Miss Emily And Homer Barron example essay topic

LastName 1 Dave February 28, 2001"A Rose for Emily"-William Faulkner In the story "A Rose for Emily", William Faulkner, the author talks about a life of a woman and the town she lived in. The story begins just when miss Emily died. The author doesn't tell us much about that time except that many people were interested to see what was in her house. As the story progresses, the author decides to jump all the way to the beginning when miss Emily was still a young woman and her father was still alive.

During that time, the town felt bad for poor miss Emily and thought that she was going to die with out a husband by her side, since her father didn't like any men that liked his daughter. Later on, the author gets to the time when her father just died. Miss Emily felt so alone that she decided to keep her dead father's body in the house, and not let anyone take him away from her. After the neighbors kept coming to the city council and complaining about the fowl smell that was coming from miss Emily's house, the judge sent a few men to put lime around the house to kill the smell. As the reader later finds out, the smell was coming from miss Emily's father's decaying body.

Finely the authorities took the dead body out of the house and buried it. As the story goes on, the reader is told that the town was being renovated, streets being paved and such. With the renovators, came a young man, by the description, he was a handsome young man. The town kept talking as they always did, gossiping about miss Emily and after Homer Barron and miss Emily were started being seen together, the town thought they were going to get married.

Unfortunate for miss Emily, Homer Barron enjoyed the company of men. After find this out, miss Emily came to a drug store and ordered their strongest poison. When the druggist asked her what she needed it for, she refused to say. After that, the town thought that poor miss Emily was going to kill herself. As the renovations were complete, the streets paved, miss Emily and Homer Barron were still seen riding together but one night Homer Barron left and didn't return for some time.

The town once again felt bad for Emily that the one man that she finely liked and spent her time with has left her. After a while Homer Barron returned and one night, as he came to miss Emily's house he was never seen again. Years passed, miss Emily became sick and her hair started turning gray. Then finely, the author comes back to where he left off in the beginning. Miss Emily died and the authorities went into her house. As the writer tells the reader, before her death and after Homer Barron's disappearance, the second floor of the house was completely off limits to everyone.

Later, when the officials came into her house, they went to the second floor and finely revealed the mystery. As they went up to the second floor, they forced open a door that was locked for some time. When they entered, they saw a beautiful room. In that room they saw man's clothing nicely folded on the chair and on the bed, they saw a dead body.

By the looks of it, the body was there for quite some time. Next to the body, they saw there was enough room for a second person. On the pillow there was a dent, as if someone had slept there recently and on that pillow they found a strand of gray hair. The author chose to tell the story his way and not in order, sort of jumbled up the events, telling the story jumping from one point in time to another.

I believe that the story was written this way to keep the suspense alive so the reader will want to read more of the story Mental State Was or Was Not Impaired Miss Emily was referred to as a 'fallen monument' in the story (William Faulkner). She was a 'monument' of Southern gentility, an ideal of past values but fallen because she had shown herself susceptible to death (and decay). The description of her house 'lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps -- an eyesore among eyesores' represented a juxtaposition of the past and present and was an emblematic presentation of Emily herself (William Faulkner). The house smells of dust and disuse and has a closed, dank smell.

A description of Emily in the following paragraph discloses her similarity to the house. 'She looked bloated like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that palled hue' (William Faulkner). But she had not always had that appearance. In the picture of a young Emily with her father, she was frail and apparently hungering to participate in the life of the era. After her father's death, she looked like a girl 'with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows -- sort of tragic and serene' (William Faulkner). This suggests that she had already begun her entrance into the nether-world.

By the time the representatives of the new, progressive Board of Aldermen waited on her concerning her delinquent taxes, she had already completely retreated to her world of the past. She declared that she had no taxes in Jefferson, basing her belief on a verbal agreement made with Colonel Sartoris, who had been dead for ten years. Just as Emily refused to acknowledge the death of her father, she now refused to recognize the death of Colonel Sartoris. He had given his word and according to the traditional view, his word knew no death.

It is the past pitted against the present -- the past with its social decorum, the present with everything set down in 'the books. ' You can further see this distinction in the attitude of Judge Stevens, who was over eighty years old, and the young man (a member of the rising generation) who came to the judge regarding the smell at Emily's house. For the young man, it was easy to point out the health regulations that were on the books. But for the judge dealing with the situation it was not so simple. 'Dammit, sir... will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?' (William Faulkner).

As it states in the story in the following paragraph. Thirty years be for about the smell. That was two years after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart - (William Faulkner). This also tells about her frame of mind. If Homer had triumphed in seducing Emily and deserting her, Emily would have become susceptible to the town's pity, therefore becoming human. Emily's world, however, was already in the past.

When she was threatened with desertion and disgrace, she not only took refuge in that world but also took Homer with her in the only manner possible -- death. Miss Emily's position in regard to the specific problem of time was suggested in the scene where the old soldiers appear at her funeral. There are two perspectives of time held by the characters. The first perspective (the world of the present) views time as a 'mechanical progression' in which the past is a 'diminishing road' (William Faulkner).

The second perspective (the world of tradition and the past) views the past as 'a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years' (William Faulkner). The first perspective was that of Homer and the modern generation. The second was that of the older members of the Board of Aldermen and of the confederate soldiers. Emily held the second view as well, except that for her there was no bottleneck dividing her from the meadow of the past. Emily's room above the stairs was that timeless meadow. In it, the living Emily and the dead Homer remained together as though not even death could separate them.

In the simplest sense, the story says that death conquers all. But what is death? On one level, death is the past, tradition, whatever is opposite of the present. In the setting of this story, it is the past of the South in which the retrospective survivors of the Civil War deny changing the customs and the passage of time. Homer Barron, the Yankee, lived in the present, ready to take his pleasure and depart, apparently unwilling to consider the possibility of defeat neither by tradition (the Grierson's) nor by time itself (death). In a sense, Emily conquered time, but only briefly and by retreating into her 'rose-tinted' world of the past.

This was a world in which death was denied at the same time that it was shown to have existed. Such retreat, the story implies, is hopeless since everyone, even Emily, was finally subject to death and to the invasion of his or her world by the clamorous and curious inhabitants of the world of the present. 'When Miss Emily died, [the] whole town went to her funeral... the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant... had seen in at least ten years' (William Faulkner). Now would you say that everybody who went to the home after her death was also a little bit going in the nether-world.