A Rose for Emily

1. A Rose for Emily

2. Emily • Your classic outsider. Emily isolates herself from the community so that she limits the access the community has to her true identity by remaining hidden. • Miss Emily is an old-school southern belle trapped in a society bent on forcing her to stay in her role. She clings to the old ways even as she tries to break free. When she's not even forty, she's on a road that involves dying alone in a seemingly haunted house. At thirty-something she is already a murderer, which only adds to her outcast status. 

Miss Emily is a truly tragic figure, but one who we only see from the outside. • Object of scrutiny from the townspeople. • Behaviour is bizzare, eccentric, tragic.

3. Emily • A law unto herself. • A known figure. Respected? • Abandoned. • Compared to a monument- why?

4. Emily • Artist: We don't know for sure if Emily's artistic ability extended beyond china-painting. • Even though we don't know the full extent of Emily's art, thinking of her as an artist helps us to see the tragedy of her life, and also provides us a bit of a hopeful angle of vision. • On the tragic side, we see that while Emily's art was at first a link to the town, a way to be a member of the community and to have some contact with the outside world. • Once the "newer generation" pieced together her secret, even this last link was gone.

5. Emily • Daughter: but where is her mother? Why isn’t she mentioned? • The town sees Emily as her Father’s daughter. • Emphasises the control that Mr Grierson had over his daughter and her life. He kept her isolated. • Why didn’t she just leave?

6. Emily • The bare sketch we have of her father shows a man who was unusually controlling, domineering, and perhaps capable of deep cruelty, even toward his only daughter. • This theory also disguises her behaviourafter his death, when she tried desperately to shed the image of dutiful daughter, and, probably for the first time, at thirty-something, pursued her own desires for love and sex.

When this attempt at womanhood failed miserably, she reverted back to the life her father created for her – a lonely, loveless, isolated life. • Except now, with Homer Barron rotting away upstairs, there are two men that haunt her.

7. Emily • Necrophiliac: Necrophilia typically means a sexual attraction to dead bodies. In a broader sense, the term also describes a powerful desire to control another, usually in the context of a romantic or deeply personal relationship. • Necrophiliacstend to be so controlling in their relationships that they ultimately resort to bonding with unresponsive entities with no resistance or will—in other words, with dead bodies. • Mr. Grierson controlled Emily, and after his death, Emily temporarily controls him by refusing to give up his dead body. • Unable to find a traditional way to express her desire to possess Homer, Emily takes his life to achieve total power over him.

8. Similarities with ‘The House of Usher’ • The house represents the mind of the character that inhabits it: shuttered, dusty and dark- full of secrets. • Emily is the last Grierson- Roderick and Madeline are the last Ushers • Emily wishes to keep the bodies of her loved ones nearby. Usher wants to keep Madeline’s body away from the doctors in the vault.