A Rose for Emily Research Paper Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1750 words

A Rose for Emily - Research Paper Example Emily in her course of life lost her father and lover and was living an aloof life. We have sympathy for Emily but cannot really have a deep visual about her life. Anyway, it was obvious from her life that she had spent a tragic life mainly filled with skepticism and tragedy (Thesis). Emily has never lived an independent life. All she had was poverty and the house that her father left before his death. Emily was always under the control of her father and did not find a suitable partner to live with. Her father always wanted to control her and in this struggle she was left all alone after her father’s death. After her father’s death she was not paying tax and she kept herself away from the township. Later she met Homer and fell in love with him, but killed him with arsenic and continued to keep his rotten body with her. Describing the poverty of Emily The poverty of Emily is described here with the criticism from various authors and each one is as follows. 1) Father†™s hidden body From my analysis of the short story â€Å"A Rose for Emily†, we may gauge the character of her as a psychopath. She is definitely a case of mentally unstable woman, and people did not have much connection with her, hence none could acknowledge her disorder. This is the understanding of mine and this thought of mine is similar to that of the criticism of Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren. Both of these authors conducted an evaluation of the story of Faulkner and claimed that Emily is a pathological case. A normal person would not hide the body of another person from the public sight. The stench coming from home could be that of her father’s hidden dead body. She loved her father as they shared a nice and warm relationship with each other and she was barely able to accept her father’s death. She loved him because he provided for her life and comforted her and also handed over the house to her. However, both authors feel that the story lacks ju stification and meaning as Faulkner was only keen on narrating the psychopath nature of Emily. It is a fact what authors have said because even I feel that the story looks incomplete in some way. According to Brooks and Warren, â€Å"Miss Emily is obviously a pathological case. The narrator indicates plainly enough that people felt that she was crazy.† Emily here does not have an identity or characterization since the author intends mainly to portray her as a victim of the dominating world of men. 2) Homosexual Homer Emily loved Homer and her character evoked piety and sympathy from her contemporaries. Emily killed Homer just after one year of their alleged love relationship. She sleeps with the dead body of Homer, which is rotting in the bed in a room upstairs. Here we can perceive the state of Emily as abnormal, where she is mentally disordered and shows signs of a pathological condition. Here we can understand that Emily killed Homer because he was a homosexual. She believ ed that Homer was still alive and for that reason she hugs his decayed body and sleeps. She killed Homer because she could not accept the fact that he was homosexual. According to critic Ray West, Homer was an unheroic figure and Emily had a resisting quality which can be mentioned as â€Å"heroic.† According to West< â€Å"Her tragic flaw is the conventional pride: she undertook to regulate the natural time-universe.† Emily never wanted the time to move on as she wished to cuddle up with the body of her dead lover. The Barron Homer and Emily did have an affair