Emily Grierson

Emily Grierson, also referred to Miss Emily in the text, is the main character of the short story "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner. Miss Emily is described as “a small, fat woman” who lived within a modernizing town full of people who saw her as a very cold, very distant woman who lived in her past. Throughout the story, she is referred to by her fellow townspeople as a tradition, a duty, and a care, and is portrayed as a very mean, stubborn old woman. However, as her story unfolds, Faulkner wants readers to sympathize with her because of the amount of loss that she's had to cope with throughout her life.

Miss Emily is a “hereditary obligation upon the town” in which she lived. The townspeople find themselves looking after her after her father's death. Miss Emily is often misunderstood because she is portrayed as being incapable of being alone while also exhibiting a sense of authority over the town by disregarding the laws of which they live by. For example, not paying her taxes, not putting numbers on her mailbox for the federal mail service, not telling the druggist why she needed arsenic, and parading around town with Homer Barron. After purchasing the arsenic the townspeople thought she was going to kill herself, but being the misunderstood character that she is, Miss Emily has other plans. Miss Emily's physical appearance also displays her deeper character. One individual, Xie Qun, who studied how Faulkner painted Miss Emily's character in this short story found that he wanted to reveal Miss Emily's internal changes using her external characteristics. Qun explains that Faulkner "enables the readers to watch how Emily transforms from a slender lady to an old gloomy "bloated" one, and from an obedient, genteel young girl to a murderer and corpse keeper". The way that Faulkner portrays her external changes is parallel to how she internally changes. Readers will find themselves feeling sympathetic towards Miss Emily in the beginning but much less for her in the end of the story.

Miss Emily’s character symbolizes the fall of the chivalric American South as the industrial, modern South begins to rise The description of the decay of both herself and the house slowing becoming “decaying eyesores” add to the imagery of things associated with Miss Emily. These things help show how the surroundings are advancing and Miss Emily, the symbol of the classic South, is stubborn and does not want change. Her character is described as “bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water…her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough”. The reoccurring reminder that Miss Emily is stuck in the past symbolizes that the South is not ready to industrialize and let go of its classic ways.

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