The short story A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner is a true classic. The story is about a woman who lives in a high-class family and has always relied on her father. When her father dies, she is unable to easily accept it and when she soon suits a young worker in the town the people question her reputation. Emily is unable to easily live without a strong male figure in her life and quickly goes mad without one. Emily reacts so extremely to her father’s death because he is all she has ever known and she is in shock.

Emily has reason to her madness. She has only ever been with her father. It is a sudden shock for him to not be with her, so she tells herself that he is still there with her. She does not want to accept the fact that he is gone and will never be with her again. It is hard for her to live without her father because he had a strong reliance on him. She relied on a male figure that she now no longer had. He kept away all the suitors that wanted to court her, and now without him she didn’t know what to do about the men in her life. Her crazy reaction could also be justified by the regular reaction that everyone goes through with death. Death is a foreign thing to us that we don’t quite understand so it is hard for us to except it among others. Someone you hold close to and know so well that dies is hard to understand because you remember them so well and it is hard to let go of that.

Overall, the reaction of Miss. Emily made sense because she already wasn’t totally sane, but the lose of someone so close sent her over the edge. Her father was all she had ever known and she didn’t know what to do without him. Because of this, she just pretended that he wasn’t gone. Miss. Emily wasn’t totally insane with her reaction, even though it was unusual.