Emily, The Recluse
...value of a dollar until after the death of her father. She was left with only that big, old, empty house. The author states, “Being left alone, and a pauper, she had become humanized. Now she too would know the old thrill and the old despair of a penny more or less”(132). She was around thirty years old when her father died, and after his death she cut her hair short, which made her look somewhat like a girl, and a small resemblance to, “…those angels in colored church windows—sort of tragic and serene” (132). Afterwards, she met Homer Barron, who people believed she would never marry because, “…a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northern, a day laborer… older people, who said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noble oblige…” (132). This suggests that Emily was very full of an old fashion, southern pride, which was instilled in her by her father; therefore, “She carried her head high enough—even when we believed that she was fallen. It was as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson….”(133). When Emily was a little over thirty, she was, “…still a slight woman, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye-sockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper’s face ought to look” (133). At this time, it is suggested that she still considers herself as high class, looking down on people she did not consider her equal. The author makes this known when recounting the events of when Emily went to buy poison. When she told the druggist she wanted arsenic, he informed her that the law requires that she tell its planned use. Faulkner states that as a response, “Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye, until he looked away….” (133). The next time Emily was seen, she was fat, and her hair was beginning to turn gray. The author claims, “During the next few years it grew grayer and grayer until it attained an even pepper-and-salt iron gray” (134). Over the years, Emily did not come out at all. Faulkner suggest, “Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows—she had evidently shut up the top floor of the house—like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which. Thus she passed form generation to generation—dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse” (134 – 135). Emily was stubborn and set in her own ways. Her pride would never allow her to accept charity; therefore, the mayor at the time of her father’s death came up with an elaborate story of why she did not have to pay taxes. When the next generation became mayors and aldermen, they had no knowledge of the taxes. Therefore, “the mayor wrote her himself, offering to call or to send ...