This essay examines the key relationships in William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" and how they shape Emily Grierson's tragic transformation from a hopeful young woman into a reclusive murderer. Drawing on Faulkner's own commentary and scholarship by Scherting, Harris, and Melczarek, the paper analyzes Emily's oedipal attachment to her domineering father, her obsessive relationship with Homer Barron, and her symbolic role within the town of Jefferson. The essay also explores how Jefferson's collective complicity, resistance to change, and nostalgia for the antebellum South contribute to Emily's fate, ultimately arguing that her crimes are products of patriarchal chauvinism, puritan womanhood, and the conflict between community and individual.
The paper demonstrates the use of multiple critical lenses — psychoanalytic, cultural, and narratological — applied to a single literary text. Rather than committing to one interpretive framework, the writer shows how different scholarly perspectives illuminate different aspects of the same story, a technique that strengthens the overall argument by triangulating evidence from psychology, social history, and narrative structure.
The essay opens with a character overview and thesis about Emily's abnormal relationships, then moves through three major analytical threads: the father–daughter dynamic and sexual repression, the oedipal transfer onto Homer Barron, and Emily's symbolic role within Jefferson's resistance to modernity. A brief but pointed conclusion ties these threads together under the umbrella of Southern social determinism. The Works Cited page follows MLA format throughout.
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 into 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 as follows: "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 argues that 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 that 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 this lover-and-father figure would not marry her, Emily made plans to marry him herself. 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 nightshirt, and some arsenic. In doing so, she both murdered and married Homer.
This story cannot be read merely as a detective story, as doing so would overlook the profound meaning behind it. Miss Emily's killing of Homer is not the result of an inherently bloodthirsty nature; rather, it is the result of southern society. The social causes of Miss Emily's tragic transformation from a lady into a murderous necrophiliac are rooted in her degradation and in a series of consequences produced by the southern social system — among them patriarchal chauvinism, puritan womanhood, and the conflict between community and individual. In some sense, Miss Emily is the victim of her relationship with southern tradition and culture.
Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." The American Short Story. Ed. Thomas K. Parks. New York: Galahad Books, 1994, 648–655. Print.
Gwynn, Frederick L., and Joseph L. Blotner (Eds.) Faulkner in the University. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1959, 138. Print.
Harris, Paul A. "In Search of Dead Time: Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily.'" KronoScope, Vol. 7, Issue 2, 2007: 169–183. EBSCO. Web. 2 February 2013.
Melczarek, Nick. "Narrative Motivation in Faulkner's A Rose for Emily." Explicator, Vol. 67, Issue 4, Fall 2009: 237–243. EBSCO. Web. 2 February 2013.
Scherting, Jack. "Emily Grierson's Oedipus Complex: Motif, Motive, and Meaning in Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily.'" Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 17, Issue 4, Fall 1980: 397–406. EBSCO. Web. 2 February 2013.
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