Psychological Character Analysis of Emily in “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner
Miss Emily Grierson, the main character in William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily,” is certainly strange by any average reader’s standards and a character analysis of Emily could go in any number of directions. It is nearly impossible not to examine her in a psychological as well as contextual light. Over the course of Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily", Miss Emily’s erratic and idiosyncratic behavior becomes outright bizarre, and the reader, like the townspeople in the story, is left wondering how to explain the fact that Miss Emily has spent years living and sleeping with the corpse of Homer Barron. According to the narrator in one of the important quotes from "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner the townspeople “did not say she was crazy” at first (Faulkner 2162), and of course, she was never evaluated, diagnosed, or treated by a mental health professional. Yet by the story’s conclusion, the reader can go back through the narrative and identify many episodes in which Miss Emily’s character and behavior hinted at the possibility of a mental illness, even if the town wanted to deny this fact and leave her intact as a social idol. In fact, this information could be used to support the claim that Miss Emily suffered from schizophrenia as defined by the American Psychiatric Association’s DSM-IV criteria (American Psychiatric Association 159). It is reasonable to propose that Miss Emily developed this mental illness as a response to the demanding conditions in which she was living as a Southern woman from an aristocratic family. Miss Emily decompensated because she was unable to develop healthy and adaptive coping and defense mechanisms. While most people can handle the kind ...