Emily Herself The world is changing all around her, but she clings to her traditions and makes a living monument out of her home. She symbolizes tradition and a stubborn clinging to the past, no matter what progress or changes occur.
Emily's house also represents alienation, mental illness, and death. It is a shrine to the living past, and the sealed upstairs bedroom is her macabre trophy room where she preserves the man she would not allow to leave her.
Readers will find themselves sympathetic towards Miss Emily in the beginning but far less so, if at all, by the end of the story due to her disturbing actions and obdurate character. Miss Emily's character symbolizes the fall of the chivalric American South as the industrial, modern South begins to rise.
The old, once powerful elements in society resist change and attempt to maintain control. Emily Grierson symbolizes resistance to this decline. While her actions are certainly influenced by her insanity, she represents this attempt of the Old South to resist change and to maintain control.
Possible Meanings of the Gray Hair. The gray hair on the pillow indicates that she has been lying down on the bed, beside the corpse of her dead former fiance. There's also an indent in the pillow, which suggest that it wasn't a once-or-twice occurrence. Gray hair is sometimes seen as a sign of wisdom and respect.
This something turned her house into a virtual prison – she had nowhere else to go but home, and this home, with the corpse of Homer Barron rotting in an upstairs room, this home could never be shared with others. The house is a huge symbol of Miss Emily's isolation.
The third major symbolism is a man's toilet set, which represents Emily's hope for marriage and love. The narrator states, “we learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece.
Throughout this story about murder, Faulkner uses many symbols to represent a theme about leaving or breaking traditions. Among these symbols are the crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father, Emily's house, and the long strand of iron-gray hair that found on the pillow next to Homer's body.
Given all of this, we might conclude that Miss Emily's hair symbolizes both the woman's turbulent mental life as well as her radical isolation from her community.
Grierson. Mr. Grierson, Emily's father, sets the tone for her narrative of solitude and control. He makes himself the central figure in Emily's life, chasing away her suitors with a horsewhip and exerting his influence over every aspect of their home - something that does not ebb after his death.
Faulkner uses visual imagery to describe what Emily looks like throughout the story, through much of her life. At first, she's ''a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head.
When her father dies, Miss Emily cannot face the reality of his death and her loneliness. Because she has no one to turn to — "We remembered all the young men her father had driven away . . ." — for three days she insists that her father is not dead.
Emily's Protector
It is evident that much of Emily's identity is wrapped up in her relationship with her father, so much so that ''after her father's death she went out very little. '' Throughout her life, Emily's father was extremely overprotective.
Emily's father earns the role of antagonist because of the way he negatively affected Emily growing up and leaving her a dead flower. He drove away potential suitors for Emily which indicates the level of control he had not just on her, but on her love life.
In a sense, Emily's disregard of time also means that she is oblivious of death and decay. Keeping her father's and Homer's bodies indicates that she does not accept death. She can love both in life and in death, as if subjects were still living.
When Emily dies, the townspeople learn that she has kept Homer's corpse. Her loneliness had been so severe that she has been sleeping with his corpse for years.
One of these themes is betrayal. Emily betrays the wishes of her father when she falls in love with someone who is both a Northerner and a day laborer. He would have felt that Homer was beneath her. Emily, likely, may have also felt betrayed by her father because he left her alone with no husband.
In fact, it's suggested that Miss Emily's father is so abusive that Miss Emily develops Stockholm Syndrome. When he dies, Emily refuses to believe that he's gone—she almost forbids the townspeople from taking his body away.
There are three different motives that can be looked at as to why Emily killed Homer. She wanted to exercise power, she couldn't accept that Homer was a homosexual, and she didn't want another man to be taken away from her. Emily's father controlled her life up until his death.
Miss Emily Grierson is herself a symbol of this faded glory of the South: a land that had been defeated militarily in the Civil War and whose old ways were being ousted by the new, industrial, mechanical age (those cotton wagons and garages selling gasoline for motorcars).
Homer Barron was from the North and also represented "the next generation with it's more modern ideas" (Faulkner 315). In some stories, Negroes sometimes represent death. In the short story, " A Rose for Emily," the color black is symbolic for death, as well as depression and gloom.
Miss Emily suffers from schizophrenia because she shows symptoms of withdrawing from society. Throughout Emily's life, her aristocratic father the townspeople highly respected, kept Emily closed in believing no suitors are worthy enough for her.
Yellow is usually called upon to represent happiness, joy and positive energy. (Think about the bright yellow sunshine.) Both of these references that include yellow happen during the period of time when Emily is being courted by Homer Barron, which must have been a joyful time for her.
Death in the story, as it does in life, signifies the end of something. Emily's father's death ends her old way of life and the death of Emily herself symbolizes the end of deep southern tradition in the eyes of the townsfolk who call her a monument. Death also serves as a means to prevent change.