Death and Dust in “A Rose for Emily”
The short story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner has many themes and symbolism. Miss Emily Grierson, the main character, is a strange lady. She is very withdrawn from society and definitely shows signs of mental illness even though the town seems to deny it. The fact that Miss Emily had a mental illness that was brought on by her seclusion from society and her neediness for a father figure may be why she never left the house and tried to keep her father’s dead body with her. Miss Emily may have murdered her boyfriend Homer because he was not the marrying kind and it was too much for her disordered mind to take. The theme of the death and dust that hangs and surrounds Emily, Her character having a mental illness and The surrounding questions to Homer’s disappearance.
Emily lets death hang over her. She pretends to deny death itself. She has a strange affiliation with the dead bodies of the men she loved. She shows this obsessive behavior when her father died, “She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body” (Faulkner 34). She gave up her father’s body after the community kept pestering her to let them dispose of it properly. She let them but did not want them to. The dust also hangs over in this short story. With it in Miss Emily’s house, it is like a protective seal from outside barriers and keeps things in a state of misuse and decay. When the alderman came to Emily’s house to discuss the tax payment he thought “It smelled of dust and disuse a close, dank smell” (Faulkner 32). The alderman sat on the leather furniture and a cloud of dust rose from it and his thighs and showed in the ray of the sun (Faulkner 32). The dust seems to be everywhere. Like Emily’s house is fading or decaying away much like the woman is. The dust can also represent the decay of Homer’s corpse, “And upon him and upon...