A Rose for Emily: Psychological Conflicts

William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, is a Southern sad, but eerie story that is profoundly burden with Psychological conflicts, deterioration, rejection, displacement, self-restraint and necrophilia. From the beginning to the end the reader is being led by clues as seen and told by the town’s folks as they capture a few glimpses of Emily’s sad and psychotic life. The very basics psychoanalytic element ego, and superego can also be found here. A Rose for Emily is a distorted journey beyond the psychotic personality of Emily Grierson.

A dubious old spinster of the town of Jefferson in Tennessee. Emily lives with her strict overbearing father that will not let her date. The narrator of the short story distinctively speaks from the point of view of the united town’s people most often using the word %we& and characterizes the superego, which is the role of psyche led by morals. The town’s people are the ones who agree or disagree of Emily’s behavior as acceptable or forbidden, through them we learn what Emily is like.

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The towns’ people only see bits and pieces which they combine for assumptions and judgments since Emily barely socializes. Emily’s father was a very controlling as seen in a portrait with Emily standing in the background with her father “clutching a horsewhip.” All suiters were turned away, thinking they were not good enough of the family name. “None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such.

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The Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. (Faulkner) His excessively domineering behavior was a result of the superego that controlled his psyche and made him choose to isolate his daughter from the opposite sex as the society expected that being a Grierson she had to remain pure and wed someone of her particular class as the family tradition commands. It brought about sexual oppression in her because she was never able to date any gentleman, she kept suppressing her sexual desires in her psyche and it disturbed her persona severely. These obscure frustrated desires, hurt, anger had become part of her Id as she grows up. The town’s people come to see her when her father passes away and are dumbfounded as she refuses to let go of the dead body and is in a state of denial by telling the towns ’people that he wasn’t dead. By psychoanalytic theory, all her oppressed sexual frustration becomes part of the Id that is automatically driving her behavior and makes her fixated with the thought of having a man and because she was deprived of that all her life, the only man she can possess was her father. The repression of the hidden sexual desires she felt guilty of expressing turn into displacement then, as she takes out all the repressed emotions by clinging to a dead body of her father. Displacement happens as a security system, when a person takes outrage and the frustration of a psychological conflict on someone else, other than the issue which caused it.

“The day after his death all the ladies prepared to call at the house and offer condolence and aid, as is our custom' 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. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly. We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.” (Faulker) Because of a history of sexual repression, Emily as a defense shows a behavior of evading, because social communication can result in bringing up horrible feelings of her psyche. She doesn’t go out very much and spends time in isolation. Her house is old, tarnished from inside reeking of decay and shows her lack of interest in life. Her persona was destroyed, and she acts abnormally because all the unsolved feelings she kept accumulating in her unconscious drive her conscious behavior. When the deputy mayors come to ask her for taxes she hasn’t paid, she drives them out harshly showing rage of being approached. She dodges people all together and is unable to establish regular relationships and refuses to adapt to the reality of life stubbornly.

The three distinct types Id, ego and superego of the human psyche, all must be analyzed to understand Emily’s fall from stability in Falkner’s “A Rose for Emily.” Emily’s Id, her very most basic and original yearning is to have a man, something she has been deprived of all her life. Repression doesn’t remove her sexual desires. These repressed feelings appear after two years of her father’s passing, when she faces a road paver Homer, Barron outside her house and starts an affair with him. She is seldom seen with him on Sunday midafternoons riding in a yellow/wheeled buggy, her Id meanwhile fulfills her desire of having a mate, but the superego part of Emily’s psyches is shown through the town’s people' who find it difficult as Homer is a low class day workhand and doesn’t meet Emily’s status. “Of course, a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer”; she is being a lady should not fall from noble grace public ally as they saw her.” (Faulkner).

In the past Emily did try to maintain a superficial sense of normalcy less than the influence of her superego. In the combined eyes of the town’s people' “Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty and a care, a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town,” and she had also taught china painting to some young children from the neighborhood after she had met Homer. She is what Jefferson once was, proper and traditional. (Faulkner) This was the exemplification of Miss Emily’s Superego, what was anticipated, what was socially accepted, and morally true. As the story further progresses, the town’s people believe both Emily and Homer to wed, though they have learned that Homer was a homosexual, but they still wonder if Emily might encourage him to wed her as she was setting a poor example for the younger generation by being seen with a man openly. They ask some church men to go and support her on the bad issue.” Then some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister, Miss Emely’s people were Episcopal to call upon her. He would never divulge what happened during that interview, but he refused to go back again.”(Faulkner).

