in white in the foreground, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.

So repressed is and sheltered in the life of the Old South's gentry is Emily that, when the old gentleman dies, the townspeople believe that Miss Emily has become humanized as she, too, would "know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny..."  But, when the ladies of the town visit her, they find no trace of grief on her face, and she denies that her father has died. This macabre denial of Emily's continues for three days, even as doctors used their persuasive powers upon her. Finally, she breaks down and allows the authorities to bury her father. Desperately, Miss Emily of the Southern aristocracy has tried to "cling to that which had robbed her, as people will." So, she dresses with the watch and fob of her father on her, a reminder of the many times that her father ran off her gentlemen callers. But, when Homer Barron, a Northerner and a common laborer arrives in town, Emily rides on Sundays with him to the dismay of the older people who remark, "Poor Emily...." Nevertheless, Emily

demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson.

And, when Homer attempts to leave her and take from her this dignity. Emily stops him; she will not be denied. And, so, she dies, dies in her "inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse" world in her house filled with "dust and shadows" with a lonely stand of iron-grey hair upon a second pillow next to the skeletal remains of a man.

Miss Emily Grierson has changed from a repressed, young Southern lady, to a recluse, to a mockery of what she once was, to a ghost. And, it is for this tragic ghost that the author William Faulkner wrote that he named his story "A Rose for Emily" because

here was a woman who had had a tragedy... this was a salute... to a woman you would hand a rose.

Miss Emily's character in A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner is described in part by the narrator's description of her role in the town:

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town . . .

She is of the old southern aristocracy, and her character is dominated by pride in her family and class and love for and adherence to Southern tradition, of a sort that was disappearing. As a female, she regarded making a good marriage as part of her role. She saw being jilted as dishonorable, and because honor was a central part of her character, saw murder as less shameful than dishonor.

William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is a masterful short story.  Miss Emily Grierson, the protagonist, becomes an icon and celebrity in her home town of Jefferson, Mississippi.  She was a relic from the Old South when ladies were cherished and protected. 

Emily had been protected by her father while he was alive.  Thinking that no man was good enough for her, he drove all her gentleman callers away. When her father died, Emily was over thirty years old  and discovered that he had left her nothing except the house. Unable to let her father go, she would not let them take her father for three days after he died.   

The townspeople knew there had been insanity in the family, but they would not admit that anything was really wrong with Emily. Unfortunately for Emily, her father had left her penniless;  however, Emily had the strength to survive. Of course, she still had Tobe the black servant to help her. 

Two years after her father died, her fiancee deserted her.  Each time one of these tragedies happened to Emily, she would retreat inside her house and not be seen for several months. 

When next Emily was seen, Homer Barron had come to town to help with the construction of the town's sidewalks.  Homer was a yankee and a self-described homosexual.  Still, every Sunday, he and Emily would go for buggy rides. Gossip ran rampant through the town: what were they doing on those buggy rides?

She carried her head high enough--even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson...

Insinuating that there was more going on than just buggy rides did not bother Emily. She was above all of that.   Her cousins came, and they were convinced that Emily and Homer were going to be married.

Homer left for a while. When he was gone, Emily seemed to prepare for the wedding.

We learned that Miss Emily had been to the jeweler's and ordered a man's toilet set in silver, with the letters H. B. on each piece. Two days later she had bought a complete outfit of men's clothing, including a nightshirt.

Surprisingly, Emily buys arsenic and refuses to tell why she needed it. No one needed to know Emily's business. Homer was seen going in the back door of Emily's house and was never seen again.

Next, the neighbors complain about a terrible odor coming from Emily's house. The men of the town sneak around and put lime around her house to get rid of the smell. Emily watches them do it from an upstairs window.

Again, Emily is not seen for a long time.  The new generation of council men come to collect the taxes from her. She is now completely gray haired and heavy. She does not offer the men seats nor does she admit that she owes taxes. Emily refers them to Colonel Satoris who has been dead for several years. 

