A Rose for Emily

             In the story A Rose for Emily, Homer Barron was the foreman of a construction company. He was also the first real change Emily ever experienced. The town around her was advancing with the times, illustrated by the "garages and cotton gins" that had "encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood", yet Emily's weathered house stood there unchanged. "The new generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town" and yet Emily still maintained her ironclad grasp on the past and the way things used to be.
             Emily's relationship with the middle class Homer was looked down upon with some people saying that, "even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige". Yet this relationship seemed to set her free of her hermit-like lifestyle. People began to see Homer and Emily on "Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable". It almost looked as if Emily might finally release her grip on the past and begin to move forward in life.
             When it seemed that Homer left to see another woman, Emily was pushed back into her reclusive self. That along with the fact that Homer admitted to not being a "marrying man" drove her near to the point of insanity. Emily was then seen purchasing arsenic from a drug store. One night Homer returned to Emily's house. "And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron. And of Miss Emily for some time".
             Throughout the story we find that Emily is a woman trapped in the past. Every time it seemed she might escape from her false sense of reality something in her life comes crashing down. Faulkner at the end suggests that Emily turned her house into a tomb, "she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house" to further prevent the present and the future from interfering with her life. "Then
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A Rose for Emily. (1969, December 31). In MegaEssays.com. Retrieved 09:30, March 28, 2024, from https://www.megaessays.com/viewpaper/84416.html