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Homicidal Complicity In Faulkner's A Rose For Emily

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Dilworth discusses the unhealthy relationship the narrator, Faulkner, has with Emily it’s imaginary state, and how the relationship is required for both to exist, in “A Romance to Kill for: Homicidal Complicity in Faulkner’s ‘A Rose for Emily’.” Dilworth explains how the narrator and the townspeople value their southern heritage and beliefs by pressuring Emily to follow their ideas. These values and beliefs control much of the story and explain why Emily commits murder. Emily fell in love with a northerner, against the townspeople’s liking, they pretend to think she ends the relationship, therefore obeying their values. Dilworth mentions that he townspeople wanted to, “preserve the values of the old South embodied in Emily as a representative of idealized southern womanhood” (252). Emily’s life was always full of seclusion and she refuses to let her first love go. The townspeople uses many different people to influence Emily to end the affair. When the northerner refuses to marry her to satisfy everyone, she uses her idolized freedom of the town to her advantage and murders her lover. Therefore, everyone was happy, she does not have to live without him and the townspeople believe she obeyed their wishes by ending the affair.
The narrator and townspeople are in denial the entire story, living imaginary lives. They do not …show more content…

They needed her to portray the southern womanhood values, but that was not who she was. She was forced to follow their rules, therefore they covered up or ignored the murder of her lover. Dilworth describes how the cover-up allowed her to satisfy her sexual desires with possibly Tobe, her servant, but also her necrophilia with the northerner (261). Dilworth claims that “Emily is the scapegoat because she, or her madness, is made to carry all the blame for the killing and its long concealment” (253). The townspeople do not allow her to live her life as

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