and asks for poison. When Emily purchases the arsenic, the druggist harbors a fear regarding the use to which Emily intends to put the poison. When the man asks her what she wants it for, "Miss Emily just stared at him, her head tilted back in order to look him right in the eye, until he looked away, and went and got the arsenic and wrapped it up" (pg.56). Sometimes people who are looking to commit suicide look for someone or something to prevent them from going through with it. Maybe Emily thought that the druggist would be really concerned about her and deny the sale of the arsenic. It's almost as if the druggist has too much affection for her to see clearly what he saw in her eyes. And maybe if he didn't stop her, when word got out that is what she had bought, maybe someone in the town would have stopped her. However, the town does not come forward in her time of need, in fact the very next day the townspeople decided, "She will kill herself"; And we said it would be the best thing" (pg.56). This had to have drove her close to insanity, knowing no one would care if she took her own life. Also the community would have liked her to have committed suicide because of her tarnished image. Now that the townspeople have deemed the house dead, they wait for her to die. When Miss Emily continues to live, the community refuses to invest in an alternative interpretation of the arsenic. They simply want to forget about it or suppress it. The druggist and the community members thus house information that our narrator could pursue, but does not. The narrator is too imbedded in the togetherness of the community to interrogate his fellow neighbours. In Emily's community "common sense" codes believed to be truths facilitate lack of knowledge. Codes about asking women questions, assumptions about what a woman would use arsenic for seem quite common. However, Emily refuses daily, to participate in the symbol making of her as a precious lady of the old ...
