rose for emily
Emily’s father had a significant impact on her daughter’s life. Mr. Grierson was the reason Emily was not married and he was also the reason Emily experienced attachment and control disorders later in her life. The narrator tells the readers that the Grierson’s had held themselves a little too high for what they were and that none of the young men were good enough for Miss Emily. The town’s people thought of the Grierson’s as a tableau, with Miss Emily in the background dressed in white and her father in the front with his back towards Miss Emily clutching on to a horsewhip. When Emily’s father died she had trouble letting go. For three days, when the town’s people came for the body, she met them at the door denying the fact that her father was dead. The narrator claims, “We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will” (Faulkner 3). This is where the readers can first identify Emily’s attachment disorder. Later in the story, after Emily has passed away and the town’s people are let into the Grierson’s house for the first time they break down the door to the room of which no one had seen in forty years. In this room they find Homer’s decayed body lying in the bed. The narrator observes, “Then we noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head. Once of us lifted something from it, and leaning forward, that faint and invisible dust dry and acrid in the nostrils, we saw a long strand of iron-gray hair” (Faulkner 7). In this final scene of the story, that readers can identify Emily’s attachment disorder once again. The readers can also identify a theme of control here as well. When Emily’s father was alive he was an overly controlling figure towards her. Mr. Grierson had driven away all young men from his daughter and now that he was gone she could finally have power in that aspect of her life. That is