English 68

The title of the short story a Rose for Emily represents the theme of death. A rose is seen as an
object of beauty and is known to wither throughout time. Emily was seen as the rose in the short story,
she was an object of beauty and desire that eventually withered and died. In the beginning of the story
she is well respected. After the death of her father and the disappearance of her love, Homer the town
people start to feel sorry for her. There is no sign of life around her house. After her father dies she
hardly ever comes out and is left alone. Her father's death gives her the liberation to be able to date and
fall in love. She is involved with a homosexual by the name of Homer that doesn't want to marry her,
and perhaps because of that she kills him by poisoning him and sleeps with his corpse. Death was not
the greatest loss in her life. The greatest loss in her life was what died inside of her while she lived. Emily
becomes a prisoner of the Old South while she refuses to acknowledge the new world around her.   She
buries herself in time through physical appearance, her treatment of others, and her desperate attempt
to keep her world intact within her domestic prison by keeping Homers Corpse in her house.  
Emily's physical appearance is buried in time. Once she had been a beautiful woman, who later
becomes obese and bloated. "She looked bloated, like a body longed submerged in motionless water,
and of that pallid hue" (pg.161). She is described as a "fallen monument" (pg 160), to suggest her former
grandeur and her ugliness that came later in the story. She was a monument an ideal of past values, but
fallen because she had shown herself vulnerable to death and decay. Like a rose she decays and loses
her beauty.   Emily isolated herself into a world of loneliness. "When we next saw Emily, she had grown
fat and her hair was turning gray"(pg.165) .She had lost her sense of belonging and caring. It was  
evident she was depressed...