Why would Emily want to sleep in the bed with his dilapidated body every night though? Do you think she wants the comfort of someone still being around her? Or do you think she still does not believe that he had died?
oh, and this was bothering me when i was done reading the story, why is it called a rose for emily? there were no roses, and the only thing that i can think of would be the rose representing the man. any ideas?
I think that she maybe kept his dead body because she was kind of mentally ill and after he was falling away from her and started to stop loving her I think that she killed him and kept him in an attempt to preserve his love or memory of her better life.
I agree with Erika, I think that she was still completely in love with him, and that could have been what drove her to insanity. Like we talked about yesterday in the "Tell-Tale Heart" how the tension kept building until the narrator couldn't take it anymore, that is what drove him to insanity. I think it might be the same case with Emily, she knew that she couldn't have him, yet she still loved him, and she couldn't take it anymore so she chose to kill him.
I disagree with Jimmy. :] I think Emily was completely insane. Especially since the fact that she had been lying next to the slave in bed when his body was decomposing.
jimmy, i think it's pretty insane to sleep with a dead body. that doesn't sound depressed to me, just crazy. maybe she began as depressed but it eventually deepened into insanity
Meghan- I think the rose is the town leaving her with a little bit of respect even though they didn't like her. They gave her respect until she died and the rose could be their last respect until they invaded her whole life.
I totally agree on the rose thing. I was really confused on that too and was wondering on the symbolism of it. I was thinking that maybe it is used because a rose is thought of as beauty and earlier in the story it talked about how all these guys called on her but weren't sent away by the father. Apparently, Emily used to be beautiful.
This is Chelsea Van Essen by the way by user name isn't very descriptive.
Does anyone else think that the rose could've represented love? Because roses normally represent love, that the the title A Rose for Emily meant that she got her love, from a dead house servant? That's kind of a stretch though... :]
Ooo Jimmy interesting idea. I definitely hadn't thought of that. I definitely thought that there was something between Her and the Negro and that would be something that makes sense. Perhaps we need to take this story from a different point of view. Emily's.
ty- that's a good point. i think that is because insanity scares people. crazy people are unpredictable and that is scary, so it definitely fits into a gothic story.
I think that Emily is so deeply rooted in the past that she is virtually unable to live in the present. Perhaps she hardly distinguishes between the live Homer and the corpse Homer because she lives in a time that no longer exists.
I agree that it is extremely disturbing. It is crazy to show your love and affection for someone by killing them. Maybe it was the only thing she knew to do if growing up she had an abusive father or something.
Is the slave treating Emily like a slave out of fear of the unknown. Does the slave himself theink that something is going to happen to him if he sets Emily free or tells anyone about anything?
I think that we chose to live by time because as time has gone on, people get more and more overwhelmed, and then the clock pretty much runs our lives. It is just what we are used to, and trying to break free from it would be nearly impossible... right?
Ms. Kakos that brings up the distortion of time. It isn't necessarily distorted for us but for her it is. Once again, I think we ought to try and reexamine this story for from Emily's point of view.
The hidden chamber makes me think Poe's obsession with live burial--it's almost as though Emily is attempting to entomb herself in a reality that exists only in her head.
Chelsea, Almost any experience, bad or good, can have an affect on a person. If Emily had a troubled childhood, she could get caught up in thinking about it often, or trying to forget it. Maybe she was just never able to escape it.
So with that connection what is the symbolism involved in this intense and disturbing motif of live burial? How is this idea evident in all of Gothic literature.
The townspeople seem to be unreliable narrators to me; they're caught up in gossip, drama, and self-interest. Yes, Emily sleeping with a dead body is certainly dramatic, but how do we know that everything in this story is true? We know only the bits and pieces of Emily that the outsiders know.
Well, because this is only information we know, we have to assume that most all of it is true, otherwise we begin fabricating our own versions of the story and end up discussing not the Poe version, but our own.
Also, the narrator is not a "he" or a "she," but a "we." As we've seen in "The Lottery," and The Crucible, mobs often experience a distorted sense of reality and morality.
