Questions:
1. What kind of a person is Emily?
From what I have read, I feel that Emily is a really unsociable type of person; furthermore she is very curt and cannot adapt to newer and tougher situations. But she does have some strong points like the fact that she really knows how to cherish what she has.
2. How do we know? What evidence does the writer provide?
For the fact that Emily is unsociable and curt it applies to both her later years as well as her younger years although it is more pronounced closer to her death. One example would be she said "See Colonel Sartoris." (Colonel Sartoris had been dead almost ten years.) "I have no taxes in Jefferson. Tobe!" The Negro appeared. "Show these gentlemen out." It can also be seen that she mostly kept to herself fromt eh fact that she stayed in her “house, which no one save an old man-servant—a combined gardener and cook—had seen in at least ten years.”
As for the fact that she is unable to adapt, it can be seen when “After her father's death she went out very little; after her sweetheart went away, people hardly saw her at all.” This showed that she still could not recover from the set back of the loss of two dearest to her and this continued till her death day. It is true that she can cherish what she had as seen when she still kept “a crayon portrait of Miss Emily's father.” This showed how much she missed her father and kept a portrait of him till the very end as seen on “the funeral on the second day” a portrait “the crayon face of her father musing profoundly” could still be seen. But she took it a little too far with Homer Barron where in order to have his love forever, she actually gave him arsenic and let the man lay in a room on a bed.
