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Emily’s father, arrogant and overbearing, thinks all the young man in the town can not match his daughter, or can not suit for her image of upper class (Wu, 2012). In the contrast “a slender figure” of Emily and “a spraddled silhouette” of her father, the vast imbalance between them can be easily seen. Apparently, Emily is unable to exclude her father’s influence on her. Therefore, during her father’s lifetime, Emily is deprived of the right as a normal woman to fall in love with one of those suitors and to contact with others. Without company of others, her father’s behaviors and bearings are the only model for Emily to learn from without decerning whether they are right or not. In the lifetime of her father, the life of Emily was strictly restrained and controlled by her father due to patriarchy.There is no doubt that his patriarchal upbringing was the basic element that cultivates the arrogant and eccentric personality of Emily and drives her to a tragic end.
2.1 Aristocratism
Both Emily’s family and the townspeople have an aristocratism value. With an aristocratism value, aristocrats are considered to be nobler and more dignified than others and always receive aspirations from people so that people are subordinate to them, for example, people seldom qualify for the marriage with aristocrat.
In the townspeople’s eyes, her father clutched a “horsewhip” when managed to drive away all her pursuers. A horsewhip is a long, thin piece of leather which is used to train and control horses. In another word, her father treats others like horses, domestic animals. Zhu Hui points out in his research that her father is accustomed to dominating and intimidating others (Zhu, 2011). Actually, he treats others worse than that. He not only got used to repressing others but also is likely to despise and distain others, treating them as his inferiors.
After the death of her father, Emily is brave enough to pursue her love. It looks like she finally gets rid of the image as a lady which her father enforced on her.
Although she accepts Homer as her lover, she still carried her head “high enough” when the townspeople gossiped about her; she forced the druggist to sell her arsenic with an attitude of coercion and arrogance; the Baptist minister, who wanted to interfere her love with Homer, refused to go back again after a visit for Emily. Emily still remains arrogant and considers herself as a noble, dignified lady prior to nearly all the townspeople. Emily inherits her father’s temper as well as values and fails to cast off what her father enforced on her. In the tableau, her father is a silhouette which is frequently related to darkness. By contrast, Emily was in white which often stands for pureness. It implies that under the shadow of her arrogant and cocky father, Emily is an innocent victim even though she spontaneously imitates the disgusting stuff in her father’s aristocratism value.源`自,751`文.论"文'网[www.751com.cn
There are five people once in comparatively long and direct contact with Emily: her father, her servant, Homer and her cousins. This is how the novel depicts the relationship between the family of Emily and that of her cousins.She had some kin in Alabama; but years ago her father had fallen out with them over the estate of old lady Wyatt, the crazy woman, and there was no communication between the two families. They had not even been represented at the funeral (Faulkner, 1931).
Apparently, Emily don’t tend to get along well with her cousins and vice versa. It is while the two female cousins were visiting Emily that Emily prepared for her wedding and abruptly ploted to poison Homer and that Homer left the town when the streets were finished some time. However, what the two cousins did and said towards Emily remained a mystery. Then, when Emily passed away they came back at once, held the funeral, led the townspeople to Emily’s house where she had perversely remained closed to others during her lifetime and opened the room where the body of Homer was on the bed. Then, the murder Emily committed was uncovered.