Three days later Emily finally allows for the body to be removed from her home. .
Part three is one in which no outsiders are allowed in. Miss Emily is only known to have purchased rat poison for an unidentified reason. Similar to the second part, in part four, two invasions occur: The Baptist minister and a visit from her relatives from Alabama. In the final part, the horde comes and buries the corpse as Miss Emily can no longer deny entry (509).".
When discussing how Emily did not pay her taxes and eventually bought arsenic to kill her lover, it was clear that her attitude is what made her "too good" to follow the rules which made the whole town show up at her funeral. Their lack of emotion was replaced with curiosity as they finally saw the inside of her house and ultimately her bedroom, which revealed she lay next to a dead body for approximately forty years. The people did not even seem that surprised when they discovered the hair in the bed. Emily was known for being secretive and this was just one more event that people could question about her.
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Watkins hit the nail on the head when discussing Faulkner's structure and plot. Not only did Faulkner show what people really think of their neighbors, he did it in a way to fill the reader's curiosity about their own lives. People read stories to go into another world and with Emily, it was easy to wonder about her and imagine that someone like that existed. Everyone has a neighbor that raises suspicion and this story fed into that curiosity. People have the notion that they need to be the "perfect neighbor" and that way nobody will really know how messed up their lives really are. It is still common for everyone to keep up their external appearance, so that no one knows the problems they may be hiding. .
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Hawthorne wrote "The Birthmark" which examines the obsession with human perfection. The main character and protagonist, Aylmer, is a perfectionist as he created a potion to get rid of physical flaws.