Have you ever lost people that meant something towards you? A Rose for Emily is about how a young woman goes from being well-known around town to never seen or heard from over the course of fifty years. The moral to this story is that change is not always good. It can have its good ways and its bad ways. All of Miss Emily’s problems through the story revolve around her problem to move on. The problem with her taxes, the problem to properly bury her father, and the problem of Homer Barron are all caused by Miss Emily’s problem with hanging on to the past.


Emily’s character would have to be self centered. She shows us this when she leaves her husband in the house and how she takes care of her home. And example from the book would have to be when she doesn’t do anything about the dust that collects in her house. She also ignored the help that was being giving to her from the mayor and people. She could also be ignorant because she doesn’t know how mad it makes the community feel when they pass by her house and it smells like or someone died. “ It smelled of dust and disuse-- a close, dank smell”(1)
people would complain to her and keep telling her that it smells. They even told the town’s mayor, but there’s only so much he could do as a person. “four men crossed Miss Emily’s lawn and slunk about the house like burglars, sniffing along the base of the brickwork and at the cellar openings while one of them preformed a regular sowing motion with his hand out of a sack slung from his shoulder. They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings.”(3) The people that lived around Miss Emily’s neighborhood had put up with enough to the point where they had to go and try to stop the stench themselves.


The meaning read between the lines is that Emily is still trying to live in the days were it was okay for her to not pay taxes. This is one of the examples where she couldn’t let go of the past. Miss Emily also had a hard time letting go of the person that was always there for her which was her father: “Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body” (3). Miss Emily refused to move on when her father died. She was holding the body trying to believe that he was still alive even though it was well known that he was dead. To save and hold on to a body has no more use to it and truly believe that the person is still alive is not healthy and shows true emotional issues. It is important to move on in life and accept the fact that things happen for a reason. “And so she died. Fell ill in the house with dust and shadows, with the only a doddering negro man to wait on her”(4) Miss Emily had a hard time doing this and it lead to her living a miserable live and suffering a lonely death.


Anthropology throughout this reading is that Miss Emily doesn’t like change. “she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all”(2). The first event that shows us is when her husband tries to leave her. Miss Emily didn’t like the fat that he was leaving her and so she felt that it wasn’t over. As a result Miss Emily killed her husband and left him in the upstairs bedroom. Another way we fond out that she doesn’t like change is that she would sit in her basement and rock in her chair while everything in her house collected dust “It smelled of dust and disuse-- a close, dank smell”(1) this explains how she really didn’t care about what was happening to her house. After the fact that everyone has left her, she felt lonely and didn’t want to interact with anyone from the community. People would always see Miss Emily around at the local store. But as a result of her family deaths and the death of her love one, she died lonely and miserable.

This story can teach the reader that it is important to forget about the past and move on in life. The past is the past and there is nothing that can be done about it. A reader can also learn that it is important to get help in life if you need it. A reader can analyze “A Rose for Emily” using aspects of moral, anthropology, and action.