(see pdf for color and font design)

“Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face.  She told them that her father was not dead.  She did that for three days…”(Faulkner, 3)

In this quote, it is clear that Emily is in complete denial that her father is dead.  It is made clear in the text that her father kept her from living a normal life by keeping her in the house and refusing any guy that came to introduce himself to her.  In her fathers death, she clings to him since he never let her close to anyone else.  Her denial is her desperate attempt to repress the reality that now everything she had was gone.  Freud defines this in his lectures, stating  “…the end of this internal struggle was that the idea which had appeared before consciousness as the vehicle of this irreconcilable wish fell a victim to repression, was pushed out of consciousness with all its attached memories, and was forgotten.”(Freud, 2212).  This desperation to cling to something/someone is what ultimately drives her to keep Homer Barron’s body in her room until her death, releasing her repressed desires in the act of keeping his corpse.  

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I chose this quote from the text because I felt it was an important moment for the reader where bits and pieces of her emotional state were coming together.  Throughout the text, her story is told and more and more context is given in order to reach the end of the story.  This quote is the first moment we see Emily’s raw reaction to her trauma, and in looking at the story as a whole it sets the stage for how she copes with the rest of her life.   It ties together the events of her life that follow.