Miss Emily’s Real Identity
In the story A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, Miss Emily Grierson is a single woman who has been shut off from society her entire life by her father. When he dies, her life crumbles and she is ultimately driven mad. Miss Emily is a very complex person, and this complexity is evident in every aspect of her character – from her physical appearance to her thoughts, feelings, actions, and relationships.
When it comes to Emily’s physical appearance, she is not just a basic character with basic features. The imagery in this story is amazing; Faulkner paints a vivid picture of every aspect of Miss Emily’s appearance that allows readers to see everything he writes.
When Faulkner describes her characteristics, it seems as if he is describing a lifeless body. He states, “She appeared bloated, resembling a body that had been submerged in still water for a long time and had taken on that pale hue. (595)” This suggests that she looks like a corpse; pale and swollen. When discussing her facial features, one can picture a snowman. He writes “Her eyes resembled two small pieces of coal embedded in dough (595)” which brings to mind the eyes of a snowman but when he mentions the word dough, it is easy to visualize.
When he writes, her eyes were lost in fatty ridges of her face,” it makes one think that she is either old or has aged with stress (which is likely) since another word for ridges is wrinkles. Another way he explains her is as having a small skeleton, which he says makes her look obese instead of just plump. This just means she was short, but if she were tall, she would not look as big as she did. When the Board of Aldermen visited her house, they described her as if in mourning. She was dressed in all black with a thin gold chain and had a cane with an old gold head.
Labeling Emily with wrinkles and a cane makes one believe she is older. Overall, Emily is a short, fat woman who dresses like an elderly person. She is surrounded by history and lives in a house that reflects her age. Faulkner describes the house as a mansion set on one of the nicest streets: It was a big, quarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had been our most select street” (595). While the street has changed over time due to garages and cotton gins encroaching on it, Miss Emily’s house remains standing. The story takes place in Jefferson, a small town in the late 1860s just after the Civil War when gossip and trouble are rampant. Due to her actions, Miss Emily leads readers to believe she may be a necrophiliac – someone who sleeps with dead bodies whether sexually or non-sexually. The first thing readers notice is her refusal to give up her father’s body for three days: “She told them her father was not dead. She did that for three days” (597). While this seems odd at first glance, it becomes clear that their relationship was unusual as he controlled every aspect of her life even after his death.
In the story A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, Miss Emily Grierson is portrayed as a single woman who has been shut off from society her entire life by her father. It is rather odd that her mother is not mentioned at all in the story. Mr. Grierson raised Emily on his own, away from all of her relatives who lived somewhere in Alabama and had nothing to do with her except for two girl cousins who appear twice in the story.
The townspeople express their sympathy towards Emily saying, “Poor Emily. Her kinsfolk should come to her. She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them (598).” For a year after Mr. Grierson’s death, she lives alone with an old Negro servant living with her until she meets Homer Barron.
Homer courts Emily but does not want to marry her which angers and triggers the deeper insane side of Miss Emily causing her to become consumed in finding love no matter what limits she has to cross. She buys arsenic at a local drug store and poisons Homer while indulging in Necrophilia once more.
When Miss Emily dies, the entire town comes out of curiosity including the two cousins mentioned earlier who waited forty years before opening an upstairs door that was never seen until “she was decently in the ground (600).” Faulkner wrote this line almost as if showing uncertainty or more importantly certainty about what happened inside that room.
In conclusion, Miss Emily’s insane side completely takes over leading to strange actions like buying “man’s toilet things backed with tarnished silver (600)” and a men’s tuxedo as if hinting at marrying them. Throughout the story, it becomes evident that Miss Emily is a very complex person whose physical appearance, thoughts, feelings, actions and relationships are all intertwined.
