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“She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.”
This quote illustrates the profound impact death can have on an individual. In Emily’s case, the death of her father is so destabilizing that she rejects it altogether. Though she eventually relents and allows the town to bury her father, this incident exemplifies Emily’s attempts to exert power over death itself and foreshadows the fate that befalls Homer Barron.
“For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him.”
Here, the town discovers Homer Barron’s grotesque and long decayed body—the proof of Emily’s attempt to thwart death, to subvert its finality and offer her more control. In this passage, death is characterized as eternal, lasting longer than love. Faulkner also personifies death as having “cuckolded” Homer Barron, because of the fact that death has now taken Emily, suggesting a twisted connection between love, sex, and death that is underscored by the disturbing revelation that Emily had been sleeping beside the body, and that it had “apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace.”
