The short story "A Rose for Emily," by William Faulkner presents the reader with a woman named Emily Grierson, who for the greater part of her life was not only sheltered and controlled by her, father she also dealt with the mental abuse that came with his domineering personality. The consequence of her not fully experiencing life and her father's dominance results in Emily's inability to cope with modern society and lead a normal stable life.
             Faulkner's story is a town's critical narration of the life of Emily Grierson, one of the town's oldest citizens, who for most of her life has been kept almost hidden from the rest of the world by her wealthy Southern father. After her father's death, Emily was emotionally unstable. She is so unstable that she would not let go of her father's dead body. Shortly after her father's death she meets Homer Barron and life for Emily begins to look up because. The townspeople think that she has found a replacement for her father. However, she does not actually marry him, but instead buys arsenic and it is implied that she killed him with it. Emily continues to live in a further isolation from the rest of the world. It was later discovered when Emily passed away at the age of 74 she did indeed actually kill Homer and she was keeping his rotting corpse in bed with her.
             The damage that her father bestowed upon her by sheltering her from the rest of the world results in her incapability of coping with death, mainly that of her father. The death of Emily's father leaves her with a sense of vulnerability. She is faced with the unknown because she has never been without her father's constant control. Her father is described by the townspeople as "a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, with his back to her and clutching a horsewhip." When he died she enters into a state of confusion in which she is so afraid of being alone that the townspeople were "trying to persuade her to let them dispose of ...