Ms. Kakos makes a good point and the townspeople really don't know very much at all. None of them were friends with her or visited her a lot. There is huge gaps in the times that the townspeople knew. So much could have happened that the narrators don't know.
One of the factors of Gothic literature that we have discussed is the reliablity of the narrator. I don't think we should assume anything. Gothic athurs may make the narrator appear one way or another, just to confuse the reader and leave the story up for questioning.
We seem stuck on the idea that the body is Homer. It doesn't necessarily have to be him. It could, though a stretch, be her father. It could also be her sweetheart who died. We never heard about his burial.
I think the narrators do that because it forces the reader to develop their own opinion and ideas about the story, almost making their story more appealing to the reader, because they are able to form their own opinions.
Zach, I don't necessarily think that the townspeople mean to distort the facts. It's just like that game, telephone, where someone starts with a fact, but at the end, it is so different. As stuff spreads, it always gets distorted, ESPECIALLY when its gossip.
Zach- the townspeople distort facts because they don't know excatly what's going on so they create their own reality. I said it numerous times and i'll say it again, people fear the unknown and the townspeople fear what's happening in the house so they create thier own veiws.
I agree Meghan. None of the narrators in the stories we have read have clearly identified themselves, so there is no way that we can tell how credible they are.
Zach- I don't think that they distort facts on purpose, but as Ms. LeKakos said, mobs have a distorted view of reality, words get changes, inflections get added and each person adds his own theory and presents that as fact. It is just something that happens when a group of people narrates, rather than one person.
While I was reading A Rose for Emily I was having a lot of trouble decifering who the man was in her bed. I thought it could be the man she loved, or her, father even. I thought of it from, does the author want it to be more creepy, or less creep? because if they wanted to make it more creepy I would have to think that it would have to be her father, meaning that she would have had to find a way to get him out of his burial sight and into her home, and more specifically her bed. And then if it were to be less creepy, but still creepy all the while, I would think that it was her lover because then it would just mean that she killed him while he was already in her house. Regardless, creepy story indeed. In my mind while I was reading this, I couldn't really figure out how everything was meant to piece together. Like the poison and such. And I think this is in result to the narration: it leaves a bunch of gaps. And I think that is essential for gothic literature: leaving room for the mind to wander and for the reader to create their own ideas. Without this element, gothic literature would not be half as scary or disturbing. I think there has to be that level of uncertainty in order for someone to be truly moved/creeped out/ scared/ disturbed or anything in result of reading something. As mentioned in your posts, I feel that Emily struggles with attachment issues and with her past. After her father died...oh! I just had another thought: did the story specify how it was that her father died? Perhaps she killed him as well, and didn't want him to be buried so she could keep him close to her. Maybe...just maybe. But anways, after her father died, Emily probably felt very alone. So, after she finally was able to build a relationship with someone, she was afraid of losing them, too. So, as soon as there was sign that there was a possibility of losing him, she killed him, to forever keep him with her. I dont know if that would fit so well if we considered the fact that maybe she killed her father, too, but considering that: maybe she has some weird issue with killing people. Hey, anything is possible in gothic literature! One last thought, on the poison. I was never fully decided on what I thought the poison was used for. At first I thought she might try to kill herself because she was unhappy, but then at the end of the story I thought maybe she used it to kill the man. But then, I also thought, maybe she saved it to use once she had killed the man; a sort of 'together in death sort of thing'.
Brace yourself for an epically long post. (This is a more thoroughly proofread version.)
Here is my theory as to what happened (why I believe she killed him and what aspects of her nature caused her to do that):
First, I believe that Emily was a control freak. If you analyze her life, there is nothing that she doesn't have direct control of. The town tells her to pay her taxes; she tells them to get lost (and they do). It seems like her servant also caters to her every wish. I think these tendenices are not condusive to successful, lasting relationships. Additionally, I think Emily was socially inept. The only person she really interacted with on a regular basis was her servant, and I don't think that relationship could really be considered anything. With her being so used to living basicallly on her own, I think she might not have been ready for the constant interaction that is associated with marriage. I think these factors are evidence that she killed him, most likely with the aresenic she bought.