Emily dies in a downstairs chair at the age of 74.  The cousins bury her two days later.  After the funeral, Tobe lets the women into the house and goes out the back door never to be seen again. The women are there to snoop.  They break down the upstairs bedroom door.  There they find a man's skeleton dressed in a nightshirt. On the pillow next to him is one gray hair.

Emily Grierson found a way to keep her man.  Her father prevented her happiness while he was alive, but how does she survive once he is gone?  Secretive, clever, and insane--those were the qualities that kept Miss Emily going.

In "A Rose for Emily," Emily is a complex character, and we can discern several of her important characteristics from Faulkner's descriptions.

One of the first things we learn about Emily is that she is stubborn. After her father dies, town authorities approach her to try to persuade her to pay taxes. However, no matter how much they insist, she refuses, claiming that a former mayor of the town has exempted her from taxation.

Emily is insecure and reclusive. After her father dies, she retreats into her house and stays there, except for a brief interlude during which she goes for buggy rides with Homer Barron. After she kills Barron, she remains in the house for the rest of her life.

Emily is mentally unstable. We see this first when she initially refuses to give up her father's body after he dies. This becomes even more obvious when we learn that she has killed Barron, presumably because he was going to break up with her and move away.

Emily is murderous. Most women, of course, would be sad and depressed if their boyfriend announced his intention to leave. However, they would not resort to killing him and then sleeping with his dead body.

Finally, Emily is proud and duplicitous. She covers up the murder she has committed with an attitude of haughtiness.

Emily's secret in Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" is that she apparently poisons Homer and keeps the body in her upstairs bed.  What's worse, the hair the men find at the end of the story matches Emily's, which means that she has been sleeping next to the corpse. 

Homer disappears from the town years before Emily dies and the corpse is discovered, but everyone simply thinks that Homer sneaked away because he didn't want to marry Emily. 

Emily's secret is easily kept because the narrator can only reveal what the townspeople experience from the outside of the house.  Since no one ever goes upstairs in the house, no one knows Emily's secret. 

Emily's secret was found in her bedroom.  She had presumably killed Homer Barron all those years ago and left him to rot in bed.  But not only that, she was sleeping next to him every night since she killed him.  That's a pretty major secret!

To see this, look at the last four paragraphs of the story (one is just one sentence).  You can see that his corpse is there, kind of fused to the bed.  And we know that she was sleeping next to him because there was a dent in the pillow and one of her hairs.

What Emily inherits from her father that most affects her adult life is her attitude about her position in society.  As a Grierson, her father was considered to be of the elite class in Jefferson, and as such, her father didn't think that any of the young men where "quite good enough for Miss Emily."  The townspeople pictured Emily and her father as a portrait with her father in completely dominant position at the forefront of the picture, and Emily, barely visible behind him.  The superior attitude and the subsequent behavior leave Emily alone after her father's death, and she is more desparate than ever to keep Homer, so she takes the ultimate control and kills him and then keeps his body in the upstairs bed chamber. 

Ironically, the only thing she actually inherits is the house they lived in and little to no money, so she is actually not the most wealthy or elite person in town, and is now at the mercy of the town elders, who for the most part treat her with the respect her father deserved, but that too isolates her and makes her take her desparate actions.

Miss Emily has no close friends and she rarely leaves her house except during the short time that she was being courted by Homer Barron. We do know that many people in Jefferson think that

... the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were.

People in Jefferson thought of her as a "fallen monument" and a "curiosity."

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town...

When the authorities came to her home to collect back taxes, she was rude and unfriendly, ordering her servant, Tobe, to show them the way out. Others were happy that she had become "humanized" after her father's death, and they "felt sorry for her" after the episode of "the smell." The townspeople knew that insanity ran in the family, but

We did not say she was crazy then.

When Emily began seeing Homer, some people were happy for her, but they soon began whispering that "she was fallen." They believed that she

... demanded more than ever the recognition of the dignity of being the last Grierson...

Yet they held out hope that she would eventually persuade Homer to marry her. But when the two were seen, unchaperoned, on Sundays, the believed that

... it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people.

Following her death, she was remembered fondly by the older members of the town,

... talking as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing they had danced with her and courted her, perhaps.

