First, I’m sorry I could not come up with a creative title for this post.
Recently in class we have been discussing feminist criticism and reading the short story “ A Rose for Emily”, this story is about the life of this woman Miss Emily Grierson who refused to change with the times. However, I will be looking at our dear Miss Emily through a psychoanalytic point of view. The earliest point in her life that we are told about is the death of her father. She at first is in complete denial and does not let the doctors take his body away fro three days. She exhibits extreme denial, which is a pathological defense mechanism, it is understandable for her to have this reaction, as her father is now dead, however she reacts this way with every form of conflict. Another time she does this is when the town goes to her to collect tax money, she simply repeats “ See Colonel Sartoris” who has been dead for some time. Due to her using this defense mechanism we can deduce that she has snapped and that her father’s death could have been the cause of it. I believe that there is a chance that this singular event is not totally to blame. Also we learn that her father took care of everything in her life and taught her to think like the rest of her family, that they are ultimate beings and are better than every other person in the town. So she for her formative years never really had to do much leaving her in a spoiled almost infantile mind frame.
An interesting theory that I thought of about Miss Emily’s pathological tendency to revert to denial could be that she is a result of inbreeding within the family. Now hear me out on this, her great aunt Wyatt went crazy, it was also assumed that in turn Emily would go crazy. Most people do not assume something if it only happens once, therefore other members of her family have more than likely gone crazy. This makes her fragile mental state a genetic issue. Her father it is noted, chased any suitor away from Miss Emily, on the grounds that she was too good for them. The families weird arrogance and pride could then also be taken as that they are only people who were good enough for the Griersons were… the other Griersons. Which makes Miss Emily an inbred, inbreeding within a family narrows the gene pool and makes the less desired traits more pronounced in a group, one of these such traits may be the mental instability that seems to run through the Grierson family tree.
I am a bit disappointed this is not another dinosaur post. How am I supposed to know about the great Goldblumaraptor now? I guess keeping blog posts relevant to an English class seems fair. Anyway, “A Rose for Emily” has been quite a literary experience, despite all of the accurate Southern impressions I have pulled in class. Miss Emily Grierson is a woman who fully refuses to change with the times despite the modern influences around the town, especially after the death of the old generation. This older generation, which Emily herself is a part, retains a sense of Southern honor and pride that was unable to adjust to common manners and times. Of this generation, Miss Emily, Colonel Sartoris, and several former Confederate soldiers from the War of Northern Aggression, I mean the War for Southern Independence, I mean the Civil War are mostly all dead by the end of the story. A way of life dies off with them, a time where men had to treat women with respect and not mention the horrible rotten smell emanating from their house. One did not ask why one was purchasing poison in spite of incredibly likely possibilities of murder and certainly not to deal with rats. This was a time where it was okay to shut yourself and your slave from the outside world except for the brief moments of staring out a window and retrieving food, but that was the time back then. The good old days. Just do not keep any dead bodies in the top floor while doing some nasty biz on the side. Now that is wrong.
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