My interpretation of the story “A Rose for Emily”, is that of a women from the old south or reference to other people from the old south that are trying to hold their dignity of the southern gothic heritage. It seems that Miss Emily had been raised with the mindset of Confederate rule and slavery and when her father died she become insane or at least lost her sense of being. It appears that she locked a room in her house after her one love had left her and in this room lye the dead body of her father on the bed. She probably entered the room only to lye next to him and have conversations about her day.
I think that the old black man that lived with her was because he could not adjust being free and he wanted to maintain loyalty to a white master, in this case Miss Emily. The smell that was in the house was due to that the black man probably had worked in the field as a slave and did not know how to clean house well. Surely a southern dignified women like Miss Emily was not going to stoop to doing slave work. It appears that the man that she loved had left her heart so heart broken that she could never love again. This explains why she only had one other male that she had ever entertained, after her love, he was a gay man that chased young men in the town.
The fact that Miss Emily could not sense time was probably due to the fact that she believed time was not moving forward and she could not mentally see that physical changes around her were happening. In her lost appetite for desire she just sit around and grew fat with no youth left, just bones.
The Essay on Emily Dickinson Love Themes
Love Theme's in Emily Dickinson's Poetry In evaluating Emily Dickinson's biography and poems, I surmised that excluding the love of father, brother, and her deceased nephew, Emily's knowledge of romantic love, by first-hand experience, is questionable. The pure-of-mind reader may believe that what familiarity she had about love matters might have been based mainly on her extensive reading of ...
I think that her father’s body was rotting away and she bought rat poison to make sure that the rats would stay away from him.
Colonel Sartoris was the only person left that knew Miss Emily and her father and could relate to her situation. He provided work for her to ensure that she had some human contact and later convinced the city council to waive taxes, but when he died he left her with a white lie and a tax problem to deal with. She didn’t deal with it well, considering the fact that she still thought he was alive.
Now that I have given you my analysis of the story, I will conclude with my opinion of what the meaning of the rose is. I believe that a rose means a true love for something that is never ending and in this story I found three things in Miss Emily’s live that were never ending. First, her forever loyalty to Southern Gothic tradition. She showed this by her ability to only focus on the past. Second, her forever love for the one sweetheart in her life, in that, she never had a desire to love again. Third, her inability to let go of her father, by keeping his body.
The question is which one of these never ending loves is the real meaning of the rose in this story. None, the rose for Emily is the invisible rose that she earned when she died. She earned this rose for keeping her forever commitment to what she believed in and took her dignity to her grave.
