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Miss Emily let her past conflict with her present by keeping the body of her deceased father in a room in her home. By her keeping the deceased body it causes a major over that began to leak into the city. The odor was so bad the people of the town had to creep to try and get the smell way.
Inside, among the gifts that Emily had bought for Homer, lies the decomposed corpse of Homer Barron on the bed. On the pillow beside him is the indentation of a head and a single strand of gray hair, indicating that Emily had slept with Homer's corpse.
She hides her dead father for three days, then permanently hides Homer's body in the upstairs bedroom. In entombing her lover, Emily keeps her fantasy of marital bliss permanently intact.
There have been complaints about an awful stench emanating from Miss Emily's house. The older generation, which feels that it is improper to tell a lady that she stinks, arranges for a group of men to spread lime on her lawn and inside the cellar door of her house.
In a sense, Emily's disregard of time also means that she is oblivious of death and decay. Keeping her father's and Homer's bodies indicates that she does not accept death. She can love both in life and in death, as if subjects were still living.
The men throughout the town were afraid of offending a woman especially one coming from a family like the Griersons'. For example, in the story they notice an awful smell coming from Miss Emily's home, but they don't know how to tell her without her being offended.
Emily eventually apes that male dominance by killing Homer Barron. Now robbing herself, she becomes the black silhouette of her father and assimilates his characteristics. After Homer's death, she successfully retains the corpse.
The day after Mr. Grierson's death, the women of the town call on Emily to offer their condolences. Meeting them at the door, Emily states that her father is not dead, a charade that she keeps up for three days. She finally turns her father's body over for burial.
A strand of grey hair was found on the pillow next to Homer's corpse, indicating that she had been sleeping with his corpse for the rest of her life. The gray hair of Emily shows that time is passing and she is getting older.
After her death, the same servant allows the townspeople inside, and they make the gruesome discovery of Homer's body in the bed, a single strand of gray hair on the pillow beside it where Emily slept.
Miss Emily suffers from schizophrenia because she shows symptoms of withdrawing from society. Throughout Emily's life, her aristocratic father the townspeople highly respected, kept Emily closed in believing no suitors are worthy enough for her.
1935 – Miss Emily dies at seventy-four years old. Tobe leaves the house. Two days later the funeral is held at the Grierson house. At the funeral, the townspeople break down the door to the bridal chamber/crypt, which no one has seen in forty years.
The narrator says some attended her funeral to respect a "fallen monument," but many simply wanted to see the inside of her house. By the time Emily died, the only person who has been in her house in the past ten years is Tobe, Emily's cook, and gardener.
Eighty years old, Judge Stevens attempts to delicately handle the complaints about the smell emanating from the Grierson property. To be respectful of Emily's pride and former position in the community, he and the aldermen decide to sprinkle lime on the property in the middle of the night.
Emily's house also represents alienation, mental illness, and death. It is a shrine to the living past, and the sealed upstairs bedroom is her macabre trophy room where she preserves the man she would not allow to leave her.
When Emily dies and her body is buried, the townsfolk finally venture into the upstairs bedroom in the house, where they discover the dead body of a man lying on the bed, surrounded by dust – presumably, the man is Homer Barron (though this is not stated).
There are three different motives that can be looked at as to why Emily killed Homer. She wanted to exercise power, she couldn't accept that Homer was a homosexual, and she didn't want another man to be taken away from her. Emily's father controlled her life up until his death.
Foreshadow: Arsenic
According to the narrator, Emily is a haughty aristocrat who thinks she is better than most of the other townspeople. Emily uses her demeanor to bully the druggist into selling her poison. ''I want some poison,'' she demands, though she refuses to tell the druggist the purpose of her purchase.
' After Emily's death, he waited until others arrived so he can let them in, 'and then he disappeared. He walked right through the house, out the back, and was not seen again. '
Even in death, Miss Emily cannot escape her father: "They held the funeral on the second day . . . with the crayon face of her father musing profoundly above the bier . . ." When the townspeople break into a locked room upstairs, they find carefully folded wedding clothes and Homer's remains.
Descriptive phrases include terms that add to the gothic quality of the story: She is dressed in black and leans on a cane; her "skeleton" is small; and she looks "bloated," with a "pallid hue." But Faulkner doesn't say outright that she looks much like a dead person, for it is only in retrospect that we realize that ...
These thematic connections are apparent in the story's first sentence: ''When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house . . . .''
why do some townspeople avoid asking Miss Emily about the smell? it was seen as impolite to ask a lady why she smelled foul.
Emily enforces her own sense of law and conduct, such as when she refuses to pay her taxes or state her purpose for buying the poison. Emily also skirts the law when she refuses to have numbers attached to her house when federal mail service is instituted.