Faulkner explains that victims of controlling life styles have a hard time adapting to change. Emily allowed her father and other people in her community to control her. Throughout her life, the town’s people described Emily as a “hereditary obligation upon the town”, almost as though she owed them her life (81). After the death of her father, the town believed she wanted to “cling” to him because she had allowed him to be the only man in her life (84). It is expected that we would want to hold on to someone if they were all that we knew. Emily was so strictly controlled by her father, that she would become lost without him

The author will go on to show that over time people not adapting to change may experience a loss of reality. In the story, the town’s people avoid reality by blaming the horrible smell coming from Emily’s house, on a “snake or a rat” (83). The people were avoiding the possibility that the source of the smell could have been a dead body. When Emily goes to buy poison, “the druggist didn’t come back” (85). He did not want to know why Emily needed such a strong dose of arsenic. Emily has lost grip of reality, and with controlling intentions will kill her lover Homer. She realized he was “not a marrying man”, disrupting her plans for marriage (85). People could also lose reality because they are afraid that things might possibly change in the future. Emily was afraid that Homer was going to tell her that he wanted something different in life, and she would not have control over him. After Homer’s death, Emily was able to have control because she kept his dead body around her house. When his body is found, it appeared he was once in “an embrace” (88). It was obvious that Emily had been lying with the dead body because of the “indentation of the head” on the pillow next to him (88). Emily had gone crazy and completely lost reality by hugging and comforting a dead body. Overall, it is easy for someone to lose reality because they have not accepted the changes that have occurred around them.

. She did not have a life of her own. She was even described as “the background” of her father (84). The narrator recalled all of the men in her life that “her father had driven away” (84). Even at thirty years old she “was still single”, implying that by allowing someone else to control your personal life, you could still be affected long into adulthood (84). But the town’s people agreed that she would never change her father’s ways, saying that she “would not think seriously” about dating a man like Homer Barron (84). They also felt that she held “her head high” to prove that she deserved dignity because of her family’s last name (85). Th

Some topics in this essay:
Faulkner Emily, Emily Grierson, Colonel Sartoris”, Miss Emily’s, Homer Barron, Emily Homer, William Faulkner, town’s people, dead body, accept change, adapting change, unable accept change, life 84, unable accept, Rose Emily”, kept dead body, body emily, lose reality, change eventually lonely, people lose, grip reality, people accept change, accept change eventually,