She hides her dead father for three days, then permanently hides Homer's body in the upstairs bedroom. In entombing her lover, Emily keeps her fantasy of marital bliss permanently intact.
Inside, among the gifts that Emily had bought for Homer, lies the decomposed corpse of Homer Barron on the bed. On the pillow beside him is the indentation of a head and a single strand of gray hair, indicating that Emily had slept with Homer's corpse.
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.
Emily eventually apes that male dominance by killing Homer Barron. Now robbing herself, she becomes the black silhouette of her father and assimilates his characteristics. After Homer's death, she successfully retains the corpse.
For 3 days, she refused to give up her father's dead body to be buried. Emily had depended so much on her father due to his action of not allowing her to marry. After Mr. Grierson's death, she locked herself away in her house.
' After Emily's death, he waited until others arrived so he can let them in, 'and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house, out the back, and was not seen again. '
Who went to miss Emily Grierson's funeral? Everyone in town,because she was well known. Why did the men go? Out of respect and affection for a fallen monument.
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.
The day after Mr. Grierson's death, the women of the town call on Emily to offer their condolences. Meeting them at the door, Emily states that her father is not dead, a charade that she keeps up for three days. She finally turns her father's body over for burial.
Even in death, Miss Emily cannot escape her father: "They held the funeral on the second day . . . with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier . . ." When the townspeople break into a locked room upstairs, they find carefully folded wedding clothes and Homer's remains.
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.
The ending of the story emphasizes the length of time Miss Emily must have slept with her dead lover: long enough for the townspeople to find "a long strand of iron-gray hair" lying on the pillow next to "what was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt" and displaying a "profound and fleshless grin ...
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.
'' When they are seated in the parlor, ''a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray. '' Dust coats everything in the secret room where Emily's horrifying secret is revealed and the townspeople learn that she has killed Homer Barron, her boyfriend, and kept his body.
Summary and Analysis: "A Rose for Emily" Section I
The story's opening lines announce the funeral of Miss Emily, to be held in her home — not in a church — and the reasons for the entire town's attending-the men out of respect for a Southern lady, the women to snoop inside her house.
Faulkner's story instead hints at an altogether more morbid and unwholesome notion: that Emily has continued to 'sleep' with Homer even after he was dead (indeed, perhaps that was the only way she could sleep with him at all).
"A Rose for Emily" ends with the discovery of the forty-year-old corpse of Homer Barron. Yeah. It's nasty. The first time we read this story, we assumed that—of course—the town didn't know about Homer Barron until Emily died.
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.
After her death, the same servant allows the townspeople inside, and they make the gruesome discovery of Homer's body in the bed, a single strand of gray hair on the pillow beside it where Emily slept.
So to recap: Miss Emily is kept in isolation by an abusive father, kept out of the workforce and indoors by a restrictive society, pushed away from marrying a poorer man by her relatives and the townsfolk, and then (passively) encouraged to kill herself.
The story speaks of Emily's descent into insanity that is caused by a combination of her father's control over her, isolation, and a tendency in the family towards mental illness. However, the story is also a commentary on society. The warning signs are all around them, yet no one wants to get involved and help her.
She was from an antebellum Southern aristocratic family. Emily seemed to have mental breakdown after her father, and then her potential lover, died. As Emily is a part of an antebellum family, she is likely not black. Additionally, her corpse is described as "pale and swollen."
Towards the end of the story, it seems that Emily may have found love at last, with Homer Barron. However, he rejects her. This leads to a desperate plan to create a fantasy world in which Emily will never be alone again. She purchases arsenic, a rat poison, and kills him.
The rose represents the idea of love since young lovers often give each other roses to express their affections. With so many suitors in her youth, it seems inevitable that Emily will accept a rose from one of them, but she never does. When she meets Homer, it seems like she may finally have true love.
Homer Barron
In order to keep him permanently around, she bought poison from a druggist. Many of the people in the community assumed that this poison would be for Miss Emily to kill herself. The community then realized, after coming upon this secret, that this poison was to keep Homer in Miss Emily's life.