I really like Matt's question regarding the title: Why is it called "A Rose for Emily" if there were no roses mentioned at all during the story?
Like Jorday, I think that the rose is symbolic of love. Emily lived such a secluded, lonely life for such a long time that when someone caught her fancy, it completely changed her life. But for some reason, the title also reminds me of death. I guess it is bitersweet within the context of the story. Is there any way it could represent death?
Moving on, I thoroughly agree that this the moral of this story is "don't get stuch in the past". At least to me, the people of the town are the protagonists and Emily is the antagonist. I think she is portrayed in a very negative way that makes her look not only insane, but uncooporative, futile, and greedy.
I also think we are overthinking the role of her negro servant. I think Poe intended Emily to be the focus of scrutiny, not the servant. I believe he is sustinence for her chosen lifestyle. To clarify, I think his only function is to allow Emily to live like she does.
Finally, I am confused about the timeline of the story. How long was the body boarded up in the room? It implies that Emily was sleeping in the bed with the corpse, but it also says that they had stopped using the second floor of the house. (Just a side note, I think the second floor is a metaphor for death, as that is where the lives of both Emily [in the attic] and Homer ended.) I guess the only plausible way I could understand it was that Emily had been sleeping with the corpse right up until her death, then after her suicide, her servant boarded up the room. Does that make any sense?
And one more thing, what evidence of homosexuality did we discuss as being present during the story, because that didn't jump out to me as a theme nearly as much as the theme of insanity.
88 comments:
signing in
On the question that Kylie just said, I agree that I think that after she killed him she continued to sleep in the bed with his dead body every night.
well how long do you think it has been since she killed her?
she killed him*
i disagree, i thought the room was boarded up?
that is completely disturbing. this really makes me question the sanity of her, what would drive her to do that?
Why would Emily want to sleep in the bed with his dilapidated body every night though? Do you think she wants the comfort of someone still being around her? Or do you think she still does not believe that he had died?
The story never tells about Emily's mom or maybe other siblings. What do you think happened to them?
I don't think it matters how long it has been, the fact that she still sleeps with dead body is gross enough.
and yeah jimmy, she deffinatley killed him. why, i have no idea. but she did it
So I guess this women has attachment issues?
jimmy makes a good point because the body would decompose and the hairs would too after a little while, so she must have killed him recently.
Why do you think she killed him? Why would she have wanted him dead?
Matt
Even though it does say that the room was boarded up it also said that the people saw her in the upstairs window and sometimes saw a ligt on upstairs.
Why didn't the poison guy ask force her to tell him what she's using the poison for?
did she try to kill him with the poison but failed and then suffocated him?
oh, and this was bothering me when i was done reading the story, why is it called a rose for emily? there were no roses, and the only thing that i can think of would be the rose representing the man. any ideas?
I believe that Emily is still emotionaly attached to him, because she never had the time to be "In love" with him while she was still alive.
I agree with the symbolizing the man Matt. Maybe the rose was appropriate because they were at her funeral.
cvanessen2-but didnt the story say that eventually they stopped seeing her upstairs, and only saw her on the lower level?
So in the inner circle homosexuality has come up. Did anyone else notice undertones of it in Poe's stories?
Okay I have a question...
We were talking about degrees of insanity on here yesterday, what degree of insanity would Miss Emily be?
Jordan
I think that she maybe kept his dead body because she was kind of mentally ill and after he was falling away from her and started to stop loving her I think that she killed him and kept him in an attempt to preserve his love or memory of her better life.
Matt:
Totally with you on that one.
What if instead of "rose" the flower, "rose" as in rose from the ashes, rose from the dead?
Eh?
I agree with Erika, I think that she was still completely in love with him, and that could have been what drove her to insanity. Like we talked about yesterday in the "Tell-Tale Heart" how the tension kept building until the narrator couldn't take it anymore, that is what drove him to insanity. I think it might be the same case with Emily, she knew that she couldn't have him, yet she still loved him, and she couldn't take it anymore so she chose to kill him.
hannah, i don't think emily was so much insane then just a loner. She seemed depressed, not insane.
cmeghan- that could be true, but if true, why would it be called "A" rose for emily, since rose from the dead is an action, not a noun
I disagree with Jimmy. :]
I think Emily was completely insane. Especially since the fact that she had been lying next to the slave in bed when his body was decomposing.
