confused with Emily’s behavior which assumes that her father has not passed away yet. It can be shown:
Miss Emily met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that
for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to
resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly p.309.
Emily’s behavior shows her denial and repression to defend herself from suffering. Huffman states that denial is used to protect oneself from an unpleasant
reality by refusing to perceive it 451. Emily does not want to believe that her father passed away. She assures her thought to believe that her father is still alive.
Her behavior also shows repression because according to Kalish, repression is occurred when an individual is unable to recall or recognized something because
of consciousness needs to deny the awareness 155. Emily’s thought to perceive that her father is still alive, helps her to defend herself from suffering. Emily’s
thought makes her unable to recognize her father’s death. Emily’s behavior not to believe the fact that her father passed away also shows that she is in depression.
Kalish states that if someone feels that everything is going wrong, that nothing matters, that person is in depression 171.
f. Emily’s Possessiveness to a Man She Loves
Emily’s possessiveness to a man she loves is shown from her action when she kills and then hides a man she loves because she does not want to lose that
man. She does not want Homer Baron—the man she loves—leaves her. Emily
does that thing because she does not want to lose a man whom she loves like her father leaves her because of death.
The man himself lay in the bed. For a long while we just stood there, looking down at the profound and fleshless grin. The body had apparently
once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him. What
was left of him, rotted beneath what was left of the nightshirt, had become inextricable from the bed in which he lay; and upon him and upon the
pillow beside him lay that even coating of the patient and biding dust p.312.
Emily does not want Homer Baron to love others. In the story, the author explains that Emily’s neighbors assume that Baron is gay. It can be concluded that Emily
murders Homer Baron because she does not want Homer Baron to love another person. Emily becomes a person who will do anything even to murder to defend
someone she loves.
3. Influences on Mabel’s Behavior
At the first part, Mabel in Lawrence’s The Horse Dealer’s Daughter is characterized as an interesting young woman, who is affectionate, lovable, but
fragile. Mabel experiences the absence of love in her life repeatedly. She is left by her mother, father, and her sister. Her father leaves her because of the death. Her
mother also passed away when she was fourteen. Her sister goes away from their house because she has married. Mabel just lives with her three brothers. The fact
of the death of her father and mother can be seen as follows: And she lived in the memory of her mother, who had died when she was
fourteen, and whom she had loved. She had loved her father, too, in a different way, depending upon him, and feeling secure in him, until at age
of fifty-four he married. And then she had set hard against him. Now he had died and left them all hopelessly in debt p.471.
