A Rose for Emily Reader Response Essay All men and women are created equal and deserve fair treatment from the opposite sex. However, since the beginning of history, sexual equality has not been a virtue that was closely followed. Men tend to falsely assume that since they are physically more capable than women, they are inherently also more important. Obviously that is not the case and this sexism tends to create a powerful barrier between males and females. Thankfully, modern day culture has vastly diminished the discrimination of women while resorting to more politically correct viewpoints. Though in the early 1900s when “A Rose for Emily” was set, the Deep South still considered women as major inferiorities to men, which is made evident in “A Rose for Emily.” I disagree with William Faulkner and how he utilizes his short story “A Rose for Emily” to portray his view that women are second-class citizens. “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house…” (Faulkner, 217). Here in the very first paragraph of the story I quickly became aware of the writer’s intention to go out of the way to present the idea that women are of less moral value than men. Faulkner could have simply stated, “When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral,” but he decided instead to elaborate and give the specific reason for each gender’s attendance. I highly doubt that the outlandish accusation of Faulkner – to say that all the women were so self-conceived that they attended the funeral mostly for personal gains, is true. But even if that fact was true, there is no possible way the narrator could know it. The peripheral narrator’s identity is never revealed, but the reader can assume the narrator is a single person