Essay On Miss Emily In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

In the short story “A Rose For Emily”, by William Faulkner shows how Miss Emily, the protagonist, is a product of her old southern upbringing. She does not deal with money or do her own shopping, which is why the town has such a difficult time dealing with her about her unpaid taxes and why she has had a servant all her life. She neither thinks nor acts like anyone in town and even where she lives is part of an earlier tradition and way of life which is now decaying. These are not particularly crippling effects of the way she was raised, but at least one other thing about her particular upbringing changed the course of her entire life. Miss Emily is an old maid, and that is only because her father followed the traditions of the Old South. Every potential suitor had to be approved by him, and he found none of them suitable. Because of that, Miss Emily lived most of her life alone and unmarried. The reader knows that, while she was obedient to her father's wishes regarding who she could marry, she had to have resented him for that. In fact, Faulkner gives the reader a vivid picture of what life must have been like for her, “None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the …show more content…
It is not surprising, then, that when her father dies, Miss Emily would not let him go, probably as some kind of punishment rather than out of actual grief. The only time Miss Emily seems happy is when she is breaking the code of her Old Southern upbringing and has a rather scandalous affair with Homer Barron. Of course, this affair goes against every value and tradition her father instilled in her and eventually prompts her, in her desperation not to be left alone again, to kill and keep Homer Barron with her