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Caroline Jarvis
11 May 2017
Pettay
ENG 112

A Rose for Emily

A dead father, a dead lover, and a dead socialite. Emily Grierson, a young Southern

socialite from Mississippi, can be seen throughout the story as having a plethora of both internal

and external problems, ranging from her inability to let go of the death of her father and her

lover, to leaving her old, Victorian house in utter ruins after years of neglect due to her slowly

deteriorating mental health. A Rose for Emily is a story that details the difficult life of a young

Southern girl showing signs of both schizophrenia and depression for the majority of life, which

can be justified through her actions and personal characteristics.

Emily Grierson is a renowned member of her towns social society, though she barely

ever set a foot outside and rarely had any interactions with the town at all. The Grierson family

had dated back to 1894 and beyond, seen among town members as a tradition, a duty, and a

care. Starting off as a carefully guarded daughter to her father and slowly morphing into a

troubled, guarded recluse, she refused the modern ideas her town begins moving towards and

favored the traditions of the town instead, refusing to pay her taxes because of an exemption by

Colonel Sartoris, the previous (and deceased) mayor.

In this post-Civil War society, men were dominant, leaving women typically catering to

their every whim and playing the role of homemaker. After years of doting on her father, her

life being controlled by him, her father passed, leaving Miss Emily in a state of despair, refusing

to allow the body to be moved until two days after his passing. It was clear that Emilys father

was a dominant figure in her life, often being seen by others as a slender figure in white in the
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background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a

horsewhip. Her fathers death could likely be the event that triggers the beginning of her

suspected mental illness; after years of being guarded and protected by a father figure, she is

suddenly abandoned, leading to possible symptoms of depression and schizophrenia.

Depression is a mood disorder that affects how a person feels, thinks, and responds to

daily activities and interactions. Miss Emily shows symptoms of depression through her

irritability, her weight gain, and loss of interest in hobbies or activities, since she spends the

majority of her time indoors. While these symptoms could merely just be a part of her own

personality, most people go through depression at one point in their life, and it can occur

genetically, due to changes in brain structure, such as a chemical imbalance or life circumstances

In Ms. Emilys case, her life circumstance would be one such as the loss of a loved one, leading

to the point of her feeling depressed after the death of her father, and later on the death of her

lover, Homer Barron. Her persistent bad moods and lack of interest in activity could be observed

only after the death of her father, who she could have easily seen as the only positive figure in

her life.

Depression isnt the only illness that could be the cause of Miss Emilys mood swings

and behaviors. Schizophrenia is an illness that causes people to lose touch with reality, often

having delusions, hallucinations, and have disordered thinking and unusual behavior. It impairs

their decisions, actions, emotions, and ability to relate to others. Schizophrenia is usually an

illness seen in the late teens to early 20s for men, and late 20s to early 30s for women, due to the

fact that symptoms usually dont show up until the brain is fully or almost fully developed.

Emily exhibits symptoms of schizophrenia through her lifetime, ranging from her lack of

emotional responses and lack of ability to relate to others who live in her town, to her odd and
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peculiar ways only appearing later on in her adult life, after she experiences the trauma that is the

death of her father and later on, the death of the one man she ever had a connection with, Homer.

Her schizophrenia combined with her depression causes Miss Emily Grierson to become a

recluse, a prisoner inside her old, decaying Victorian home. Emilys reeled in personality makes

it difficult for the reader to feel any empathy towards the character, leaving her as nothing but an

old, batty woman who seemed to have murdered her ex-lover and cannot get past the death of her

father.

The presence of a mental illness would make the majority of Emilys actions throughout

the story form a connection through the simple fact that they are odd. From a logical point of

view, it seems just as if Emily had parental issues from the lack of a mother figure in her life and

the dictatorship of her father, leading to her questionable life decisions, from her reclusiveness to

the suspected murder of her lover. Why would Emily murder her lover? Though the perspective

of the reader is limited, the reader is led to assume that they had a healthy relationship, since

there is a lack of mention of any quarrels between the two lovers, leading to the question of

Homers death. In Timothy OBriens article Who Arose for Emily? from The Faulkner

Journal, OBrien suggests the title and final setting of the story, in Miss Emilys bedroom, to

imply that Homer was Emilys romantic rose, a keepsake rose; or as a memento that love once

flourished in her life (OBrien). Did Homer die a natural death, or a death caused by his

mentally unstable lover who fed him arsenic due to her delusional tendencies? Why was Emily

allowed to parade around the town without paying her taxes and to buy arsenic without

reasoning? Emily might not be the one totally at fault. The town allowed her to continue on her

path of ill behavior, allowing her to think that her actions could go without consequences, which

they did. If the town hadnt been so passive about her reckless, unsupervised lifestyle, its
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entirely possible that her mental illness could have been monitored and she would not have been

able to kill Homer Barron, nor keep his body for at least twenty years. Homer had the possibility

to live a long, happy life if it werent for Miss Emilys destructive behavior, depression, and

delusions due to suspected schizophrenia.

While, of course, Miss Emily only exhibits some of the symptoms of depression and

schizophrenia, her eccentric way of living leads the viewer to believe that there must be

something wrong with her, or something in her troubled past that would lead to her living a life

of sadness and loneliness, but not every detail of Emilys past is revealed from the outsiders

point of view. In order to fully diagnose Miss Emily with some sort of mental illness, the reader

would need to be able to get inside the mind of Miss Emily before making any assumptions on

her character. Emily could likely be sane, her actions driven by an instinct caused by her father

repressing her own feelings and emotions from a young age, or possibly an Oedipus complex

that caused her to have ill feelings towards men in her life, but these could all be signs that point

to a mentally ill woman in desperate need of help from the ignorant and passive towns people

that would prefer to look on at Miss Emilys life as if she was a woman who could not be loved

or cared for by anyone but herself and the few people that she allowed in her life.

Works Cited
Faulkner, William. A Rose for Emily. 1930.
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O'Brien, Timothy. "Who Arose for Emily?." Faulkner Journal, vol. 29, no. 1, Spring2015, pp.

101-109. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com.ezproxy.vccs.edu:2048/login.aspx?

direct=true&db=a9h&AN=121942931&site=ehost-live.