A Symbol Of Neglect Essay Research Paper free essay sample

A Symbol Of Neglect Essay, Research Paper A Symbol of Neglect Merely when the nowadays has become the past can we reflect on what we could hold or should hold done. Yet our society is so haunted with maintaining path of clip that we spend 1000000s of dollars a twelvemonth to maintain a set of atomic redstem storksbills clicking the clip. These redstem storksbills are so accurate that they must be reset one time a twelvemonth to rectify for the Earth # 8217 ; s imperfect orbit. Our base-60 step of clip is an abstract thought dating from the Babylonians. All this, and what most human heads per se understand about clip is the past, present and future. I say most heads, because non every head does grok these abstract thoughts. Many people are able to last in the present, but give small or no idea to the hereafter, and these people normally live in the past. Such a head is the head of Miss Emily Grierson in William Faulkner # 8217 ; s A Rose for Emily. Emily Grierson survives in the present, but lives in the yesteryear. The morbid stoping is foreshadowed by the narrative # 8217 ; s opening with Miss Emily Grierson # 8217 ; s decease and funeral. The eccentric result is farther emphasized throughout by the symbolism of the decaying house, which parallels Miss Emily # 8217 ; s physical impairment and demonstrates her ultimate mental decomposition. Her life, like the house which decays around her is a direct consequence of life in the yesteryear. Part of life is decease, and the hereafter conjures life, the yesteryear, and decease. Emily # 8217 ; s instability of past and present causes her to confound the life with the dead. Possibly the most outstanding illustration of Emily # 8217 ; s confusion is the carcase of Homer Barron lying in the honeymoon room of Emily # 8217 ; s house. This division is exemplified by the symbolic imagination of Faulkner. The rose coloured room, a colour of life, is covered thickly with dust, a symbol of decease. Of class, this is non the first clip we learn of Emily # 8217 ; s confusion. Previous to Barron # 8217 ; s find, her male parent dies, and she denies that he is dead. Faulkner gives the reader a gustatory sensation of this confusion early on when Miss Emily instructs the town tax-collectors to confer with with Colonel Sartoris about her revenue enhancements, though he had been dead for 10 old ages. At this predicting point in the narrative, Emily seems to be a doddering old amah ; th is could non be further from the truth. The external features of Miss Emily # 8217 ; s house parallel her physical visual aspect to demo the transmutation brought about by old ages of disregard. For illustration, the house is located in what was one time a outstanding vicinity that has deteriorated. Originally white and decorated in # 8220 ; the to a great extent tripping manner # 8221 ; of an earlier clip, the house has become â€Å"an eyesore among eyesores† . Through deficiency of attending, the house has evolved from a beautiful representative of quality to an ugly hangover from another epoch. Similarly, Miss Emily has become an eyesore ; for illustration, she is foremost described as a â€Å"fallen monument† , to propose her former magnificence and her ulterior grotesquery. Like the house, she has lost her beauty. Once she had been â€Å"a slender figure in white† ; subsequently she is corpulent and â€Å"bloated, like a organic structure long submerged in inactive H2O with eyes lost in the fatty ridges of her face† . Both house and resident have suffered the depredations of clip and disregard. The inside of the house besides parallels Miss Emily # 8217 ; s increasing devolution and the turning sense of unhappiness that accompanies such decay. Initially, all that can be seen of the interior of the house is # 8220 ; a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow # 8221 ; with the house smelling of # 8220 ; dust and neglect # 8221 ; . The darkness and the odor of the house connect with Miss Emily, # 8220 ; a little, fat adult female in black # 8221 ; with a voice that is # 8220 ; dry and cold # 8221 ; as if it were dark and dust-covered from neglect like the house. The similarity between the interior of the house and Miss Emily extends to the # 8220 ; tarnished gilding easel # 8221 ; with the portrayal of her male parent and Miss Emily # 8220 ; tilting on an coal black cane with a tarnished gold caput # 8221 ; . Inside and out, both the edifice and the organic structure in which Miss Emily live are in a province of impairment like tarnished metal . Finally, the townsfolk # 8217 ; s descriptions of both house and occupant reveal a common intractable haughtiness. At one point the house is described as # 8220 ; stubborn # 8221 ; as if it were disregarding the environing decay. Similarly, Miss Emily proudly overlooks the impairment of her once expansive abode. This motive recurs as she denies her male parent # 8217 ; s decease, refuses to discourse or pay revenue enhancements, ignores town chitchat about her being a # 8220 ; fallen adult female, # 8221 ; and does non state the pharmacist why she is buying arsenic. Both the house and Miss Emily go traps for that strongest representative of the 20th century, Homer Barron, labourer, foreigner, confirmed unmarried man. Merely as the house seems to reject advancement and updating, so does Miss Emily, until both of them become disintegrating mistimings. Through descriptions of the house that resemble descriptions of Miss Emily Grierson, # 8220 ; A Rose for Emily # 8221 ; emphasizes the manner that beauty and elegance can go monstrously distorted through disregard and deficiency of love. In this narrative, the house deteriorates for 40 old ages until it becomes ugly ; Miss Emily # 8217 ; s physical and emotional status dissipate in a similar mode.