A Rose for Emily Analysis

In A Rose for Emily, William Faulkner uses an observers narration to convey a decaying conservative culture. At the beginning of the story, Emily is youthful and skinny, but as the story progresses she is portrayed as fat, lonely, and someone who lives in solitude -- but when the town attends her funeral, they find that she had been keeping a corpse. Throughout the story, Faulkner mainly focuses on the values that the townspeople of Jefferson reflect towards Emily Grierson, a woman who exemplifies someone who holds conservative ideals. With an evolving town who keeps community values in high regard, Emily eventually becomes an image of deterioration.
The community regarded Emily as an obligation, a charity case, “Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town” (Faulkner). Emily, living in a developing town, comes across citizens who believe her to be a burden, but feel disposed to pay her back, “Miss Emily's father had loaned money to the town, which the town, as a matter of business, preferred this way of repaying. Only a man of Colonel Sartoris' generation and thought could have invented it, and only a woman could have believed it” (Faulkner). Further proof of a generation that once felt that they had to pay the Griersons, a new community is born into thinking that they have to repay a debt; although, it later becomes tedious for the townspeople.
As described in the following quote, new kin to the community surpassed the ideals of Emily, who refused to pay tax notices, “When the next generation, with its more modern ideas, became mayors and aldermen, this arrangement created some little dissatisfaction” (Faulkner). Innovative ideas contrasted those of the old south, in which Colonel Sartoris lead -- of course Colonel Sartoris being a representation of something old, and outdated, along with Emily’s home, “...only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps-an eyesore among eyesores”(Faulkner), fundamentally, the only representation of the old south was Emily’s house, based on descriptions of what was something once intact, “It was a big, squarish frame house that had once 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” (Faulkner).
At Emily’s funeral, it was noted that they the old men did not think of her as the meager person she was, but rather reminisced her as one of their own, “and the very old men -- some in their brushed Confederate uniforms -- on the porch and the lawn, talking of Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs” (Faulkner). In their Confederate uniforms, the old men symbolize something that was something of their aeon, and with that they bring Emily into the picture because of her belated past.
After Emily was buried, she took the values of an old town along with her, “And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery” (Faulkner), the cemetery meaning bereft beliefs that had once been held “among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson” (Faulkner), she took along with her the history of the town that had developed in a distinct era.
In conclusion, Emily Grierson rendered the personality of someone who kept aging in a crowd of an ever growing community. Emily being the representation of decrepity, and a town keen on communital status, sums A Rose for Emily as a story that embodies a town that decided that Emily was a “Lost Cause” -- essentially lost attitudes towards certain values.