William Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" portrays Emily Grierson's decline
into insanity. Emily lives in the small town of Jefferson where the people of the town have
the need to peer into her life with a magnifying glass. Despite their insatiable curiosity
about her life, they don't know as much as they think they know about Emily. They seem
unaware of her desire to make time stand still in her life and how her attempts to do so
Emily first shows signs of this obsession and hints that she is crazy when her father
dies. For three days she denies that her father has died, but finally gives into persuasion
and allows him to be buried. He was all she had and so she wants to keep him there with
her. Her father kept her isolated from others in the town and even her relatives, making
him the only person she really knows and loves. In order for her not to face the fact that
she is alone, she tries to keep his body . She would try to stop time itself to keep from
being alone. The townspeople make excuses for her action and despite their statements
that they "did not say she was crazy then," they were certainly aware that her behavior
Soon after her father's death, Emily begins a relationship with Homer Barron who,
like her father becomes her only companion and she will not sit idly by as time takes him
away as well. Emily, it seems, would like to marry Homer. She buys the man's silver
toilet set and the men's clothing as wedding gifts for him and even decorates an upstairs
room in her house as a honeymoon suite. However, when the townspeople open up this
room they find a grim surprise - Homer's body and the evidence that Emily had slept with
the body over the years. Emily had killed Homer because she knew, despite what the
townspeople thought, that Homer was "not a marrying man" and would leave her and
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