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Gender Roles In A Rose For Emily By Faulkner

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In the early 1800s women were completely controlled by the men in their lives, which includes their father, then their brothers, and male relatives and finally by their husbands. Women had many obligations and very few choices. Their main purpose in life is basically to find a husband, reproduce, and then spend the rest of their lives pleasing and/or serving him. However, if a woman were to decide to remain single she would be ridiculed and pitied by the community, in this case an example of this would be in the short story “A Rose for Emily,” by William Faulkner. Faulkner examines the expectations of Southern values of women. Faulkner also reveals a concerned community that fails to understand the complexities of the main character, whom to be Miss Emily Grierson. …show more content…
One of the biggest concerns of the townspeople is that she is not married; nevertheless they seem to understand partially because of her upbringing. Moreover, Miss Emily Grierson, the protagonist in the story is an odd and bizarre character. She was highly affected by her authoritarian father who intentionally isolated her from society. After her father’s death, Miss Emily develops a masculine identity to gain some type of control over her life. Because of developing a more masculine role and the sudden death of her father, Miss Emily starts to withdraw from society, and by doing so, she creates her own reality from the past, and by also trying to maintain control by being manipulative to gain some sort of power over the townspeople and because of this type of thinking, she starts to form an erratic and idiosyncratic

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