Emily Grierson also known as Miss Emily in the story “A Rose for Emily” is the main character. Miss Emily was born and raised in an aristocratic family during the civil war. In a huge mansion, Emily Grierson spent most of her life with her father and servants. As a result, the Grierson Family considered themselves superior to other people in the town. According to his father, no man was suitable for his daughter Emily. As a result of such an attitude, Emily’s father was unable to create any viable association with any other person. Her entire world revolved around her father. By examining Emily Grierson’s character and her social relationships, we can possibly diagnose her with a mental illness. Even though the people of her town never took her as insane, her actions reveal something very different. Through Miss Emily, we can argue that the community highly invests in safeguarding the identity.
Miss Emily grew up as a muted and mysterious person. At some points, she reveals the characteristics of stereotypical eccentric and unbalanced behaviour. Miss Emily comes up with her protocols for buying poison. Emily discards the laws when she declines to have a number attached to her house when instituted by the federal mail service. Her disregard for the law eventually brings about sinister consequences, as she murders a man whom she doesn’t want to abandon her.
Miss Grierson’s life has been passed by time. As a result, she stopped the passage of time. This resulted in a lot of problems in her life. First, she cannot come to terms with her father’s death. Later, she creates uneasiness in the town by declining to pay her taxes. When the taxmen go to her place to collect the taxes, she declines to pay the taxes and indicates “I got no levies in Jefferson.” This kind of arrogance is one of the main reasons she has been living in her world in a small town in Mississippi. She does not have any friends or suitors. When she was young, she never had a boyfriend. Due to their lifestyle, the townspeople viewed the Grierson family as a higher class. None of the prospects best suited miss Emily as such.
From the story, it is evident that Emily worships her father too much despite his controlling character. When the aldermen came to their house to conduct investigations regarding an odour smell coming from the house years later, this saw his notice in a place of prominence. “The portrait was placed on a gilt easel above the fireplace” The people of the town understood her worship of her father. “We knew she had to cling to what had robbed her.”
As we can see from her character, Miss Grierson grew up as the only child. The story does not mention any other siblings. The narrator tends to focus only on the extent of Emily’s worship of her father and how desolate she was when Mr. Grierson was alive. For all the evidence provided in the story, Miss Emily was completely controlled by her father until his death and even continued to be controlled by his father even in his grave.
First, his father ensured that she separated from other people in the town when he was alive, going to the extent of ensuring that she didn’t have a boyfriend, and she brought her into a life that was hard for her to escape. The plain picture we have of Miss Grierson’s father demonstrates a man who had a commanding character and was capable of extreme meanness, even towards his only daughter. Therefore, it can be indicated that Mr. Grierson is abusive to the extent that Miss Emily develops Stockholm syndrome. When her father passes away, Miss Emily never comes to terms with the fact that he’s dead. She tries hard to prevent society from taking away his body.
“Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have discovered it, and only a woman who could have believed it.”(1.3). Although the town has strived to be hard to be nice, they only try to be nice since they can’t believe that a woman of Emily Grierson’s class cannot support herself. If Emily had been allowed to work besides hosting China painting sessions –she might not have become crazy. However, society precisely aspires to keep her indoors. Even when she flirts with Homer Barron, every other person appears to be surprised. It would be surprising for Emily Grierson to marry someone well off as her. To make matters worse, When Emily is spotted buying poison, people think she may be planning to kill herself, and they can approve of such drastic actions.
However, Mist Grierson’s instabilities push her in another direction, and the end of the story indicates that she is a necrophiliac. This implies that she had a sexual attraction to dead bodies. From a wider perspective, it is a term that describes a strong desire to control other people, often in a romantic framework or deeply in a personal relationship. In most cases, necrophilia control other people, especially in their relationships eventually integrating with unresponsive entities with no resistance to dead bodies.
Work Cited
Faulkner, William, Josef Schwarz, and Zdeněk Urbánek. A rose for Emily. Paderborn, De: Verlag F. Schöningh, 1958.