For Emily, Homer presented a chance of potential marriage as she was oblivious of him being a gay; her ego settles with the Id for a behavior that is reality based, so that the contentment of her sexual desires can take place in a suitable way. A year has gone by of meeting Homer, Emily is observed purchasing a silver toilet set for men from the 'jeweler’s, a nightshirt and some men’s clothing. The town’s people think she’s finally had wed, as her man servant is also seen later taking Homer inside the house. That will be the last time anyone sees Homer and Emily for the following six months. The towns’ people believe that she is being deprived of a loving relationship by her father might have liked staying inside with husband and finally enjoy a blissful marriage, “But for almost six 'months she did not appear on the streets. Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman’s life so many times had been too virulent and too furious to die.”

For about seven years, he kept giving lessons of china painting on the ground floor of the house, while the top story was kept locked and windows were shut forever. Till the age of forty, generations after generations saw this perverse woman get old, and her man servant going out for grocery, but no one knew what happened to Homer. Some men from the town’s council were called in to sprinkle lime around Emily’s house because of the rotten smell coming from her house, and when she died at the age of seventy-four they discovered that she had poisoned Homer and killed him long ago, it was his dead corpse rotting in the bed in the upper portion of the house. Emily used to sleep with the corpse till she died herself. From psychoanalytic point of view this abnormal behavior was caused by her unconscious repressed sexual desires, which were part of her Id, because Homer rejected her proposal, she could not find any other means of possessing him within the limits that her ego allowed, so her id took over displaying her animal self.

Ego is where Emily’s two more extreme selves collide. Emily’s ego is ticketed with the deed of self-preservation. How does Emily live with herself knowing she killed her lover and sleeps in bed next to his corpse every night? By far better question might be how does Miss Emily conduct art lessons with children downstairs, with the corpse of her lover rotting above? This 'juggling act is the job of her ego. Her ego bridges the gap and finds a middle ground within which Emily can live, going about her daily duties. Emily’s Id is clearly the most dominant portion of her psyche' in fact it is her ego’s inability to control the impulses of the terrible and reigning Id that allowed Emily murder her lover to begin with. When one of our three selves outweigh the other two we are not well balanced and can’t mature as an adult. Faulkner’s story comes full circle with the town’s people burying Emily. They could barely wait “until Miss Emily $as decently in the ground” before they storm her home and discover her ghastly secrets. The town’s people had not fathomed what they were about to discover.

While the dust, decay, and curtains of faded rose could be expected, no one expected to find the corpse of Homer in Miss Emily’s bed chambers nor did they expect to find “a long strand of Miss Emily’s iron-gray hair” on the pillow as though she had been sleeping in the corpse embrace for over forty years. Her unconscious repressed feelings make her repeat her past in a form of regression, which in Freudian terms is a temporary return to a former psychological state which is not 'just imagined but relived. Just like she wasn’t letting go of her father’s dead body, she killed her lover and possessed his dead body driven by the unconsciously operating Id, that fulfilled her primal desire in an animalistic way rather than a reality/based ego or socially acceptable way superego would have allowed. Repression returns in Miss Emily’s personality in the form of developing madness, or how she tries to preserve the little that

She has left in her life, by employing horrible means of keeping her lover by her side. The lover Homer then presents “the lost object of desire” or object petit a “for Emily, that she lost while entering the Symbolic order from the preverbal, Imaginary order. The repression of her desire for union with the mother formed her unconscious mind# and the acquisition of language then made her aware of the “lack” in her conscious experience. This side of her reflects a failure inhere development as a grown-up, mature individual, who has come to terms with the lack and losing her life successfully and does not seek to replace it by using fake means. She has obviously not overcome the loss, and she strives to remain in the realm of the pre oedipal world of sexuality and maternity filling in the gap with an imaginary lover  who is no longer real and living. Her world is a construction, it is entirely imaginary and therefore her ways are defined as “mad” and “crazy” by the community as they express a denial of the community values and lifestyle. Thus by entering the Symbolic order or the world of language, Emily is entering a world of loss and lack where her desire cannot be fulfilled, and where there are rules and restrictions that she must obey. Thus she tries to live abnormally in an illusionary pre-verbal world, where her dead lover is in her control and possession making her feel satisfied. The dead body of Homer is a metaphor or a stand/in for her lost, “object petit a”, Emily unconsciously desires it and is drawn to her Imaginary order in search of something she can’t identify through language.