A Rose for Emily

            The story of A Rose For Emily is a very in depth tale about a woman named Emily Grierson who was the last of a very prestigious rich family left in a small, tight community set in the 19th century fallowing the civil war. The city of Jefferson appears to be a community that is growing, evolving and changing, but most of the residents there still gossip and spy on each other and seem to divert their attention from concerning themselves with their own lives to worrying about the intimate details of the upstanding family of the neighborhood which now only constitutes miss Emily Grierson. Do to the overwhelming nosiness of her surrounding community, Emily feels trapped by everyone else's opinion of what her life should be and the people's expectations of her " hereditary obligation upon the town" drive her to fall apart and kill Homer Barron when she can't have the relationship with him that the townspeople have made her need.
             As the story unfolds we find that Emily is use to a life of prestige in her community living with her rich father who set the impression for her and the rest of the town that no man was really good enough for her. Since this was the only life she ever really knew see was at a huge loss when her father died and left her to fend for herself. More importantly was the fact that the image that the Grierson family had shaped the views, opinions and curiosities of the townsfolk to a state of extreme jealousy as well as unhealthy concern for the affairs of them. When Emily's father died it soon became well known to the gossipy people of Jefferson that "the house was all that was left to her" and it was all that remained to represent the previous upstanding image of the Grierson family besides Emily herself. The people of the town took this information and acted happy about it saying that "she had become humanized" because they were all so used to incorporating their own jealousy and feelings of less-worth in their opinions of Emily's family.