A Rose for Emily, Essay Example

The Conflict between the old and New South in “A Rose For Emily”

In William Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily”, the Town is a representative of the change that comes with the advancement of the society towards modernity and industrialization and this is demonstrated in relation to the opposing main character, Miss Emily, because the Town’s treatment of her changes with time, because her skills are not valued anymore and because Miss Emily’s funeral is described as a burial of the Old South itself.

In the beginning of the story, the Town is already racing towards the future. Whereas Colonel Sartoris, as a representative of the old generation of Southerners,is still driven by old-fashioned chivalry and absolves Miss Emily from paying taxes, something only “a man of Colonel Sartoris’ generation would have thought” (1), the new generation “with its more modern ideas”(1), is less considerate and tries to persuade Miss Emily to pay the taxes as any other Jeffersonian. Whereas even by the time when the problem of the bad smell appears, the old generation still has the final decision, by the time when the problem of the unpaid taxes is posed, the new generation reached power and tries to force Miss Emily evolve in the Town’s rhythm.

Later in the story, the readers find out that the town has stopped considering Miss Emily as a valuable source of knowledge for young girls. The narrator notes that “the painting pupils fell away and did not send their children to her with boxes of colors and tedious brushes and pictures cut from the ladies’ magazines”. Miss Emily was raised in a world in which girls were supposed to have household and artistic preoccupations and therefore, what she knows becomesuseless for the new generation. The Town’s progress involves new forms of education for young women who are now supposed to become active members of the society.

A symbol of the South, Miss Emily’s death and funeral may represent a metaphor for the death of the Old South itself. Miss Emily is now unknown to most people, and only “the very old men-some in their brushed Confederate uniforms – on the porch and on the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs (5)” have an idea of whom she was-maybe not even who the woman was, but what she stood for, the traditions, the gentility and pride of the aristocratic South. For the rest of the Town however, she lost signification, and became a fallen monument of the past, or a fascinating piece of the Town’s past.

Works Cited

Faulkner, William. A Rose For Emily. 1930. Web.