Emily Grierson’s father was a domineering man who controlled his daughter’s life. The narrator says, “We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.” Emily’s mother was dead and her father turned away any young men who wanted to court Emily with the excuse they were not good enough. Emily remained fairly isolated in the house with her father.
When the townspeople somehow discerned that Emily’s father died, they went to offer their help and sympathy. They also indulged their avid curiosity about Emily and the life she lived behind those mysterious walls. However, Emily will not let go of her father:
“She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days… We did not say she was crazy then. We believed she had to do that. We remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.”
Emily retreated into lonely isolation, rarely leaving the house. Nevertheless, she did go out enough to meet Homer Baron, the Northerner whom the town believed was too low class for Emily. When she bought a men’s toiletry set, they believed she and Homer would be married. But Homer disappeared and Emily withdrew into complete isolation. The narrator comments, “After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all.” No one entered the house except Tobe, the servant who had been with her family for years. The pattern she practiced of isolation and refusing to let go of those she loved, even when they died, continued until her own death.
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