This is an interesting question because although Miss Emily might be considered a "strong" person in lots of ways in the story, it is clear that her "strength" is also linked to a crucial weakness, which is her tendency to retreat from a reality that we are not comfortable with into a former world or a fantasy world where we get everything our own way. Consider in the first section how she greets the Alderman and then deals with them, insisting that she will not pay taxes:

She did not ask them to sit. She just stood in the door and listened quietly until the spokesman came to a stumbling halt. Then they could hear the invisible watch ticking at the end of the gold chain.

Her voice was dry and cold. "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves."

She is clearly a "strong" character in the way that she is able to face down the authority represented in the alderman - she will not suffer fools gladly. It is clear however that this "strength" as illustrated here is likewise a weakness, for it is indicative of the way that Miss Emily has retreated into her own world and will not let reality enter. Note the reference in the first paragraph of the quote above to the "invisible watch," reinforcing the idea that Miss Emily is linked with the inexorable passage of time. It is as if she keeps her own time regardless of the rest of the world, and thus can talk as if Colonel Sartoris is still in power, whilst the text tells us that he died ten years ago.

When Emily Grierson was young, her father drove away all of the young men who showed an interest in her, and the people in the town believed that "she would have to cling to that which robbed her, as people will." When he passed away, she would or could not accept it, and she told everyone that he had not died. For three days, she stuck to this story, until, finally, when the town ministers and doctors were about to force their way into her home, she allowed them to take the body. However, "she broke down" when they took him. She seems helpless and weak.

When Homer Barron, a construction foreman, comes to town, Emily seems to take up with him, beginning a relationship. He is someone who her father would have found entirely unsuitable—he's a laborer, he's dark complected, and he's from the North. Emily seems to have chosen someone who is the exact opposite of who her father would have chosen, and this makes it seem like she's trying to punish her father, though he's dead, for his responsibility in her sorrowful solitude. Homer, however, is "not a marrying man," and so Emily, rather than allow him to leave her, as all the other suitors and her father did, kills him in order to keep him. While this isn't healthy behavior, we can see that Emily does gain some agency, she takes things into her own hands—having had everything done for her when her father was alive—and she makes her own decisions. Again, they aren't necessarily good decisions, but they show a change in her: she was once willing to be ruled, but she changes into someone who rules instead.

In William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," Emily changes only superficially.  In fact, one of the traits that makes Emily what she is is her inability to change. 

Emily is a character raised in the ante-bellum South who is trying to hold on to her pre-civil war world.  She even refuses to have a mail box installed.  She won't let go of her father when he dies until she is forced, just as she won't let go of Homer.  If she changes, the change is only that she gets better at holding on to what she wants to hold on to.  She understands that Homer is not the settling down type, so she makes a preemptive strike, if you will, and poisons him so that she can keep him with her forever.  And she manages to keep it a secret. 

She succeeds (by holding on to Homer), where she had failed with her father.

"Emily is born to a proud, aristocratic family sometime during the Civil War; her life in many ways reflects the disintegration of the Old South during the Reconstruction and the early twentieth century." 

Miss Emily's character can best be described as eccentric, not crazy enough to be in a mental institution, but someone who acts outside the mainstream of thought.  For example, when her father dies, she does not want to bury him, she does not want to let him go even though he is dead. 

Another characteristic that I would attribute to Miss Emily is that of desperation.  She is driven by emotions that cause her to feel desperate.  For example, she begins taking rides in her carriage with Homer Barron, the Yankee who arrives in town to work, but when he informs her that he is not a marrying man, she resorts to desperate measures, she poisons him.

By the time she dies, I would say that Emily has crossed the line from eccentric to mentally unstable.  The proof of this lies in the fact that she has slept next to the corpse of Homer Barron all these years.

Sleeping next to a dead body crosses the line into insanity.   

