A Rose for Emily

“It was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily’s house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps—an eyesore among eyesores.”

Emily’s house is a symbol of The Reconstruction Era and the Decline of the Old South. The elaborate architectural structures that once decorated the house have, like the Grierson family, faded into grungy disrepair. As subsets of the new South spring up—represented by the machines of emerging industries—Emily’s decaying house is a physical manifestation of the Southern aristocracy’s refusal to change. As an extended metaphor, the Grierson home also represents Emily’s declining mental state.

“Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town.”

This opening quote establishes the story’s solemn tone and identifies Emily as a metaphorical historical institution that the town has an obligation to maintain. The narrator’s description of this obligation as “hereditary” suggests that Emily herself is not the point of reverence; rather, they respect her as a part of the fading Grierson family legacy. In framing Emily as both an obligation and metaphorical object, Faulkner characterizes her as separate from the Jefferson community and sets the foundation for the thematic development of The Dangers of Social Isolation.

“Only a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it.”

This quote highlights the antiquated social norms and gender roles of the Old South. The reference to Colonel Sartoris’s generation suggests that the new Jefferson administration views Emily in the same vein as pre-Civil War politics—outdated and biased.