A Rose for Emily Response

I found William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily very enjoyable. I thought that the story implied the darker side of people and society in a way that I found most clever. The characteristics of A Rose for Emily all work together to bring about the ideas of how the ideals put forth by society clash with its very own inhabitants. Faulkner's story seems to focus on the aspect of society preferring to look down upon and ignore what it has dubbed as not normal. The most common cases being issues of the various internal aspects of humans. I will not use "problems" or "illnesses" for I do not feel that certain mental states can be fairly justified and proven as such. I feel that the story did an excellent job of acknowleging society's issue of neglect as a true social problem. 
I was struck specifically by the unique characters Emily Grierson and Homer Barron. These two characters show how simple similarities between people does not mean that they are totally alike. The major aspect that Emily and Homer have in common is that they are both outsiders. However, while Emily is shunned by her community due to her secretive nature, Homer's outgoing personality makes him the center of attention. Likewise, everything else about the two is different: Emily is a higher class Southern woman while Homer is a lower class man from the North. The most important difference between the two characters is revealed to be the state of their internal differences. Emily shows various time throughout the story to be a person who is insanely controlling or at least fiercly against change. As such, Emily is very resistent to the rule of authority and law. Emily refuses to give up her father's body, refuses to pay taxes, allow numbers to be put on her mailbox when the new mailing system was invented, and even tell the druggist what the poison was for as demanded by the law. Emily's desire for complete control eventually lead her to murdering Homer with poison. She keeps his body for years until her own death, supposilly even sleeping in the bed where she kept it. In this manner, Emily is not only keeping Homer from leaving her, but also allowing her to have complete control over him. Homer is revealed to be a symbol of uncontrolable change. Homer is a man of travel and does not like to stay in one place, perhaps for an implied hatred of unchanging environments that would make him feel trapped. Homer claims to be "not a marrying man" and that he "liked men" implying that Homer might be a homosexual. What William Faulkner truly intended to imply by making Homer a homosexual is not fully clear, however, it most likely was another social aspect that Faulkner felt that society looked down upon and, thus, is neglected.

Each character has an internal aspects to them that society marks as abnormal and refuses to recognize. Even though Emily lived in the same house her whole life mostly as a shut-in, she became more of a charity case than anything. Rather than completly recognizing Emily's behaviors and working to help her, the people in town mostly chose to leave her be and simply continue to refer to her as "poor Emily". Nobody even knew that she murdered Homer and kept his corpse for many years. The most they did was complain about a bad smell.