Rough Draft for Defending Emily Grierson's Murder

Emily Grierson, the key character in William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” was clearly mentally ill. Her father certainly didn’t help her recover during his lifetime, in fact, Faulkner hints that he might’ve encouraged her exaggerated possessiveness, by his own example. The town people remembered “all the young men her father had driven away” (Faulkner, 529), which suggests that her father was incredibly possessive of her. Looking deeper into this, a reader could assume that their relationship wasn’t a normal, healthy father/daughter relationship. He perhaps needed her, the last Grierson, all for himself, and so she needed him. This idea is reinforced by the fact that when her father died she refused to let him go. She kept his dead body in the house for three days, refusing to let the ministers or doctors in the house, insisting that her father was not dead. The townspeople “did not say she was crazy then” (529), dismissing her behavior as natural instead of trying to help her. This is one of the first examples of the townspeople negligence, that succeeded in ruining three lives.

Tobe is an interesting, while entirely mysterious, character. He undoubtedly knew about Homer’s murder, and did not report it. But Tobe was not just an accomplice; he was a victim as much as Emily was. This was a town where traditional standards were still important, even while the town itself was being modernized, moving into the thirties. It didn’t matter how modern the rest of the town was, the townspeople still valued the idea of the “Griersons,” the southern elite, “the noblesse oblige -- without calling it noblesse oblige” (Faulkner, 529). A black man loyally serving her fit with this ideal. Tobe probably grew up learning, from the townspeople’s behavior, that he was nothing, fit for nothing except servitude. This is why Tobe served Emily so faithfully, not because of any kind of affection towards her, but because he was doing what everyone expected of him. The evidence Faulkner gives the readers to support this idea is when the townspeople pointed out that Tobe “talked to no one, probably not even to her, for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse” (532). You would probably talk to someone you had affection for, so that couldn’t have been the reason for staying to serve Emily. The townspeople wouldn’t even call him by his name, only referring to him as “the Negro” (532), reinforcing the idea that they thought of him as inferior. We only know his name because Emily called to him. We know that Emily has serious abandonment issues, so she probably had some sick, twisted affection for him. She probably didn’t view him as her equal any more than the townspeople did, but she would’ve made sure, somehow, that he wouldn’t leave her. The townspeople treated him like he was less than human, and the woman he served his entire life was insane. Tobe’s life was ruined because the townspeople needed to hold on to their traditional southern ideals.

The townspeople’s negligence becomes glaringly apparent when Emily bought poison at the drugstore. Emily haughtily asked for arsenic, and stared the druggist down when he asked her what it was for. Instead of insisting on knowing why she was getting the arsenic, or simply refusing, the druggist complied. He did this because of who she was, a southern princess. Never mind that the princess was mentally ill, and needed help. The day after they all thought she would kill herself, and they all “said it would be the best thing” (Faulkner, 530). This shows a disgusting lack of empathy or sympathy towards a person that is in desperate need of someone caring. When it came to Homer Barron, no questions were asked of Emily, though it was known that she was the last one to see him alive, and also known that she had recently bought arsenic. Were the townspeople truly blinded by her old southern prestige, or was it that they had a suspicion of what was happening, but looked the other way? Either way, it’s clear that the townspeople were somewhat responsible for the death of Homer Barron, the incredibly horrible servitude of Tobe, and the continuation of the untreated mental illness of Emily Grierson.

Symbolism In The Objects They Carried

First Lieutenant Jimmy Cross carried heavy equipment across the Vietnam terrain, but he also carried tokens of his previous life, which perhaps weighed more heavily on his person in an emotional sense. He has “love letters” and pictures from a girl named Martha. This is a girl he can not stop thinking about. He will vaguely order his men about, then continue daydreaming about Martha, the poetic, mysterious girl he was so in love with. This girl, however, does not return his passionate affection. Did really “love” her? Probably not. His love for her was an escape for him, a way to leave the war-torn country, the hideous sights that he had to encounter. She sent him a pebble that she found on the Jersey shore line, “precisely where the land touched water at high tide, where things came together but also separated” (O’Brien 1039). This separate-but-together quality disturbed him slightly, because he questioned what this meant. He carried that emotional weight around with him, and often kept the pebble in his mouth, sucking on it’s saltiness. This was the case one when he was resting while one of his men was searching the inside of a tunnel. He was happily imagining both of them together, and he was imagining the pebble in his mouth was her tongue. “Vaguely, he was aware of how quiet the day was, the sullen paddies, yet he could not bring himself to worry about matters of security” (O’Brien 1041). If he wasn’t busy daydreaming, if he had been more alert, he would’ve been aware that something was wrong. He could’ve told his men to be cautious, to take cover. Instead, he allowed his men to talk and laugh loudly, for Ted Lavender to leave to urinate. As Lavender was returning, he was shot by sniper fire. This made him heavy with guilt, and he thought that “he had loved Martha more than his men, and as a consequence Lavender was now dead, and this was something he would have to carry like a stone in his stomach for the rest of the war” (O’Brien 1044). He burned Martha’s letters and pictures and planned to dispose of the pebble, so no longer was he literally carrying mementos of her, but he also planned to dispose of the emotional mementos. He swore he was done with daydreaming, that he “would dispense with love” (O’Brien 1048). He intended to embrace the life of a lieutenant completely. Thus, by getting rid of the emotional and physical baggage of his previous life that he had carried, he absorbed only war, focused only on the war. This sacrifice he made to protect the lives of his men, to prevent carrying around more pain and regret.
Ted Lavender carried tranquilizers and dope around with him in addition to his standard equipment. He said repeatedly in the story that he did this because he was scared. It is interesting that the only character that died in this story is the man that carried around dope, was high all the time, and was so frightened. This could be O’Brien suggesting that Lavender, since he wasn’t carrying around a memento of his old life, instead carrying around a method to block out everything, was dead already. The men who carried around their past with them, they were holding on to something. They were remembering something other than the horrors of warfare. Lavender chose to forget it all. Perhaps this is why he was the character that was chosen to die, to symbolize that Lavender himself had, in a way, chosen death.
Kiowa carried two extra significant things from his life before the war: his illustrated New Testament, and his grandfather’s hunting hatchet. Though he carried around a bible, it seemed that he loved the smell of it more than the actual Scripture or Christianity. For example, when Lavender died, he wished he could feel remorse like Cross, but instead felt only relief that that he was alive, that he “liked the smell of the New Testament under his cheek, the leather and ink and paper and glue, whatever the chemicals were” (O’Brien 1045). This emphasis on the physical aspects of the bible, suggested that he didn’t really feel the spiritual aspect of the Scripture. He carried the hunting hatchet as a reminder of his people’s struggle against white people. This could be parallel with the Vietnamese struggle with the white people, that Kiowa was forced to be apart of.