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.
Lesson Summary
When he dies, Emily goes into denial and refuses to allow him to be buried for the first three days as a coping mechanism. She has no one else to turn to because her father drove away her suitors and broke relations with other family members who might have been able to support her.
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.
Emily and her father had such a close bond that when he died, for days she refused to believe he was dead, and she also refused to let the townspeople dispose of the body. For the townspeople, Emily's reaction to her father's death was quite normal, but for readers it was our first glimpse at her necrophilia.
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.
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.
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. But her father isn't the only thing holding Miss Emily back.
Emily depended on Mr. Grierson for most of her life and her dad was very overprotective towards her as well as great at boosting her ego. This ultimately had a bad effect on Emily when her father died since she never found that grief. Emily's youthhood was mostly controlled by Mr.
The main conflict that exists between Emily and her father is that he refuses to consider any suitors for her. She, therefore, is left alone after his death.
Lesson Summary
One moral, or ethical message, of this story is the risk we take in wearing rose colored glasses because we can't properly see the world when wearing them. Another moral of this story is that we need to find the balance between the morals of the old generation and the modern ideas of the new generation.
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.
“Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town . . .” “At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. ”
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.
What did Miss Emily tell her visitors the day after her father's death? She told the visitors that her father wasn't dead. Why did the townspeople not think she was crazy for this? They didn't think she was crazy because her father was all that she had left.
Lesson Summary
She does not have a mother and has no relationship with any other relatives, so when her father dies, there was a huge void. Emily attempts to fill it with a relationship with Homer Barron. He is gay and does not feel the same way, but she doesn't accept this.
''A Rose for Emily'' contains verbal irony when Colonel Sartoris promises the Grierson family that if they loan the town money, they won't have to pay taxes and when Emily tells the new mayor to see Colonel Sartoris, who has been dead for ten years, about her taxes. Neither party means or believes what they are saying.
Person Versus Self. A person versus self-conflict is an internal struggle that a character faces. The big internal conflict for Emily is her struggle with reality. She refuses to accept that she is no longer living in the antebellum South, where backroom deals could be made to evade taxes.
What evidence indicates that Emily loves her father despite his overbearing ways in William Faulkner's ''A Rose for Emily''? She keeps his room exactly as it was when he was alive. She talks about him constantly. She keeps his portrait on a gilt easel.
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.
Her father never allowed her to properly court any young man due to the fact that, “None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such (1000).” When the only human relationship she has left dies, it's no wonder she goes mentally insane.
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.
After the death of her father, and the estrangement from the Yankee, Homer Barron, she becomes reclusive and introverted. The reader can find that Miss Emily did what was necessary to keep her secret from the town.
In the story, “A Rose for Emily”, Emily lived with her father and had little interactions with anyone else. Emily's father was very controlling over her life by not allowing her to do things on her own, which resulted in Emily being reserved from society.
Emily's father. Mr. Grierson is a controlling, looming presence even in death, and the community clearly sees his lasting influence over Emily. He deliberately thwarts Emily's attempts to find a husband in order to keep her under his control.
"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.