The Old South in 'A Rose for Emily'

Jefferson was once inhabited by many well-off families who were members of the Old South's aristocratic class. As time, and the Reconstruction, marched on, these families slowly disappeared. Eventually, the last true living legacy of the Old South in Jefferson was Miss Emily Grierson. She had been raised to be a Southern Belle, an upstanding member of society, and she clung to her world of the Old South. She kept a black servant, Tobe, who did everything for her, just as if he were a slave, and she lived in a "a big, squarish frame house that once had 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" (par. 2). With the infiltration of the New South, however, "garages and cotton gins...encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood" (par. 2). Yet the house remained, "lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps," just as its willful inhabitant "carried her head high...even when we believed that she was fallen" (par. 33).

When opposites attracted however, Miss Emily put her dignity on the line and was seen "on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable" with Homer (par. 30). The ladies of the town said, "'Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner,'" and the "older people," those of the Old South, "said that even grief could not cause a real lady to forget noblesse oblige--without calling it noblesse oblige." (par 31). As time passed, Homer and Miss Emily were seen again and again, until finally, "some of the ladies began to say that it was a disgrace to the town and a bad example to the young people. The men did not want to interfere, but at last the ladies forced the Baptist minister...to call upon her" (par. 44). Then "the minister's wife wrote to Miss Emily's relations in Alabama" (par. 44). When they arrived, Miss Emily realized she had to do something to preserve her dignity and pride that kept her Old South alive.

The house was all that Miss Emily really had left after her father died. When he passed away, Miss Emily spent three days denying his death and not letting the doctors and ministers dispose of the body. Though it is not told first in the story, this was the first time Miss Emily had rejected the truth in order to retain her world of the past: a world in which other members of the Old South, such as Colonel Sartoris, lived on after they too had died.

We are shown not only the government of the Old South Jefferson, when it sided with Miss Emily, and the government of t

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