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Thursday, November 14, 2013

The Hoarding of Rats and the Dead


John Watson

Blog #5, option 3

            The situation described in Ree Hines’s news story, “’Hoarding’ woman fights to keep treasures after losing filthy, rat-filled home,” is similar with William Faulkner’s short story, “A Rose for Emily” because both involve homes that contain disgusting smells. In “A Rose for Emily,” Miss Emily refused to let the townspeople come view her father’s lifeless body for three days until she finally gave in (Faulkner, 184). This indicates that Miss Emily has trouble letting go of something or someone that is precious to her as well as her believing that her father’s dead body is her possession. The news story focused on a woman whose house was sold to investors because the woman refused to clean and sanitize her home. The house that the woman, Michelle, was filled with hundreds of rats of various sizes. The house contained so much filth and disease in it that the pest exterminators had to wear hazmat suits in order to do their jobs (Hines, paragraph 6). The link to the news story is provided below.
http://www.today.com/entertainment/hoarding-woman-fights-keep-treasures-after-losing-filthy-rat-filled-8C11535727
            Michelle believed that everything in the house was too important to throw away and that everything in the house belonged to her even though the house was no longer her house. Michelle did not bother to clean her house for several years until she was evicted because of she and her house became a safety hazard to the rest of the community. This is similar to Miss Emily in “A Rose for Emily” because some of the townspeople decided to cover Miss Emily’s house with lime due to the rancid smell coming from her house (Faulkner, 185). In both situations, the women refused to let go of their possessions, like how Miss Emily kept Homer Barron’s corpse in her bed decades after his death, while Michelle fought, not literally though, to keep everything in her house even though the house no longer belonged to her and the fact that the house was a health and safety hazard to everyone in her neighborhood (Faulkner, 190).















Faulkner, William. “A Rose for Emily.” American Gothic Tales. Ed. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: The Penguin Group. 182-190. Print.

Hines, Ree. “‘Hoarding’ woman fights to keep treasures after losing filthy, rat-filled home.” 6 November 2013. http://www.today.com/entertainment/hoarding-woman-fights-keep-treasures-after-losing-filthy-rat-filled-8C11535727, accessed 14 November 2013.

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