Emily Grierson, an aged Southern belle, was the last surviving member of an aristocratic family living in the antebellum South. Emily’s father kept her cloistered for much of her youth. After the death of her father, she was left penniless and alone, an outsider with no friends and no marriage prospects. Emily was alternately pitied and scorned by the people of Jefferson. She ultimately failed to overcome her isolated upbringing and became the town eccentric. Emily had a brief romance with a Northern day worker named Homer Barron. After their relationship ended in his apparent abandonment of her, she secluded herself entirely.

At the end of the story, after Emily’s death, her house is investigated. What appears to have been an open secret among the townspeople is revealed: Homer’s decaying body had been kept in a bed in Emily’s house for nearly forty years.

Emily Grierson was a remnant of the traditional Southern social stratification that was phased out in the wake of the Civil War. Much of Emily’s isolation could be blamed on her aristocratic status. Her status made her an object of both reverence and resentment in the eyes of the people of Jefferson. Her father raised her in isolation and chased away potential suitors because he did not believe anyone was good enough for his daughter. The townspeople were also scandalized when Emily began a courtship with Homer Barron. Homer was a lowly Northern laborer who would traditionally have been considered well beneath Emily’s station. In order to thwart the match, the Baptist minister’s wife contacted Emily’s relatives in Alabama. They arrived soon thereafter and seemingly drive Homer away.

However, Emily’s demands for special treatment also maintained the barriers between her and the people of Jefferson. By refusing to pay taxes and refusing to let the town put a mailbox on her house, Emily clung to the past and the traditional values it represented. The townspeople, many of whom were just as traditional as Emily, enabled this behavior. Men of the Old South, like Colonel Sartoris and Judge Stevens, declined to chastise Emily for her obstinance out of respect for her station.

“A Rose for Emily” can also be read as an allegory in which Emily symbolizes the decay of the Old South and its traditions and Mr. Grierson and Emily together represent the last of the aristocracy in Jefferson. However, after the Civil War, the South was forced to modernize and accommodate intrusions on its traditions. Emily, a fading Southern belle, was symbolically unable to integrate into the rapidly changing Jefferson. She instead withered in isolation. As the story progresses, she transforms from a slim, youthful figure into a “bloated,” corpse-like one. Emily’s changing physique provides a vivid metaphor for the fate of Southern traditions. Homer Barron, who was loud, robust, and youthful, represents the intrusion of the victorious North in the postwar years. By killing Homer, Emily symbolically rejected the intrusion of the North into the Old South. Her attachment to his decaying corpse symbolizes her desire to maintain the rapidly fading traditions of the Old South. She killed him in an effort to halt time and prevent the tides of change from sweeping away the ruined past to which she clung.

The question of whether to view Emily as a tragic figure or an unhinged murderer is up for interpretation. In the former reading, Emily was a product of her upbringing. She was an isolated, lonely figure whose social status prevented her from working or forming social bonds. When Homer Barron arrived from the North, Emily likely saw in him as a potential kindred spirit, a fellow outcast. However, Homer was charismatic and funny, better able to fit in than Emily, despite the initial prejudice he faced on account of being a Northerner. Furthermore, he described himself as “not a marrying man.”

The narrator mentions that Emily’s great-aunt, old lady Wyatt, went “crazy.” This indicates that mental instability runs in the Grierson family. Emily’s cloistered childhood and inability to accept her father’s death indicate a stunting of her emotional development. This emotional stunting left her unable to distinguish life from death. By this reading, Emily was desperate to keep the only man who was ever allowed to get close to her. So, she decided to poison Homer as a means of keeping him around when it became clear that he planned to leave. That she positioned the body “in the attitude of an embrace” suggests a combination of loneliness, desperation, and a degree of disconnection from reality resulting from mental instability. Unable to discern between the living and the dead, Emily developed the same attachment to Homer’s corpse that she had with Homer when he was alive.

Yet, for all of the tragedy of Emily’s life, she was still a murderer. She deliberately sought out the druggist and requested the “best” rat poison he had with the intention of using it to kill Homer. This indicates a degree of premeditation incompatible with true innocence. By this reading, Emily’s motive may have been revenge for Homer’s apparent rejection of her. Unable to accept being spurned, especially by a man beneath her in social class, she turned to murder.

The truth of Emily’s character is likely a blend of tragedy, anger, and mental instability. Rather than either absolving or condemning Emily, William Faulkner approaches her story neutrally. This neutrality suggests that Emily is too complex a character to cast a definitive judgement against. On an allegorical level, Emily’s complexity suggests the complexity of the Old South. Though Emily’s death comes as a relief to the town, it is also a tragedy. Similarly, though cultural progress demands that the South modernize, the loss of the old traditions is inevitably tinged with nostalgia for some.

Homer Barron was a Northern laborer who came to Jefferson to help pave the sidewalks. Though the younger citizens of Jefferson dismissed his status as a Northerner, they came to appreciate Homer’s charisma and sense of humor. At first, his relationship with Emily was a source of amusement and delight for the townspeople, but many objected to the match on account of the drastic difference in social status.

