Broken Heart In Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

A Rose for Emily is a great example of death by broken heart. Foster states in How to Read Literature Like a Professor that, “if we see that characters have difficulties of the heart, we won’t be too surprised when emotional trouble becomes the physical ailment and the cardiac episode appears” (212). Although Faulkner does not state the exact cause of Emily’s death, the sad, lonely way she deteriorates leads one to believe that it was most likely of a broken heart. Faulkner states, “And so she died….we did not even know she was sick” (305). Even though Emily died almost completely alone, with no one in the town knowing she had fallen ill, the community had known she had been sick from heartbreak for a while. Faulkner relates, “After her father’s …show more content…
This breaking of her heart brought Emily to believe that the only way to fix things was to find a man to fill the gap her father’s passing had left in her life. Enter Homer Barron. Soon Homer and Emily were married, but Emily was not the symbol of a bride most readers expect. In the handout we received about symbols, the bride is said to represent purity and innocence. Emily proves she is about as far from innocent as is possible, after she purchases rat poison, refuses to give her reasons for this purchase, and as is later revealed to have used the poison to kill Homer(303 Faulkner). Homer is found dead in one of the rooms in Emily’s house, with an indentation of her head and some of her gray hair still on the pillow (306). When Homer turned out to be unable to fill the shoes her father had created, Emily having already suffered one broken heart, suffered from another, and it finally caused her to sink into complete insanity. This insanity led her to kill Homer, but ended up only breaking her heart more. Emily still loved Homer, which is made evident by the gray hair of her old age found on the pillow next to him (Faulkner