following clues within the story support his theory that Barron is gay such as statements that Barron "liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elk's Club-that he was not a marrying man." Blythe states that Emily is humiliated when she discovers that Barron had used her to keep the community from discovering his sexual orientation and that Emily's positioning his body to appear to be an embracing a lover is her attempt to conceal his homosexuality from the town.

In her analysis, Judith Fetterley explains how Emily was calculating enough to use the stereotype of a lady that the Jefferson community forced her into against them to obtain power. Proof of Emily's control is evidenced by her getting away with not paying taxes and getting away with murder. When the new Board of Alderman demand tax payment, she informs them that Colonel Sartoris has given her permission not to pay taxes and to go ask him if they don't believe her. The men are aware that Sartoris is dead, but do not argue the point and simply leave when asked to do so. It's hard to imagine that they would have displayed this "gentlemanly" behavior toward a male. When Emily purchases the arsenic to kill Barron, everyone assumes that she intends to commit suicide and no one got suspicious after the house began to stink. The judge doesn't act on suspicious because he is afraid of offending a lady.