William Faulkner\'s Short Story, \"Rose for Emily\"

William Faulkner's short story, "Rose for Emily" offers two radical different depictions of the South. On the one hand, the South is depicted as a place that is steeped in tradition and traditional approaches to things and to virtue. Indeed, this sort of traditional aspect is embodied by such characters as Emily, herself, and Colonel Sartoris, who represent an older and more traditional order. Secondly, Faulkner depicts a new and developing group of Southerners that re more interested in modernization. In the final twist of his story, Faulkner parodies the tendency of the older generation of Southerners to keep latching on to outmoded values that are "dead" or decaying.

One of the ways that Faulkner depicts the South is as a place that is very much married to tradition and he uses Emily herself as an example of Southern tradition. As an institution of sorts in this small town she represents traditional southern attitudes and the values of the Old South that still existed as a sort of holdover from the pre-Civil War days. For this reason, Faulkner literally lists Miss Emily as a tradition, herself:

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town, dating from that day in 1894 when Colonel Sartoris, the mayor -- he who fathered the edict that no Negro woman should appear on the streets without an apron -- remitted her taxes, the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity.

Faulkner)

Indeed, here Miss Emily is literally supported by the town as an institution that subsists upon the public coffers. Thus, despite her own isolation, she literally is publicly supported by the town as if she were either a charity or a historic landmark that required continual upkeep.

Faulkner also depicts the change in the South, however, and how this change in the social order of the South comes to conflict with the more traditional aspects of Southern life that Miss Emily embodies:

Then the newer generation became the backbone and the spirit of the town, and the painting pupils grew up and fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of color and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladles' magazines... Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them.

Faulkner)

Here, we see that the main ways in which the traditional order has come into conflict with the new generation of people in the South who are adapting modern living. This new generation is not interested in the sort of talents that Miss Emily has to offer. But Emily herself is resistant to change, as evidenced by her refusal to get a mailbox.