The study of William Faulkner’s short story A Rose for Emily has mushroomed at home and abroad in recent years. An upsurge of scholars interested in the novel is found such as: David bowling (1989), Reed, J.R (1997), Xiao Minghan (1997), Shao Jinti (1995), Huang Xue’r (1997), Zhang Deliu (1990), Wang Mingin (2002) and Guan Jianming(2003).The study can be pided into three aspects: from the perspective of feminism, Emily’s tragedy is the consequence of the female sex and the female emotion being spayed both by Patriarchy and Ladies System of the American South; from the perspective of new criticism, William Faulkner’s writing techniques in A Rose for Emily express the whole significance of the story completely; from the perspective of modernism, Faulkner’s novel also consists of some modernist features[1].
This paper mainly analyzes Emily’s personality and the cause of its formation. Through this study, we find that Miss Emily is proud, self-important and obstinate like other Griersons .She is viewed as the embodiment and reprehensive of the old aristocracy. Dominated by her father, she is robbed of all opportunities for a happy marriage. It is that the patriarchal and social pressure warped her personality.

Ⅱ.The Analysis of Emily’s Personality
2.1 Extreme Loneliness
    Emily came from an aristocratic family in America’s South at a time when the women in society were censured and oppressed. Society tried its utmost to promote humility, forbearance, gentleness, and other traditional female values [2]. Emily’s father tried to shape her as a Southern lady, and she must obey her father in everything. Being reclusive, she was cut off contact with everyone and isolated herself from the outside world until, at 30-years-old, she was still single. Emily’s life was full of huge sense of loneliness, like a snake, suffocating her and making her crazy. Forty years later, Emily completed her own life but never married. After her death, people in the town discovered the 40-year-secret: Emily used a unique way to kill tile man named Barron, the only one she loved in her whole life, and accompanied by “him”, spent her lonely and miserable life in desolation [3]. The traditional concept, patriarchal society, and Southern womanhood torture her causing her to go crazy from loneliness.
    Emily’s life was lonely and tragic. In her 74 years in the world, she spent more than 40 years in solitude and isolation in her father’s dilapidated and eerie mansion where Emily quietly consumed the rest of her life lonely and miserably. “The only sign of life about the place was the Negro man young man then going in and out with a market basket.” “She passed from generation to generation dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse”. [4]
    This is a true portrayal of her lonely life. On the stage in her life, she played a role in the loneliness of tragedy.
    We note that Emily’s life is lack of a mother’s image which is on behalf of the love and happiness. Her mother died in her childhood, and Emily has never enjoyed the maternal love. She had no brothers or sisters, no family and friends, since her childhood, her father were her all and she viewed her father as “God”. Emily’s ideas and spirit suffered from repression and imprisonment when her father was alive, her proper requests, goals, desires, and instincts were all hampered by her father. Freud believed that a very normal person sometimes has some incredibly deviant behaviors, such behavior occurs precisely because they are prohibited, and these actions will make people get a spiritual relief and thrill (13). Moreover, Emily lived in such a sick and deformed society where she has been under a long period of psychological depression. Emily received her education under her father’s supervision. Her father’s high-handedness and discipline strangled her throbbing and expectation of youth, and her pure and innocent soul was poisoned by the old customs which made her miss the beautiful adolescence, suppressing her normal desires. From the picture that framed in the inhabitants eyes, we can easily see Emily’s father’s tyranny: “We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a straddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.”[5] 献给艾米丽的一朵玫瑰花中艾米丽的性格分析(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_18484.html