The setting in “A Rose for Emily” is Faulkner’s fictitious post-civil war Jefferson, a small town in the deep south of the United States. Faulkner’s use of this particular time-period or genre, is successful in giving the reader an understanding or background to the values and beliefs of the characters in the story. The town of Jefferson is a fallen legacy. The hierarchical regime of the Griersons and the class system of the time where by ordinance of the major Colonel Sartorius, a Negro women could not even walk the street without an apron, had changed into a place where even the street on which Miss Emily lived, that had once been the most select, had now been encroachi

ng and obliterating, her house an eyesore among eyesores. Both the town and Miss Emily herself, now looked upon Miss Emily as the only remnant of that greater time. This fact gives the reader an understanding of the mind set of the “town,” who is narrating Miss Emily’s story to us in a form resembling a gossip circle, where stories of various townspeople are pieced together and of Miss Emily, the protagonist who lived alone except for her lone servant.

This short story contains a high rate of setting and symbolism, which is thoroughly distributed and revealed throughout the entire story. Setting and symbolism is very prominent throughout the story, and plays one of the biggest roles in the underlying meaning of the entire story.

There are several different symbolic subjects in this story such as the house, Miss Emily as a “monument, “(87) Homer and the “Yankee”(90) views, and Miss Emily’s old Negro servant who represents death in the story. Miss Emily is compared to her house in many different ways. Descriptions of the decaying house symbolize Miss Emily’s physical and emotional decay, and as well as her mental problems. The representation between herself and her house is shown through constant neglect and not appreciated. In one point that Faulkner makes,

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