The spectrum of concepts roses can symbolize is vast and unique. A red rose symbolizes love, a black rose symbolizes death, and white roses symbolize marriage. Love and marriage are wonderful, while death is the horrific fate no one wants to confront. The short story A Rose For Emily by William Faulkner highlights the many major events in a lady’s life. In the story, the rose for Emily symbolizes love and death.
Throughout the entire story, the whereabouts of roses were never mentioned, yet the title is A Rose For Emily. This leaves the question for the readers to answer. First of all, red roses represent love in real life, so the story partially connects to reality. One of the interpretations of the meaning of this rose is love. During Emily’s life, she fell in love with a Northerner called Homer. Despite, her family’s novelty, she still decided to love a low-class poor man. This shows the amount of love bonding their connection. Additionally, the community also decided to make Emily’s life easier after her father died by allowing her to not pay taxes. The village chose to do this because they appreciated, loved, how her father performed many great deeds to benefit the village, and in return, they give his daughter a better life to help her fight through the tremendous loss. Her father’s death ties into the next meaning of the rose, which is death.
In reality, the meaning of a black rose is death and agony. Black roses are also used in video games to represent death. In the game Minecraft, black roses called wither roses cause the player to slowly die which is quite terrifying. In the story, death is shown when Emily’s father dies, and when Emily murders Homer. The death of Emily’s father caused agony for the rest of the village. The major twist of the story was when Emily murdered Homer, the man she loved. Her action was extremely strange, as very little people murder their loved ones. The most probable reasoning behind her action was to provide a better meaning of the rose. As previously stated, roses represent many unique concepts, and Homer has “given” Emily two roses. Love and Death. This strengthens the fact that roses have a large significance in this story, one of which is death.
Roses can represent a large variety of definitions ranging from love to death. Love was shown in the story when Emily and Homer fell in love. Additionally, the bond of love was broken when her father died. This ties into the next meaning of the rose, death. Death was shown when Emily’s father died and when she terrifyingly murdered her lover. The true meaning of a story might not even be highlighted during the story.