In William Faulkner`s A Rose for Emily, the protagonist, Miss Emily, is defined both in her own behaviour and in the way she is viewed by the older generation in the town, by her patrician background. Class, in this story as in many of Faulkner`s other works, has a major influence on the way people think and act. On the one hand, by virtue of her class, Miss Emily has a sense of entitlement (e.g. not paying taxes), but on the other hand, despite her background giving her a certain authority and freedom of action (she sees no need to pay attention to the opinions of those she considers inferior), her class background constrains her actions, in the types of people with whom she can associate and her sense of what constitutes proper behaviour, so, for example, by the code of her class background, killing an errant lover is not half as improper as taking a regular job in a shop.

Emily Grierson is characterized as a sort of "fallen monument" after her death. She has been such a fixture in the town for so long, such a representative of a bygone era, that people seem to have a hard time imagining life without her there in her big, elaborate house. The narrator says that she "had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town." In fact, a nineteenth century mayor had once concocted an elaborate story simply so Miss Emily would not have to pay any taxes, as a sort of sign of respect to her late father and her own ladylike self. 

Later, when a horrible smell begins to emanate from Emily's home, town leaders cannot bring themselves to approach her openly about the smell, so they sneak onto her property at night to sprinkle lime into her cellars, dealing with it themselves. They do not want to have to talk to "a lady" about her smelling bad. Even then, she sits in her window, "her upright torso motionless as that of an idol." Again, she is compared to some kind of statue or carving: like a monument, she is still and rigid. Further, when a new generation comes up and tries to collect taxes, a few words from Miss Emily is enough to turn them away, disappointed but unwilling to press the matter any more. She is characterized as rather tough and stubborn, as well as quite intimidating. Even when people feel sorry for her because of her status as an old maid, or as a potentially insane person, she still manages to command respect.

Emily is from a proud Southern family. Her father is most responsible for shaping her character. He won't allow any men to date his daughter because he thinks none of them are good enough. Her father becomes the only person in her life. When he dies, she's so upset that she won't allow anyone to take his body out of the house for three days. At this point, Emily shuts herself off from the town for most of her life. Then she meets Homer Barron, a Yankee foreman who is paving the streets of the town. He is the only person Emily allows in her life. She takes buggy rides with him, and the town's ladies look down on her for her relationship with Homer. They never marry, and the narrator suggests that Emily is driven to murder because she's afraid Homer will leave her.

Regarding her taxes, Emily's father leaves her without any money, so Colonel Sartoris, the former mayor of the town, decides the town will take on the responsibility of paying her taxes to keep her from being embarrassed. Later in the story, new leaders of the town try to collect taxes from Emily and go to her house. Emily tells the men to talk to Sartoris, who has been dead for almost ten years. She sends the men away and gives them nothing.

"A Rose for Emily" begins with a sense of mystery. It begins with the death of our title character, Emily Grierson.  In fact, the audience learns that "Miss Emily" has been a mystery to the town for the years leading up to her death.  Her death gave the people in the town the chance to look into her house and look for answers to questions they've had for years. 

At the beginning we learn that her house had been nice, years ago, but years of disrepair have left the house, and its inhabitant to fall apart and become an eyesore.  Her taxes are also a mystery.  Tax records show that in 1894 mayor, Colonel Sartoris, remitted her taxes for an unknown reason.  Future mayors have trouble getting her to pay after this.

The opening gives many questions about Emily. This technique draws the reader in to continue reading to understand more bout her.

NECROPHILIAC TENDENCY.  The surprising resting place of Homer Barron was not the first instance of Emily's handling of the bodies of men who were close to her. She had also held on to her father's corpse for several days until forced to surrender it by the authorities (though there is no evidence of sexual misconduct in this case).

IMPERIOUS ATTITUDE.  Miss Emily's unfriendly and haughty behavior always seemed to indicate that she considered herself better than the other residents of Jefferson.

HAIR.  Emily's hair is mentioned often--long, short, graying, iron-gray--and it becomes even more significant in the final scene.

ISOLATION FROM SOCIETY.  Emily was never a social butterfly, but her withdrawal into the hidden sanctity of her home confounded her neighbors. Rarely seen after Homer's disappearance, her decision to hide inside becomes more understandable in the final scene.