Lasting Impressions

Lasting Impressions

         Looking back, everyone has people who tend to leave lasting impressions on you; whether these lasting impressions leave you standing still in time or moving on freely in your life.  In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily,” the lasting impressions that Emily’s father has left on her after his passing has made her stand still in life, if it has not made her regress back to the past and ultimately ended in her self destruction.  Emily’s father was her life because he made it that way, and soon after his passing she did not know what to do with herself, let alone her life.  What he might have thought of as caring and protecting led to her self destruction as well as the death of the only man she really loved. 
         Emily’s father was the only man in her life, the only man who gave her structure and gave her life.  He was the only one to show her how to “be,” so when he passed and the ladies of the town stopped by she told them “that [her] father was not dead” (132). She did not want to let go of the only person she really knew. It was not until “three days” (132) later that she allowed the minister to take the body and have a burial for her father.  Nobody said that “she was crazy then;” (132) it was something they “believed she had to do” (132).  After her father’s death, nobody in town saw her for a very long time because she “was very sick for a long time,” (132). After not seeing Emily for such a long period of time they noticed that “her hair was cut short” (132).  Cutting her hair so short made her look like a child, almost as if she was trying to regress back to a time when her father was around and was caring for her.
        Parents, especially fathers when it comes to their daughters, can go to extremes in terms of what they believe is in their child’s best interests.  And in Emily’s case, her father was an extremist.  By the time her father passed, she was an adult by age, but mentally and sexually she was still an immature child.  She was still immature for her age because of her father’s selfish ways of running off “all the young men” (132).  Her father did not teach her much about relationships, so when Emily, who is a born and raised Southern fell for Homer Barron who was a Yankee, the ladies of the town decided that “her kinsfolk should come to her” (133). The ladies of the town could not understand how a Grierson could think of a “Northern, a day laborer,” (133) as a love interest. 
        Emily did not understand why the ladies had to call her cousins to basically set up an intervention about her love affair with Homer and why they made such a big deal, but she did not care what they said.  Homer was the man she loved.  There was a time when Homer left, and he decided to come back, but everyone in the town thought he would leave again because “he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks’ Club-that he was not the marrying kind” (133).  Emily soon realized that Homer would soon leave her, so she made sure that he would stay by killing him.  In his death she found eternal love which nobody could take away.  She was not going to lose the second man she loved.  After Emily passed away and the towns’ people went into her forbidden house they saw Homer “himself lay in the bed” (135). And when they looked closer they noticed an “indention of a head,” (135) as well as a “long strand of iron-gray hair” (135).                    Apparently Emily would rather him be with her physically for the rest of her life then to have to deal with losing someone again. She could not cope with losing someone like she lost her father, who she was still living with and depending on.
    Even by the time her father passed, she was still living with her father.  He never taught her how to make it on her own, even having to pay taxes or the general ways of life.  Everyone saw Emily as a “tradition, a duty, a care; sort of a hereditary obligation upon the town” (130).  After her father passed, just to insure that Emily was not embarrassed, Colonel Sartoris, the mayor made up this story that assured Emily that she would not have to pay taxes.  He told her that “[her] father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying” (130).  It was not until years later, even after Colonel Sartoris’ death did they send her a tax notice.  She, of course, ignored the notice time and time again. Until a deputation showed up at her door and asked her about her taxes to whom she replied, “I have no taxes in Jefferson Colonel Sartoris explained it to me. Perhaps one of you can gain access to the city records and satisfy yourselves” (131).  She even told them to “See Colonel Sartoris,” (131) not realizing that he has been dead for nearly ten years.  They left, and she was never bothered about taxes again.  The sheriff and the town letting her get away with not paying any taxes shows how she does not even know what is going on around her; she did not even realize that the mayor had been dead for ten years and has no real social skills to the outside world around her.
      Mothers and fathers are the people who shape what kind of person someone becomes and how they interact with the world that their parents created for them.  In Emily’s case her father showed her nothing about the world except for him, and in the end she never grew out of her father.  She never truly accepted his death and held on to everything thereafter.  It was his selfish and suffocating parenting skills and ways that left the impressions that led to the killing of her only true love Homer and why she kept him in the same position and bed that he died in.  It was her father that made her antisocial to the point that everyone in town idolized her. So when she passed away the women went to her funeral “out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant…had seen in at least ten years” (130).  It may not always be the first impression or the last impression that a person leaves, but it is the lasting impression of the people who we cherish that in some cases is the determining factor whether you live a happy life or in Emily’s case, self destruct.