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A Rose For Emily Behavior Analysis

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A Rose for Emily tells of a woman named Emily Grierson who lived in the South where a rigid class structure determined the expectations regarding a person’s behavior and society’s treatment of them. Miss Emily was the daughter of a rich upper class man who was quite influential in the community of Jefferson so it was expected that the community respect his daughter, Emily. Many allowances were made for Miss Emily’s bizarre behavior because of Mr. Grierson’s standing in the community. Miss Emily did not pay property taxes because of past favors that her father had done for the town. Emily’s marriage to Homer Barron could have been seen as a disgrace because of her husband’s place of birth and occupation, he was a Northerner and a day laborer, but the marriage gave Emily the opportunity to redeem herself by performing the role of a wife, which was expected of a woman with such a high status in society. Miss Emily represented women in society who were unable to find happiness because of a stifling class system that dictated the standards for living and prevented Emily from getting the medical help she needed during her times of deep suffering.

Some of the townspeople could not fathom the courtship between Homer and Miss Emily since they felt that “even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige.” (p. 2172) They …show more content…
She locked herself away from the rest of the world and refused to make friends. No one called upon her and she did not attempt to change her lifestyle. Eventually she sunk deeper and deeper into a world of insanity. The discovery that she had kept the bodies of her victims in the house did not diminish the townspeople’s feelings of obligation so they attended her funeral in numbers and buried her among the “ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate Solders.” (p.

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