A Rose for Emily

William Faulkner's character Miss Emily Grierson in A Rose for Emily gave me mixed emotions and opinions. At times in the short story, I felt sorry for Emily. She seemed to always have her life taken right out from under her. Her father died when she was still a young woman. Then, a few years later, her sweetheart, who people thought she was going to marry, left her. The emotional toll these events took on her were horrible. She was all alone except for her servant. "After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all" (Faulkner, 283). On top of all this, the government was now trying to make her pay the taxes that had been excused from her family by the old mayor.

With this psychological grief, it is clear that Emily needed help or at least someone to talk to. She was in search of some concrete companionship. In this sense, I believe she was "crazy." From the text, the town seemed to believe so as well. No mentally sane woman would lock her lover/possible husband in the house and poison him. Not only that, but at the end of the story it says, "Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. One of us lifted something from it...we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair" (Faulkner, 289). Emily was sick in every sense of the word. Sick in terms of sleeping with a decaying man for forty years; but, she was also sick in an emotional and psychological sense. She obviously was not in her right mind, if she every had a right mind. She was deeply disturbed. I believe she only would have killed Homer Baron for the fact that he could never leave her, and he would always be in her possession.