Naranjo, Joanna Pauline D. Essays - A Rose For Emily, Emily, Fiction

Naranjo, Joanna Pauline D. Professor McClain ENG 002 February 8, 2017 "A Rose for Emily" Exposition: In 1894, Colonel Sartoris, the town's mayor, had suspended Emily's tax responsibilities to the town after her father's death saying that Mr. Grierson had once lent the community a significant sum and this is the town's way of repaying him. Inciting Incident: As new town leaders take over, they failed to make Emily to resume payments. When members of the Board of Aldermen pay her a visit, Emily reasserts the fact that she is not required to pay taxes in Jefferson and that the officials should talk to Colonel Sartoris about the matter. However, at that point he has been dead for almost ten years. She then asks her servant, Tobe, to show the men out. Rising Action: We go back to a time thirty years earlier when Emily resists another official inquiry on behalf of the town leaders, when the townspeople detect a powerful odor coming from her property. Her father has just died, and Emily has been abandoned by the man Emily was to marry. As complaints rise, the mayor decides to have lime sprinkled along the foundation of the Grierson home in the middle of the night. Within a couple of weeks, the odor subsides. The townspeople begin to pity Emily, remembering how her great aunt became insane. With no offer of marriage, Emily is still single by the time she turns thirty. Climax: The day after Mr. Grierson's death, the women of the town call on Emily to offer their condolences. Meeting them at the door, Emily states that her father is not dead, after three days, she finally turns her father's body over for burial. The summer after her father's death, she meets Homer, who is a foreman in charge of paving the sidewalks. He becomes a popular figure in town and is seen with Emily which scandalizes the town and increases the pity they have for Emily. They feel that she is forgetting her family pride and becoming involved with a man not worthy of her status. Falling Action: As the affair continues and Emily's reputation is further compromised, she goes to the drug store to purchase arsenic, a powerful poison. She is required by law to reveal how she will use the arsenic. She did not say anything and the package arrived at her house labeled "For rats." The townspeople fear that Emily will use the poison to kill herself. News spreads of the possible marriage of Emily with Homer. Resolution: Homer enters the Grierson home one evening and then is never seen again. Holed up in the house, Emily grows plump and gray; her door remains closed to outsiders. Nothing is heard from her until her death at age seventy-four. Only the servant is seen going in and out of the house. Denoument: After Emily dies, her body is laid out in the parlor, and the women, town elders, and two cousins attend the service. After some time has passed, the door to a sealed upstairs room that had not been opened in forty years is broken down by the townspeople. Homer Barron's body is stretched on the bed, decaying. The onlookers then notice the indentation of a head in the pillow beside Homer's body and a long strand of Emily's gray hair on the pillow. Works cited: Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily". The Bedford Introduction to Literature. Ed. Michael Meyer. 6th ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's 2010. pp 99-105.