"A Rose for Emily" and the Role of Poison

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses the role played by poison in the short story, "A Rose for Emily," written by William Faulkner. The paper examines Faulkner's fascination with the darker side of life and contends that, for him, creating this story and ending the characters' lives with poison was just a way of exploring the mysterious and ugly side of the human mind. The paper explores the significance of poison, explaining how it always signifies death and decay. The paper explains that this is also in tandem with the whole plot and the character of Emily. Emily was a symbol of decay herself, since she had given up on life and happiness.

From the Paper:

"Poison plays an important role in William Faulkner's short story A Rose for Emily because it gives the protagonist freedom from years of captivity. Emily was a dark character and her intentions were equally negative therefore use of poison near the end was the most suitable choice of weapon to kill her lover. Emily was the kind of character that would have never chosen something else, like let go of her lover or kill him with a bullet. For her character, poison was the ideal choice, keeping with her negative traits and her dark, ugly but mysterious life. Bullet or something else might have created noise, thus attracting the attention of people around but that was just not Emily. Emily was a quite mysterious character whose intentions were always hidden and who rarely spoke to anyone. "Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years." (Page 120) She wanted an equally quiet end to her love story and that is what she gained by using poison and administering it her lover."

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