William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily” tells the terrible tale most girls are raised to believe: You will marry, have a family, and live happily ever after. Except Emily doesn’t get any of this. Her noblesse father scared away all potential suitors, keeping her all to himself. She has nothing, no one, but that’s nobody’s fault. “A Rose For Emily” is a perfect title, despite the concerns that the title is lacking in focus and connection to the story. What do you give a woman with nothing, and who cannot comprehend what it would mean to have something, anyway? What do you give to the elderly, the sick and dying, when you have nothing to give? A rose. It’s not hard to concur that Emily was in fact insane. However, it’s difficult to determine the degree. Does she truly not comprehend? Or does she just refuse to accept truth? Which is worse? Which determines the depth of insanity? How pitiful can this character get? Faulkner hints that Emily is the way she is because of her family’s noblesse oblige, and I want to push that a bit further: She is the way she is because she was an old-school Rapunzel, except your hair doesn’t grow out windows when you’re locked up all alone for that long. You go insane. I plan to argue that Emily is the way she is due to her father’s controlling and selfish demeanor, and how this shaped the way Emily viewed and approached relationships throughout the story. Although she is clearly the protagonist, Emily is treated almost as an object; something rather than someone. “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor – he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron – remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity” (Faulkner 85). The first section reveals that the town she has spent her life in only goes to her funeral to see the home that’s been hidden for ten years, not to mourn the woman who occupied it. But, who could blame them: Emily is a child. She did not update her home as the town modernized; she refused to respond to the mayor in a proper manner on two separate occasions regarding her taxes. She drew a portrait