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Honored as one of America’s greatest novelists, William Faulkner was a writer who deeply rooted in the American South. Faulkner, born and grown up in Mississippi, devoted his career to explore the culture and value of South based on his own experience. Southern America in Faulkner’s own time was experiencing great social and economic changes. The Civil War and the loss of war brought an end to the social caste constituted by white slave owners and black slaves, which formed the fundamental structure of “Old South”. The great slaveholders were rudely brought down: some lost out in wealth and power altogether completely, and others persisted, with much reduced wealth and power but still being respected as the local “quality”. (Williamson, 13) Faulkner’s works are powerful descriptions about the very south and its people, the one suffering from conflicts of the Past and the Present, old and new. And among these great works that defining the Southern literature, there stands A rose for Emily.
A rose for Emily is a short story set up in Jefferson, Yoknapatawpha, a famous fictional region constructed by Faulkner. First published in 1930, it shares the main theme of Faulkner’s works. With symbolism and metaphor introduced, the author unfolds a vivid south to the readers mainly through two major conflicts: the one of South with its past as well as the one between South and North, and in the very center of them is the protagonist: Emily Grierson.

The work begins with the unnamed narrator describing the death of Miss Emily Grierson, portrayed as a “fallen monument”.

When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant—a combined gardener and cook-had seen in at least ten years.

When alive, “Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a...