A Rose for Emily

I enjoyed reading the short story "A Rose for Emily". Although it was at times hard to follow along with the story due to it not being told in chronological order, in the end it all came together well. I put together a timeline of the events that were important to aid me in putting the story together piece by piece. Miss Emily represents an elder in a community that people are taught to respect because of her status, even though the townspeople don't think very highly of her. It seems as though she thinks that she is better than the rest of the citizens due to her family being of greater descent. People still look down on her perhaps due to jealousy, even though they claim to pity her. "At last they could pity Miss Emily. Being left alone and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less."(pp. 26) They seem to pick out the bad in her, and point out her flaws. Because this story is told by a towns person, that seems to be the theme of the story. I think that Miss Emily missed out on a life due to her father, and after his passing she tried to make up for everything he kept from her. When Homer refused to marry her, "he was not a marrying mad"(pp. 43), she wouldn't take no for an answer. This is why she poisoned him, to keep him with her forever. That way Homer could never leave her, as the other men in her life had. Even with his death, she had him in her bed, his lifeless body rotting beside her. The foreshadow of his death started in paragraph 15, with the smell shortly after her "sweetheart went away". And yet even as he lay dead and rotting, she slept beside him, perhaps in embrace the way she did the night she poisoned him. Her love for him outlasted his death, as he was in "the long sleep that outlasts love". (pp. 59)