Jimmy,
Her lonliness could have been what drove her to insanity.
So you could both be right...
Kylie on Erika's blog:
On what Emily said about her killing him recently, his body is decomposed. And yet her hair isn't. Which says that she has been there more recently.
But Fitz, the boarded up thing is very interesting. Secret passageways?
cvanessen- I agree that she kept the body because she loved him, but I find it kind of disturbing.
jimmy, i think it's pretty insane to sleep with a dead body. that doesn't sound depressed to me, just crazy. maybe she began as depressed but it eventually deepened into insanity
Meghan- I think the rose is the town leaving her with a little bit of respect even though they didn't like her. They gave her respect until she died and the rose could be their last respect until they invaded her whole life.
Matt
I totally agree on the rose thing. I was really confused on that too and was wondering on the symbolism of it. I was thinking that maybe it is used because a rose is thought of as beauty and earlier in the story it talked about how all these guys called on her but weren't sent away by the father. Apparently, Emily used to be beautiful.
This is Chelsea Van Essen by the way by user name isn't very descriptive.
what if the slave killed him and not Emily? Was emily a slave to "the negro"
Jordan- I also think that she was insane. It seems like having an insane character is one of the features of a gothic story.
Ty I agree she was insane. DId her love for the man drive her to the point of insanity or were there any other variables?
Does anyone else think that the rose could've represented love? Because roses normally represent love, that the the title A Rose for Emily meant that she got her love, from a dead house servant? That's kind of a stretch though... :]
WOW JIMMY!
Yes.
Yes.
Yes.
READ JIMMY'S LATEST BLOG.
ASAP.
Ooo Jimmy interesting idea. I definitely hadn't thought of that. I definitely thought that there was something between Her and the Negro and that would be something that makes sense. Perhaps we need to take this story from a different point of view. Emily's.
ty- that's a good point. i think that is because insanity scares people. crazy people are unpredictable and that is scary, so it definitely fits into a gothic story.
I think that Emily is so deeply rooted in the past that she is virtually unable to live in the present. Perhaps she hardly distinguishes between the live Homer and the corpse Homer because she lives in a time that no longer exists.
P.S. WATCH YOUR CAPITALIZATION!!!
I agree with Ty, the level of insanity varies with each story, though.
And Chelsea,
I agree with you too. The rose factor confused me as well, but it did say that Emily was very beautiful when she was younger.
ty
I agree that it is extremely disturbing. It is crazy to show your love and affection for someone by killing them. Maybe it was the only thing she knew to do if growing up she had an abusive father or something.
Great point Jimmy!!!! I believe that that could be the case, and that really, instead of working for Emily, the slave was working for Emily herself.
Ms. Lekakos!
I agree with what you're saying! So, why does time matter then, to a person? Why must we live by time?
Is the slave treating Emily like a slave out of fear of the unknown. Does the slave himself theink that something is going to happen to him if he sets Emily free or tells anyone about anything?
If the slave did kill Homer, then why was it Emily who bought the arsnic?
-Chelsea
I agree with Ms. Leclaire. I think that this relates back to how Temporal Structure makes the story very confusing.
Megan,
I think that we chose to live by time because as time has gone on, people get more and more overwhelmed, and then the clock pretty much runs our lives. It is just what we are used to, and trying to break free from it would be nearly impossible... right?
Chelse- They found a pillow with his face inside it. Emily could have wanted the poison to kill her slave or herself when the slave killed Homer.
Ms. Kakos that brings up the distortion of time. It isn't necessarily distorted for us but for her it is. Once again, I think we ought to try and reexamine this story for from Emily's point of view.
Sorry for spelling your name wrong, Meghan.
:)
The hidden chamber makes me think Poe's obsession with live burial--it's almost as though Emily is attempting to entomb herself in a reality that exists only in her head.
