Townspeople in A Rose For Emily

2102秦娟

The story is narrated by “we,” the townspeople in general, who also play a role in Miss Emily’s tragedy. The townspeople respect Miss Emily as a kind of living monument to their glorified but lost pre-Civil War Southern past, but are therefore also highly judgmental and gossipy about her, sometimes hypocritically. They think Miss Emily is too haughty and choosy when it comes to her romantic involvements, and yet when she begins to see Homer Barron,
they think she is not choosy enough. For all that the townspeople scrutinize and judge Miss Emily, for all that they stick their noses in her business and intervene in her romantic affairs, they ironically fail to recognize that she is deeply damaged, even criminally insane, and they also fail to discover that she murdered Homer till some forty years after the fact.