Rose for Emily

For some people, letting go of the past is particularly difficult, whether they are holding on because their past was spectacular and wonderful, or, as in William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily," the past is all they have. For Miss Emily Grierson, the title character in Faulkner's grotesque, haunting tale, the past offers a place of safety and respectability unavailable to her in the present. The townspeople who once held her aristocratic family in reverence has morphed into a crass and detached place, and Emily is the victim of this passage of time and values. Faulkner presents Miss Emily sympathetically and the reader feels for her as she powerlessly watches time pass and the town's respect for her dwindle, an inescapable indictment of the "new" values of the South.

Miss Emily Grierson was born into an aristocratic family in the post-Civil War South. Her family's house was...
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