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Brittany Ursrey
Professor DiNicola
English 1102
17 November 2010
Word Count: 767
Vulcan Survivalist: Shutting the World Out
Part III: Application
The short story “A Rose for Emily,” by William Faulkner, is the story of a lonely, old
lady whose father sheltered her away from the outside world when she was a child. The story
begins with the information that Emily Grierson has died. Emily, the narrator tells us, was a
woman who was from a family that was once one of the most respected and prosperous in the
town, but after her father’s death was left a pauper. Emily was raised by her father, who was very
protective of her. Her father never thought anyone was good enough for Emily, and that is why
she never married. When her father died, Emily was left with nothing and did not cope well with
his passing as he was the only person with whom she socialized. Emily was in denial about the
death, refusing to let anyone take the body for three days. Not long after her father’s death,
Emily meets a “big, dark, ready man, with a big voice and eyes lighter than his face” (32)
construction worker named Homer Barron. He and Emily began spending a great deal of time
together, however he elucidated that he “was not a marrying man,” and it was rumored that he
also “liked men, and … that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club.” (33) A few days
before those rumors, Emily was seen going into the town pharmacy, buying arsenic; the
townspeople believed Emily bought the poison to commit suicide. Soon after Homer Barron
vanishes and was never seen again in Emily’s lifetime. For most of the remainder of Emily’s life,
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she remained closed up in her house. Thirty years prior to Emily’s death, a horrible odor was
coming from her house. Rather than confront her directly, members of the town went to her
house at night and sprinkled lime around the perimeter, and the smell disappeared after a few
weeks. Emily died in a downstairs room of her house, at 74 years of age. The townspeople, after
Emily’s funeral, open up the upper rooms of her house. This is where they discover the reason
for the smell, the arsenic, and Homer Barron’s disappearance. The body of Homer Barron is
found rotting in a bedroom in the upstairs of Emily’s home. On the pillow next to it is a “long
strand of iron-gray hair,” (35) which one may presume to be Emily’s.
To evaluate this story, I applied my Vulcan survivalist lens to help myself better
understand the story. The Vulcan survivalist only socializes with a few number of people and
blocks the rest of the world out. Because of this, the Vulcan survivalist becomes highly
dependent on the love of the few they know, and trust those few completely. I see Emily’s father
as being the reason for her becoming unsocial. He cut her off from the world; therefore, she
became dependent on him, and he was all she knew. Her world consisted of him and the one
servant she had in the house. Her father also had Emily convinced that no man would ever be
good enough for her, so she never married. When her father died Emily was a lost soul. All she
wanted was to be loved, and the one person she had trusted had left her alone. Then Homer
Barron showed up; he was, in a way, a replacement of her father. Emily hesitantly opened up to
him, and I believe she began to feel loved once again. So when the worry of Homer leaving her
set in, she took drastic measures to make sure he’d be around forever. Emily had to kill him to
make sure she’d never be alone and unloved again. This did not come across as a gruesome act
to Emily. In her unstable state of mind, she felt like she was just doing whatever it took to keep a
steady man around and be loved until the day she died.
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I believe the townspeople could have prevented this murder. If they had attempted to get
to know Miss Emily better, help her become social, she would not have felt so alone in the town,
but because everyone shut her out she, in return, shut them out too. They did not notice how
alone and depressed Miss Emily had come to feel since her father died. I deem everyone in the
town at fault for what happened to Homer. Emily’s father for sheltering her away from the
world, the townspeople for ignoring what was going on with Emily, and Emily herself for
committing the murder.
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Work Cited
Faulker, William. “A Rose for Emily.” Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama,
and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. 10th ed. New York: Longman, 2007.
30-35.