William Faulkner was born in New Albany, Mississippi, in 1897. One of the twentieth century’s greatest writers, Faulkner earned his fame from a series of novels that explored the South’s historical legacy, its fraught and often tensely violent present, and its uncertain future. Faulkner won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1949 and the Pulitzer Prize in both 1955 and 1962. He died in Byhalia, Mississippi on July 6, 1962, at the age of sixty-four.
“A Rose for Emily” was Faulkner’s first short story published in a major magazine. The story tells about the life Emily has gone through. When she’s young, her father holds the major authority that she has no freedom to choose her own life partner. After her father dies, she meets Homer Barron and falls in love with him. Unfortunately, Homer cuts clear that he is not a marrying man. Her heart is broken. She remains single since then. Forty years passes, on her funeral, townspeople find out that Homer’s corpse is in her house. They also discover Emily’s hair on the pillow.
From the story, people believe that Emily is a victim. She is controlled by his father during her youth. Her father drives away every young man who comes to propose her. This is because she is weak and she is unwilling to take a stand against her father in life. After her father’s death, she eventually can seek for her love freely. She meets Homer Barron and they have a romantic relationship. But when everybody in town believes that she’s going to marry him, Homer disappears. Again, she’s a victim in relationship for being jilted by her lover. She’s a victim throughout her life for being lonely, friendless, urged to pay taxes and people even complain her for the smell in her house.
However, I don’t see her as a victim. She is a murderer instead. She hates her father and decides to kill her father for controlling her too much until no man dares to approach her. Later, she falls in love with Homer but Homer jilts her and leaves the town. Her love turns into hatred. She wants to take revenge. So she invites Homer to her house and poisons him with arsenic chemical. Thirty years after both men she loves die, she can hardly get any man to love her anymore. She, like her great aunt, has gone completely crazy at last. She commits suicide. She has kept companion with Homer long enough. It’s time for her to say goodbye to her lover. There are too many evidences showing that Emily is killing people and therefore it is my belief that Emily is a murderer.
My first supporting point is Emily kills her own father. When we look into the issue seriously, her father’s death is only mentioned in Section II of the story, but it never mention about how he is dead. The readers only know that “When her father died, it got about that the house was all that was left to her…” and “The day after his death all the ladies prepared…” There’s a big question mark here. Why does the author not indicate he’s died of illness? Or perhaps an accident? This is just so obvious that he’s killed by his own daughter, Emily.
As we all know well, “A Rose for Emily” tells of family history of insanity. “People in our town, remembering how old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last, believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were.” Emily’s father should have known their family history of insanity long time ago. And he must have discovered this sickness in Emily since young. Out of love and over protection, he purposely creates a perfect image of Emily so that no man can match her and no man will court her. He knew if any man hurts Emily’s heart, she could do anything, like killing herself, out in despair.
But, he would never know that everything he does is not appreciated by Emily. Emily blames him for forbidding her to seek for her true love. Out of anger, she kills her own father accidentally. Another proves of her possibility of killing her father is Emily shows signs of a mental collapse when her father passed away. From “She told them that her father was not dead”, we know that She couldn’t believe that she really kills her father. She doesn’t mean to kill him. She keeps his body in her house for three days and did not show any sign of grief. She thought he will be alive and healthy again. Until the day she finds out that she’s the real murderer, she falls sick for a long time and cuts her hair short.
Now I will move to my second supporting point. Emily kills Homer Barron. Emily feels hatred toward Homer for humiliating her. Emily wants revenge as the thorns of the rose appear inside her. But this time, she does it with plans. Firstly, she goes to buy arsenic. “I want the best you have. I don't care what kind” shows how insisted she is. Secondly, Miss Emily “had been to the jeweler’s and ordered a man’s toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece” and “had bought a complete outfit of men’s clothing, including a nightshirt,” although plans to kill Homer, she wants to keep him with her. It might not be possible for them to get married; at least she can “own” him in her own way.
Next, Homer Barron is most probably killed in Emily’s house as “A neighbor saw the Negro man admit him at the kitchen door at dusk one evening.” It comes to the most interesting part where town people break down the door of the locked room for forty year, “The man himself lay in the bed”. It is the corpse of Homer Barron! Last, that is where “the smell” comes from: two years after her father’s death and a short time after Homer deserts her. It is that time Homer got killed and his rotted body releases the smell.
My final supporting point is a cruel one. Emily kills herself. I can’t deny that it could happen the same thing on Emily as well like how “old lady Wyatt, her great-aunt, had gone completely crazy at last”. She has killed two men who she loves the most and she has kept Homer with her long enough. She loves no one else and nobody will love her in return. She lost hope throughout these years. It’s time for her to end her life but she doesn’t know how. The only way is to commit suicide.
Although there’s a part telling us Emily “fell ill in the house”, it shows uncertainty. The town people “did not even know she was sick”. Emily’s death happens in the house, people will only know if the people inside the house tell them the news. But think in depth, townspeople actually never receive any news from Tobe, the Negro maid and the only one staying with Emily in the house. You see, they “had long since given up trying to get any information from the Negro”. And that he “talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.” If Tobe talks to nobody, and townspeople never ask Tobe, how do townspeople know Emily is died of illness? And so I believe Emily kills herself, most probably using arsenic as well. She chooses to die comfortably “in a heavy walnut bed”. If she wants to stay alive, she should have gone to hospital for further medication.
From all the evidences mentioned above, I believe that Emily is indeed a murderer. She kills her father to gain freedom on her own marriage. Later when Homer does not offer to marry her, she loses hope. She does not want to be abandoned again, so she kills him and keeps him in her room for the rest of her life. She also has a family history of being crazy. She is totally insane that she ends her own life eventually. I suggest she deserves a jail sentence instead of a rose.