Homer’s role in Faulkner’s “A Rose for Emily” is largely symbolic. He represents the Northern influence that began to pervade the South after the Civil War. Homer was a “big,” loud, Northern “Yankee” who rejected the idea of getting married and worked as a day laborer. His presence went against the traditions and sensibilities of the South, and his romance with Emily bordered on scandalous. Just as the younger generations were more willing to challenge Emily about her taxes, they were also more willing to accept Homer, highlighting the cultural shift happening in Jefferson and in the postwar South more broadly.

The romance between Emily and Homer acts as an allegory for the post–Civil War relationship between the North and the South. Emily represents the decaying traditions of the South, upholding the notions of aristocracy and class division. Homer represents the social mobility and revised class expectations of the North, exemplified by the Northern “carpetbaggers” who traveled to the South after the war in hopes of profiting from the South’s dilapidated infrastructure. Initially, Northern profiteers like Homer attempted to integrate. However, Homer’s lifestyle, which rejected marriage and tradition, was incompatible with Southern expectations, particularly that of courtship and marriage. The grisly end he met represents the way the Southern aristocracy desperately clung to their old traditions at the expense of modernization.

Mr. Grierson was Emily’s overbearing father. The townspeople view the Grierson family as a “tableau”—more relics of the Old South than actual people. During Emily’s youth, her father rejected her aspirant suitors on account of their not being “good enough,” condemning her to a life of lonely spinsterhood after his death. Emily initially refused to acknowledge his death, only breaking down with grief after several days of being hounded by ministers.

The townspeople were sympathetic toward Emily’s plight. They said that she would “cling to what had robbed her” on account of having nothing else meaningful in her life. Emily never seems to fully escape Mr. Grierson’s domineering presence. A portrait of him continued to loom over the parlor after his death, a symbol of his continued control of Emily’s interactions. The same portrait is brought to her funeral, indicating that Emily is unable to escape her father’s influence even in death.

Colonel Sartoris was the mayor of Jefferson at the time of Mr. Grierson’s death. He invented a story about a loan Mr. Grierson once gave to the city. As a kindness to the Emily, left destitute after her father’s death, Sartoris exempted her of having to pay taxes and cited the story of the loan as a justification of the exemption.

Colonel Sartoris represents traditional Southern values and codes of honor. Rather than allowing Emily, an upper-class woman, to have to work or accept charity, Sartoris devised a strategy that benefitted Emily without embarrassing her. Colonel Sartoris’s indulgence of Emily was later challenged by the younger generations of politicians, who attempted to modernize with a federal mail service. When they wanted to include Emily, she rebuffed them.

Colonel Sartoris is a recurring character in William Faulkner’s works, specifically the novel Sartoris. He is a member of the once-prominent Sartoris family, members of the old Southern aristocracy who find themselves displaced after the Civil War.

Tobe was Emily’s “combined gardener and cook” and her only human contact for most of her later life. He served as Emily’s “manservant,” shopping at the market, escorting guests in the home, and likely caring for Emily as she aged. However, it is unlikely that they were true companions, for, as the narrator remarks that at the time of Emily’s death, Tobe’s voice is “harsh and rusty, as if from disuse.”

The townsfolk were quick to blame the smell from Emily’s house on Tobe’s poor housekeeping skills. They pestered him for details about Emily during his outings, but he refused to divulge any information. Tobe represents the remnants of oppression and slavery that still pervaded the turn-of-the-century South. There were very few employment opportunities for Black men in the antebellum South outside of labor or service, and Tobe likely stayed with Emily out of a combination of pity and a lack of better options. After Emily’s death, Tobe leaves Jefferson and never returns.

Emily’s cousins from Alabama, estranged relatives, arrive in Jefferson at the behest of the Baptist minister's wife, who seeks their intervention in Emily’s romance with Homer Barron. Although initially welcomed by the community for attempting to uphold social propriety, their presence quickly becomes a burden to both Emily and the townsfolk. Their departure coincides with Homer’s brief disappearance, which preludes his permanent vanishing.

Their visit is seen as a reinforcement of the Grierson’s aloof family values, intensifying the town’s hope that Emily might emancipate herself from their restrictive influence.

Judge Stevens was a member of the older generation of Southerners who still held to traditional values about social decorum and status. After some of the younger townsfolk asked him to do something about the horrible smell emanating from Emily’s house, he exasperatedly chastised them for so much as thinking to confront an aristocratic lady like Emily about “smelling bad.”

When Emily and Homer began to court in public, some of the locals felt that the unconventional pair would set a bad example for the children. They approached the Baptist minister and asked him to speak with Emily. He did so but was unsuccessful in breaking the pair up. He also refused to tell anyone how the conversation went. The minister’s wife then decided to reach out to Emily’s estranged family in Alabama in the hope that they would intervene in Emily and Homer’s relationship.

The druggist becomes an unwitting accessory to Emily’s grim plans when he sells her arsenic without pressing for explanation, attributing her purchase to rodent extermination. His compliance underscores the deference paid to Emily’s social standing, blind to the darker undertones of her request.

Old Lady Wyatt, Emily’s great-aunt, is a spectral presence alluded to as having succumbed to madness. Her insanity is perceived as a hereditary trait within the Grierson line, serving as a foreboding testament to Emily’s own mental instability.