Emily in "A Rose for Emily"

Whatever respects the story creates for Emily cannot be the result of her actions. Surely there can be no convincing excuse made for murder and necrophilia; there is nothing to praise about what she does. Instead, the tribute comes in the form of how her story is told rather than what we are told about her. To do this Faulkner uses a narrator who tells Emily's story in such a way as to maximize our sympathy for her. The grim information about Emily's "iron-gray hair" on the pillow is withheld until the very end not only to produce a surprise but to permit the reader to develop a sympathetic understanding of her before we are shocked and disgusted by her necrophilia.Significantly, the narrator begins the story with Emily's death rather than homer's. Though a number of studies discuss the story's narrator (see, for example, Kempton' Sullivan; and Watkins), Terry Heller's is one of the most comprehensive in its focus on the narrator's effects on the readers' response to Emily.As
Heller points out, before we learn of Emily's bizarre behavior we see her as sympathetic - if antiquated - figure in a town whose life and concern have passed her by; hence, "we are disposed to see Emily as victimized." Her refusal to pay her taxes is an index to her isolation and eccentricity, but this indecent also suggests a degree of dignity and power lacking in the town officials who fail to collect her taxes. Her encounters with the officials of Jefferson - whether in the form of the sneaking aldermen who try to cover up the smell around her house or the druggist who unsuccessfully tries to get her to conform to the law when she buys arsenic - place her in an admirable light, because her willfulness is based upon her personal strength. moreover, it is relatively easy to side with Emily when the townspeople are described as taking pleasure in her being reduced to poverty as a result of her father's death, because "now she too would know the old thrill and the old despa
ir of a penny more or less."

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