Emily’s Wickedness
We develop ties with certain acquaintances as we become older. These interactions, which could be with our parents, relatives, or someone we enormously admire, affect how we live and how we perceive the world. William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” protagonist Emily is a fantastic example of Freud’s psychoanalytic ideas. In Freud’s Three lectures on psychoanalysis, he spoke alot about different types of mental illness and how they have affected people. Sigmund Freud has a very acute correlation with “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner, from Emily’s wishful impulse toward homer; to her resistant and repressed emotions toward her father’s passing, followed closely by a sense of displacement.
Sigmund Freud often talked about the idea of the repressed mind, meaning that a person blocks out a particular thought from the conscious mind; this idea is found closely in the story “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner. Our main protagonist, Emily, is wrought with news that her father has passed, but instead of accepting this truth, she instead displaces this reality and keeps on as if nothing had occurred; this went on for three days. To add on, the story mentions this idea: “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” (Faulkner 3). Miss Emily was well acquainted with the idea that her father had yet to pass; this was due to Emily being under the direct control of her father, and for him to leave her behind was a reality she could not accept. This matches what Freud said about those who displace and resist truths/realities; they tend to differ in what they do not want to accept.
The idea of resistance and repression is also seen later in the story with Homer and his death. When Emily passed, the townspeople entered her room; the text states, “The man himself lay in the bed.”(Faulkner 6) The readers can infer that the man they found was Homer and that Emily had killed him for being a ‘homosexual’ and never accepting Emily’s love. This further consolidates Miss Emily’s resistance to the thought that Homer did not like her; Emily killed him, so he could no longer refuse her love. Further down, the text says, “The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace” (Faulkner 6), meaning Emily refused Homer’s death, layed in bed with the dead body, and embraced it. You can see how Emily is performing an act of necrophilia because she is repressing the idea that Homer is dead by embracing him, thinking that Homer is alive when he is not. Emily was raised in a household where her father made every decision for her, turning down any man who pursued her and not allowing her to basically not have any interactions with the other sex. This repression is what Freud talks about, which brings about the downfall of her life, but the upbringing of her mental illness. Miss Emily was an unfortunate individual who repressed and displaced alot of realities from her world.
Though, this is not the only similarity that Miss Emily has with the Freudian texts. Freud talked about wishful impulses, meaning when someone cannot have something in real life, they dream about it in the unconscious; Miss Emily enacts her wishful impulse through Homer. As Emily loses her father, it is almost as if she loses part of her life. Her father, a very commanding figure in Emily’s life, controlled everything, from whom she met up with to how she presented herself. Her father, who stunted her sexual development, held her as a prisoner child and had her focused on him through severe overprotection and the belief that no one was suited for his daughter. Emily suddenly losing her leading figure was a shock she was not prepared to face. Though she did not want it to end there, when some big shot entered the town, a lad named “Homer,” Emily saw this as an opportunity to find a man in her life. Since Emily lost one man in her life, she is now looking for a person to pick up that role; unfortunately, Homer was her pick. These actions signify Emily’s wishful thinking toward Homer and her connection to Sigmund Freud.
Throughout Faulkner’s “A rose for Emily,” you can see how frequently Emily shows signs of the theories Freud talks about in his five lectures on psychoanalysis. The psychoanalytic concepts of wishful impulse, displacement, and resistance are frequently shown in “A Rose for Emily” to display Miss Emily’s disparity during her life.
Sources:
Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” An American Periodical Studies Online Forum, vol. LXXXIII, no. 4, American Periodicals Series Online, Apr. 1930, p. 233.
Https://bbhosted.cuny.edu/webapps/blackboard/content/listContentEditable.jsp?content_id=_70384073_1&course_id=_2148580_1&mode=reset PDF file.
Freud, Sigmund. Five Lectures on Psycho-Analysis. W.W. Norton & Co, Inc., 1961. Semantic Scholar.