Megan- We chose to live by time so that we don't end up completey insane like Emily, living in the past and unable to live in the present.
Ooo! Kakos that is deep! Wow lots to think about. What caused her to be so deeply rooted in the past?
No problem, Chelsea ;)
Okay, we've established that Emily is chained to the past.
Is this a story about escaping the past? Warning us not to hold too tightly to the past?
Something about the past?
Past?
Laughlaugh. What do you think?
Jimmy
Ya! And maybe that is how she ended up dying, by suicide.
-Chelsea
Chelsea,
Almost any experience, bad or good, can have an affect on a person. If Emily had a troubled childhood, she could get caught up in thinking about it often, or trying to forget it. Maybe she was just never able to escape it.
Chelsea- I think that she is stuck in the past because she is in denial that Homer is dead and she just can't move on.
So with that connection what is the symbolism involved in this intense and disturbing motif of live burial? How is this idea evident in all of Gothic literature.
The townspeople seem to be unreliable narrators to me; they're caught up in gossip, drama, and self-interest. Yes, Emily sleeping with a dead body is certainly dramatic, but how do we know that everything in this story is true? We know only the bits and pieces of Emily that the outsiders know.
Does it MATTER who tells this story, gents and ladies?
Are we focusing on an unimportant factor?
Do we know who ANY of the narrators are in Gothic literature, really?
Well, because this is only information we know, we have to assume that most all of it is true, otherwise we begin fabricating our own versions of the story and end up discussing not the Poe version, but our own.
Also, the narrator is not a "he" or a "she," but a "we." As we've seen in "The Lottery," and The Crucible, mobs often experience a distorted sense of reality and morality.
I agree with Ms. Kakos. How do we even know that Homer had been decomposing there for so long? Maybe they exagerated what state his body was in?
Ms. Kakos makes a good point and the townspeople really don't know very much at all. None of them were friends with her or visited her a lot. There is huge gaps in the times that the townspeople knew. So much could have happened that the narrators don't know.
Emily
One of the factors of Gothic literature that we have discussed is the reliablity of the narrator. I don't think we should assume anything. Gothic athurs may make the narrator appear one way or another, just to confuse the reader and leave the story up for questioning.
We seem stuck on the idea that the body is Homer. It doesn't necessarily have to be him. It could, though a stretch, be her father. It could also be her sweetheart who died. We never heard about his burial.
Well, really, it would be sort of difficult to take ANY of these stories at face value.
Or face-face value.
OR face-face-face value?
I think it's hard to keep analyzing stories like this, because anyone could connect anything at anytime.
Why do the townspeople distort facts?
Because the townspeople are somewhat accountable.
Zach--
I think the narrators do that because it forces the reader to develop their own opinion and ideas about the story, almost making their story more appealing to the reader, because they are able to form their own opinions.
Zach,
I don't necessarily think that the townspeople mean to distort the facts. It's just like that game, telephone, where someone starts with a fact, but at the end, it is so different. As stuff spreads, it always gets distorted, ESPECIALLY when its gossip.
Zach- the townspeople distort facts because they don't know excatly what's going on so they create their own reality. I said it numerous times and i'll say it again, people fear the unknown and the townspeople fear what's happening in the house so they create thier own veiws.
I agree Meghan. None of the narrators in the stories we have read have clearly identified themselves, so there is no way that we can tell how credible they are.
Zach- I don't think that they distort facts on purpose, but as Ms. LeKakos said, mobs have a distorted view of reality, words get changes, inflections get added and each person adds his own theory and presents that as fact. It is just something that happens when a group of people narrates, rather than one person.
Ty- we cannot tell how credible they are, just how impartial they are which can be somewhat connected with credibility.
Jimmy- Just because they are telling a story does not mean that they are credible.
ty- excatly, we can only determine how impartial they are towards the person or event, not if they're telling us the whole story.
Nice talking to everyone, thanks so much!
A Rose for Emily is essentially about a woman that lives her life in mystery and a town that wants to figure out that mystery.
A Rose for Emily is essentially about figuring out if your past is truly innocent/good.
