Analysis of "A Rose for Emily"

Analysis of "A Rose for Emily"

  • Submitted By: huntress016
  • Date Submitted: 11/08/2010 10:34 AM
  • Category: English
  • Words: 789
  • Page: 4
  • Views: 2

A Rose for Emily is a macabre and twisted short story, and tells of the lonely existence of one Emily Grierson, a woman whose chances of finding a suitor in her early years (when she was still considered vibrant and beautiful) were thwarted by her controlling father. After his demise her mental state started to decay, as evident when she refuses to acknowledge her father’s death until three days after. The solitude that he enforced upon her was so strong that even in his death he could force her into being a submissive hermit from the world and progress. Eventually, Emily breaks through her isolation just long enough to meet a man, one Homer Barron. Soon after Emily decides to buy arsenic and, when questioned of its use, gives no reply to the druggist. The town is certain that she intends to kill herself, as her cousins keep blocking her attempts to be with Homer. Later in the story we find is real and horrific use.
The theme of decay is a major theme throughout the story, both physically and mentally. The old ways are dying out, the old town is dissolving into the new, even the Grierson home is becoming stooped and rotted (almost as if its own frame is mimicking Emily’s own physical decline). The most important decay in the story is Emily’s mental state. Whether it be from loneliness, heredity, or mistreatment by the hands of her father, Emily’s mind suffers. She even goes so far as to kill her courter and keep his body in their ‘marriage’ bed which, in an ironic twist, also serves as a deathbed. In her mind she created a fantasy of never ending love in which Barron would never leave her as her father had. Even in her older age she would still lie next to his bones in a skeletal embrace. Her lover decayed, the old negro helper decayed (along with his voice that was “harsh and rusty with disuse”), her mind had long ago decayed, and now Emily’s own body will join everything else. The last holdout from a bygone era that, maybe, should have learned to let go a...

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