.." It is as if she is some kind of living museum.
Miss Emily's status as some example of former greatness protected her in other ways. time came when her house... well... smelled. A neighbor went to officials and complained. The response the neighbor got was, "Damn it, sir," Judge Stevens said, "will you accuse a lady to her face of smelling bad?" The assumption was that some animal, perhaps a rat, had died. The location of Miss Emily's house now being so unfortunate with the passage of time, this probably made sense to the town leaders. Rather than confront Miss Emily, they checked her property for carcasses, and sprinkled lime around to encourage the rapid decay if any bodies were about. Such action is unimaginable today, which is one thing that makes the story so striking: the narrator reports these events as fact. What the narrator knows is not what the reader knows. He is giving us a peek into another time and place, a place he apparently knows well.
There is no doubt Miss Emily did pecular things. When her father died, she refused to acknowledge his death for three days, and ten years later referred to him as if he were still alive. In fact, when Miss Emily allowed the Yankee, a laborer, to court her, some approved of this because it suggested that Miss Emily was finally getting a little more in touch with reality. They suggested that -- even though she was a fine lady -- her father may have thought of their family as just a little better than they really were. The result was that no man had been good enough for Miss Emily, leaving her in the predicament...
Well, times were changing.
Miss Emily never lost her ability to set herself above the rules, however. When she went to the druggist to buy arsenic, the pharmacist insisted that because it was such a powerful poison, he had to put down what she wanted it for. She apparently did not see the need to explain herself, and stared determinedly. Finally the pharmacist gave in, and wrote what the box of arsenic said: "for rats." Some speculated that she might have bought it for herself as her gentleman caller seemed to have left town, leaving Miss Emily alone. Clearly she had expected to marry him; she had bought him a fine gift, after all.
Miss Emily became a recluse after her Yankee gentleman caller stopped calling on her, with her manservant running all her errands and doing all the shopping. When Miss Emily died, no one had been in her home for some years, so the townspeople were quite shocked to find the Yankee man's mummified remains tucked into a bed in an upstairs bedroom, with Miss Emily's gift of a silver hairbrush still on his dresser -- and evidence that Miss Emily had recently been in the bed herself.
Write what you know," as shown by "A Rose for Miss Emily," does not seem to mean "write a story telling what people believed when you were growing up." In Faulkner's story, it means, "Make the beliefs of people a backdrop and then show some extreme behavior that could have resulted from those beliefs." Maybe a better way to say the rule might be, "Use what you know when you write."