While I was reading A Rose for Emily I was having a lot of trouble decifering who the man was in her bed. I thought it could be the man she loved, or her, father even. I thought of it from, does the author want it to be more creepy, or less creep? because if they wanted to make it more creepy I would have to think that it would have to be her father, meaning that she would have had to find a way to get him out of his burial sight and into her home, and more specifically her bed. And then if it were to be less creepy, but still creepy all the while, I would think that it was her lover because then it would just mean that she killed him while he was already in her house. Regardless, creepy story indeed.
In my mind while I was reading this, I couldn't really figure out how everything was meant to piece together. Like the poison and such. And I think this is in result to the narration: it leaves a bunch of gaps. And I think that is essential for gothic literature: leaving room for the mind to wander and for the reader to create their own ideas. Without this element, gothic literature would not be half as scary or disturbing. I think there has to be that level of uncertainty in order for someone to be truly moved/creeped out/ scared/ disturbed or anything in result of reading something.
As mentioned in your posts, I feel that Emily struggles with attachment issues and with her past. After her father died...oh! I just had another thought: did the story specify how it was that her father died? Perhaps she killed him as well, and didn't want him to be buried so she could keep him close to her. Maybe...just maybe. But anways, after her father died, Emily probably felt very alone. So, after she finally was able to build a relationship with someone, she was afraid of losing them, too. So, as soon as there was sign that there was a possibility of losing him, she killed him, to forever keep him with her. I dont know if that would fit so well if we considered the fact that maybe she killed her father, too, but considering that: maybe she has some weird issue with killing people. Hey, anything is possible in gothic literature!
One last thought, on the poison. I was never fully decided on what I thought the poison was used for. At first I thought she might try to kill herself because she was unhappy, but then at the end of the story I thought maybe she used it to kill the man. But then, I also thought, maybe she saved it to use once she had killed the man; a sort of 'together in death sort of thing'.
Brace yourself for an epically long post. (This is a more thoroughly proofread version.)
Here is my theory as to what happened (why I believe she killed him and what aspects of her nature caused her to do that):
First, I believe that Emily was a control freak. If you analyze her life, there is nothing that she doesn't have direct control of. The town tells her to pay her taxes; she tells them to get lost (and they do). It seems like her servant also caters to her every wish. I think these tendenices are not condusive to successful, lasting relationships. Additionally, I think Emily was socially inept. The only person she really interacted with on a regular basis was her servant, and I don't think that relationship could really be considered anything. With her being so used to living basicallly on her own, I think she might not have been ready for the constant interaction that is associated with marriage. I think these factors are evidence that she killed him, most likely with the aresenic she bought.
I really like Matt's question regarding the title: Why is it called "A Rose for Emily" if there were no roses mentioned at all during the story?
Like Jorday, I think that the rose is symbolic of love. Emily lived such a secluded, lonely life for such a long time that when someone caught her fancy, it completely changed her life. But for some reason, the title also reminds me of death. I guess it is bitersweet within the context of the story. Is there any way it could represent death?
Moving on, I thoroughly agree that this the moral of this story is "don't get stuch in the past". At least to me, the people of the town are the protagonists and Emily is the antagonist. I think she is portrayed in a very negative way that makes her look not only insane, but uncooporative, futile, and greedy.
I also think we are overthinking the role of her negro servant. I think Poe intended Emily to be the focus of scrutiny, not the servant. I believe he is sustinence for her chosen lifestyle. To clarify, I think his only function is to allow Emily to live like she does.
Finally, I am confused about the timeline of the story. How long was the body boarded up in the room? It implies that Emily was sleeping in the bed with the corpse, but it also says that they had stopped using the second floor of the house. (Just a side note, I think the second floor is a metaphor for death, as that is where the lives of both Emily [in the attic] and Homer ended.) I guess the only plausible way I could understand it was that Emily had been sleeping with the corpse right up until her death, then after her suicide, her servant boarded up the room. Does that make any sense?
And one more thing, what evidence of homosexuality did we discuss as being present during the story, because that didn't jump out to me as a theme nearly as much as the theme of insanity.
Post a Comment