Rose for Emily

In an interview Faulker gives details about the ethical questions facing Emily.
             The conflict was in Miss Emily, that she knew that you do not murder people. She had been trained that you do not take a lover. You marry, you don't take a lover. She had broken all the laws of her tradition, her background, and she had finally broken the law of God too, which says you do not take human life. And she knew she was doing wrong, and that's why her own life was wrecked. Instead of murdering one lover, and then to go on and take another and when she used him up to murder him, she was expiating her crime. (Faulkner 59).
             In the same interview, Faulkner gives reasons to feel pity for Emily.
             In this case there was the young girl with a young girl's normal aspirations.
             to find love and then a husband and a family, who was brow-beaten and kept down by her father , a selfish man who didn't want her to leave home because he wanted a housekeeper, and it was a natural instinct of-repressed which- you can't repress - you can mash it down but it comes up somewhere else and very likely in a tragic form , and it was simply another manifestation of man's injustice to man, of the poor human being struggling with its own heart, with others, with its environment, for the simple things which all human beings want. It's that he was- that man is trying to do the best he can with his desires. (Faulkner, 189).
             The reader is then faced with deciding to feel empathy for Emily because of her upbringing or condemning her because she knew the difference between good and evil.
             The ethical conflict is not the only contrasting issue that Faulkner presents. He explores different views on the past and present. The reader is given a sense of reverence for the past by the description of the older men present at Emily's funeral. The narrator says, "Whom past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever touches" (Faulkner 34).