Week One English

Week One Paper Reaction Paper to A Rose for Emily

"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner is a moving story about a very lonely and unusual woman. It reminds me of my aunt.

My aunt was a woman who could not have children and lived alone for a number of years. She lived in the same home for the majority of her adult life. During her adult life she lived in a large home no children laughing and as she grew old and feeble she had no children to care for her. She tried to keep children around her. My sister and I would spend days with her when my parents would go on vacation and she was sad when we would have to leave to go home.

In the story Emily had a large home and she had a lot of money. This was apparent when the narrator said," It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and a scrolled balcony in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what has once been our most select street" and by the fact she had no one but her butler to assist her.

My aunt had a woman to assist her around the house and rarely came out of the house. My aunt also had sisters that would go to her home to try to force her to do things she didn't want to do. They would have her sign papers for things that she did not understand and take old family items she did not necessarily want to give to them. The only real difference was that my aunt didn't have any dead bodies around the house. We did find her dead parakeet after she died, but that was to be expected. The bird was pretty old too. She had all but one room near the kitchen closed off and when we went to clean up those rooms we found many years of our history gathering dust. It was very sad. There were so many memories that were lost when she passed away.

I barely got to know my grandmother because she died a few years after I was