A Rose for Emily

The end of the story makes readers horrified. But I show true sympathy for Miss Emily. Her horrifying and grotesque characteristic, I think, derives from the conflict between how she perceives herself and the way people in town look at her. She is raised in a way that makes her regard herself as of high social status, and as out of everyone's league. While the new generations of the town don't see her in the same way for she actually doesn't have money or anything else that makes her belong to high society. People don't really understand her or her behaviors.

Left practically with nothing, she struggles to maintain her image of upper classes, though everybody in the town knows that she is not. She struggles to appear glorious but reality denies her efforts. She can't stop her family and her house decaying; people want only to seek a sense of superiority to pity her instead of understanding her. This makes her pathetic. Besides, the way she refuses reality actually hurts herself. It is negative to block the outside world, to ignore the changes, like putting her hands over ears so as not to listen and thinks as if the world will not change as long as she doesn't change. She is in such a fear so she chooses not to accept changes and realities. She has no choice but to stubbornly repeat her own inconvincible argumentations.

I think Faulkner wishes us to see her as a tragedy because Emily is not accepted, even isolated by the whole town. The narrator uses 'we' all the time, clearly standing for a group of people in town, not an individual. It's like Miss Emily is one part of the town, and all the rest are the other part. People never approve of what she does, but they don't even bother correcting her behaviors. She makes an effort to adjust to reality, so she dates Homer Barron, but is judged as disgraceful by the ladies and they ask Emily's cousins to do something. Also, when complaints are made about the smell, the aldermen simply sprinkle lime themselves. And I am wondering will it be possible that people always know that she kills Homer Barron but pretend that they don't? Because it is not hard to link the facts that he was last seen in her house, she bought the arsenic but didn't kill herself and the bad smell lasted for a week or two.