This story is told by a narrator who represents the whole townspeople. Due to this fact, his or her perspective is limited and often subjective. Like the townspeople, readers know very little about what goes on inside Miss Emily's house. It is up to the readers to conjecture everything from the story. Here is one possible explaination of the story, but please be aware that this is only one of many possible interpretations.
Love and Hatred in A Rose for Emily
In A Rose for Emily, love does not appear explicitly in the story. That is, there are no actual romantic scenes that describe Emily and Homer Barron in love. The townspeople only see Emily and Homer Barron driving around town together, but sadly, there is no hugging or kissing. Whether what Emily feels about him is true love or mere obsession is a big question. It seems most likely that she feels a combination of love and hatred.
Emily feels this way toward Homer Barron. When she goes to the druggist and buys arsenic, she says to herself, "For rats" on her way out. One could argue that this means she loathes Homer Barron. However, the way she preserves his body and purchases clothes and toilet set (with the letters H. B. carved on each piece) for the corpse indicates that she also does love Homer Barron. Perhaps she kills him because she thinks that Homer Barron is not in love with her and that he is planning to leave. She has been rejected all her life--oppressed by her father and ignored by the townspeople. She was probably afraid Homer would leave her too.
Emily's feelings toward her father are also a mixture of love and hatred. She has affection for her father, yet she hates him for driving away all the men who could otherwise have been her husband. This could be why Emily chooses Homer Barron, a man her father would never have approved of, to defy against her father's oppression. Not being able to express her feelings in an open manner, Emily learns to show her love in a wicked way. She clings to her father's body, as she does with Homer Barron's body later in the story.
To conclude, Emily feels both love and hatred toward her father and Homer Barron. Her incapability to manifest her emotions on the outside makes her destructive.
My Personal Response
Like William Faulkner, I would also like to present a rose to Emily. I pity her very much. Living under the same roof for her entire life, Emily has also been confined inside her mind and she has never been given the chance to express her feelings. Such agony would be as painful as physical torture. It is no wonder that she talks and acts so strangely. I believe that what made her this way was not her innate personality traits but the environment she had grown up in. Had she been born into an ordinary loving family, she would have become a completely different person.
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