American Literature essay

Could you help me to check my American Literature essay that I was given, please? I am really appreciated for your kind help.

QUESTION

After reading A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner. What is your thinking about Emily’s killing Homer and her action to keep him safe with her in the past? (Can you sympathize with her or not? Explain your opinion based on the content and the messages conveyed in the story in combination with your point of view?)

MY ESSAY

Miss Emily is a daughter of prestigious Grierson whose family had glory days in the past. However, American society has changed a lot, especially after the Civil War (1861-1865) and the First World War. Emily is a typical character for those aristocratic families who still think about their great history in the past and cannot accept the changing of society so quickly.

Emily is a person who had a happy family, so she always holds on to the family’s golden past despite everything. She usually stays at home for the rest of her life after her father’s death. Although society changes as the time passes - especially the landscape in Jefferson, “only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores”. In the middle of modern neighborhood with so many changes, it is still the same: “It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street.” That is also Emily’s personality which is unchanging despite all circumstances of society. She clings to the past and lives with it to find comfort for herself. She tries to embrace the past and is determined to keep it as it was because it is the underlying reason for her actions after her father's death. Reading the whole story, I feel sorry and sympathize with Emily who feels unfamiliar with modern life and does not keep up with the rapid changing of it. It is a tragedy of Emily who feels lonely despite living in a bustling town. However, the fragile past can't stand against the present, which has pushed Emily's tragedy to the climax with all the people’s rumors around her in Jefferson. Firstly, she does not believe that her father passed away because he had lived with her for a long time and losing him means that the past will also be lost: “The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom. Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly”. Secondly, she ignores the death of Colonel Sartoris ten years ago and keeps the Colonel's order that her family should not pay taxes. She dismisses the request of the authorities and keeps a past order of a person who had gone into the past: “I have no taxes in Jefferson. Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves." Lastly, the saddest action of Emily is killing Homer because she wants to make their love into the past and keep it intact. Together with keeping Homer’s body and living with it for many years, she rarely goes out of her house. That partly shows Emily’s inability when she realizes that everything of the great days had gone. The golden past of the old days could not exist with the growing modernity. Emily keeps Homer’s corpse, cuddles and lives with it until she dies; it also shows her hopelessness in keeping those beautiful days. Although she falls in love with Homer as “she got to be thirty and was still single”, she was influenced by her father who did not want Emily to marry a normal man. In his mind, “not a young man was quite good enough for Miss Emily”. As the time goes by, she becomes older with her loneliness that makes her hair turn more and more grey because of her father’s old-fashioned thought. There were times when people caught her standing by the door like a soulless person: “As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol.” That is the tragedy of Emily when she poisons Homer to make all things into the past as she thought that once she killed Homer, he would never have the choice of leaving her. It is the way to have him with her forever. In a cold, loveless house, Emily is a loner who is a stranger in the town, in the family and even with herself. In Emily's eyes time is slow moments with so many pessimistic images about human life which seems to be just the existence of suffering, so she always tries to hold on to time and is afraid of everything passing: “For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him.”

In conclusion, Emily decides to kill her beloved because of her blindness love which is affected by her father and other people in Jefferson. It is the pain of a person who has no one to share joys and sorrows.