The Deranged Death In William Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

Imagine living in 1864 during the marine crusade of Jefferson. At that time, the South and the North were faced with conflict, fighting in a war that caused separation and destruction all over the country. In a small town of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi, there is an old woman named Emily Grierson who manages to make her life a larger conflict than the wars going on around her. This character, created by William Faulkner in “A Rose for Emily”, represents in large part, the affects that come with stubbornness during a time of modern change. Miss Grierson was an old fashioned woman living in a revolutionizing world and rather than accepting the changes, she devotes her life to contesting them. While doing so, she successfully misleads the community in thinking she is a victim when in actuality she was causing her own pain. She isolates herself from the ever so changing world and encourages people to feel pity for her circumstances. Although Emily is portrayed as a victim in Faulkner’s, “A Rose for Emily”, she creates her own sense of law allowing her to defy modern rules ultimately, being the source of her lonely deranged death. In order to prove that Emily was the cause of her own demise, one must understand what it means to determine someone as a victim. In this case, we see Emily …show more content…
In this story we see her almost as a monument or a tradition, but at the same time she is empathized and consoled. The actuality that can be seen as someone reading the story from the outside, shows that she is often looked at as irritating in the ways that she demands to live her life on her own terms. Emily is the classic outcast, supervising and regulating the town’s access to her true identity by remaining hidden, which in the end is the reason she died alone and