ostensibly to get rid of "rats," the pharmacist tells her that (modern) laws require him to know why she is asking for poison, she simply looks him in the eye, and she wins another war between modernism and the Old South.

During the only incident in which Miss Emily actually does something "modern"--allowing herself to be courted not only by a blue-collar worker but a Yankee--the townspeople adopt very Old South attitudes and actually try to bring in relatives to talk some sense into Miss Emily in order to get her to act like the  aristocratic southern lady that she still is.  This also fails completely, another defeat, but this time the conflict is flipped on its side, with Miss Emily fighting to be modern,and the town trying to keep the Old South alive.

The town, in essence, represents to forces of modernism in conflict with the Old South, and Miss Emily, most of whose actions are relentlessly Old South, defeats the forces of modernism until her death.

"A Rose for Emily" is an example of Southern Gothic literature. Here are some of the characteristics of Southern Gothic that this story contains:

• An exploration of the behavior and social order of the South

In the exposition of the narrative, Emily is described as a "tradition" and "a duty" and a "sort of hereditary obligation upon the town." She grows up in the Old South, a patriarchal society in which her father has paid no taxes because Colonel Sartoris had invented a tale in which Mr. Grierson had donated money to the town years before. Emily believes this tale and after her father dies, she insists that she owes no taxes when the aldermen pay her a visit.

• Damaged and delusional characters who try to make sense of the world around them

Later, Miss Emily makes an exhibition of herself when she rides around the town with Homer Barron, a common laboring man from the North. Many of the townspeople are concerned about Miss Emily as she has lost "noblesseoblige." Her relatives from Alabama are called upon to visit Miss Emily in order to discuss her behavior, and to urge her to act more appropriately. Instead, she purchases arsenic, and she stops going out, leading the townspeople to think Emily will commit suicide. But Emily acts even more strangely.

• Death and madness/Grotesque themes

Emily insists that her father is not dead when he has been dead for three days. Then, when the ladies of town pay her a visit, Miss Emily greets them as follows.

. . . She met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her...trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.

At the end of the narrative, after Miss Emily's funeral, it is discovered that she has slept with a cadaver for years. For, when Homer attempted to leave her, Emily poisoned him and kept him in a bedroom.

The townspeople know that "with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will." (Her father ran off beaus when Emily was a young woman.) 

When Homer Barron supposedly leaves town, it is Miss Emily who is shamed by his departure. She decides to keep him and purchases arsenic. So, it is not in marriage, but in death that she holds the Yankee in her home. In the most bizarre turn of the story, after Emily's death, Homer's skeleton is discovered on a bed where the other pillow has an indentation with one long strand of iron-grey hair.

In addition to the wonderful answer above...

It's Point-of-View. Faulkner is a master of the modernist stream-of-consciousness narrative shifts.  In "A Rose for Emily," we have a collective narrator (1st person plural):

WHEN Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years.

It is difficult to determine the gender of the whole town: are they mainly men, mainly women, or both?

Early in the story, it seems the narrator is male, or at least comes from the patriarchal culture of law and authority:

Colonel Sartoris, the mayor--he who fathered the edict that … the dispensation dating from the death of her father on into perpetuity.

We are the city authorities, Miss Emily. Didn't you get a notice from the sheriff, signed by him?

When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Baron … When we next saw Miss Emily… ...Now and then we would see her in one of the downstairs windows.

Early in the story we have the male confrontation with Emily regarding the taxes.  Later in the story, they confront her about the smell.  All told, she is the object of the male gaze.  Men, both young and old, are amazed at her as spectacle and a pillar of grotesqueness.  The men objectify her:

Alive, Miss Emily had been a tradition, a duty, and a care; a sort of hereditary obligation upon the town

We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground…

From the male point-of-view, she is not regarded as a woman.  She is an institution beyond reproach, much like the South herself.  She is a tragic memory of the lost cause and the Southern debutante.

Widely considered one of the greatest of American authors, William Faulkner is superb in his employment of all elements of fiction.  In his "A Rose for Emily" Faulkner's unique use of several narrators, the significantly Gothic tone with the influence of the Southern milieu, the characterization of Emily, and the plot itself are all skillfully rendered.

Most skillful is the author's use of time (part of setting) in the plot of his short story.  For, it is the shifts of time with the narrator's flashbacks that prevent readers from "putting all the pieces together" and that help to create the Gothic horror of the discovery at the end.  "A Rose for Emily" is divided into five sections, with the first and last dealing with the present, the now of the narrative, while the three middle sections detail the past. The story, thus, begins and ends with the death of Miss Emily Grierson; the three middle sections cover the time from soon after her father's death and shortly after her "beau," Homer Barron, has deserted her, to the time of her death. 

In the fourth section, Faulkner writes of Emily,

Thus she passed from generation to generation--dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse.

These adjectives describe each section of "A Rose for Emily." Critics argue that these descriptions of the times of each section are a metaphorical characterization of the differing states of mind that the townspeople pass through in their evaluation of Emily. For instance, in his essay, "'A Rose for Emily':  Another View of Faulkner's Narrator," William V. Davis correlates the two present sections with the adjectives that fall to them, giving Miss Emily to the reader as the paradox she has become in death: "dear" and "perverse," while before her death, she was inescapable, impervious, and tranquil."  Thus, during her life, the woman who has been a mystery and an inscrutable and impenetrable is finally clarified by the shifts of time.  Another look at the first death section reveals the foreshadowing of Emily's final portrait:  Her house is an "eyesore among eyesores" in "coquettish decay," there is a "tarnished gilded easel," and Miss Emily looks "bloated, like a body submerged.

Skillfully arranged, the shifts in time of William Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily" serve to develop the Gothic horror and explicate the narrative; as part of the plot they are key to the understanding Faulkner's magnificent story.

"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner is a classic example of Southern Gothic literature, which is the style Faulkner is perhaps best known for. Relevant social issues to the story are those of gender, the post-Civil War era, and Southern ideals.

Some of the classic elements of the Southern Gothic style are that it uses supernatural or unusual events and the use of the grotesque, as well as characters who do not fit in with the traditional society. In "A Rose for Emily," Emily Grierson is the grotesque character. Emily was an outsider and something of a spectacle for the town; the townsfolk enjoyed gossiping about her and seeing what she would do next. Faulkner writes in section IV,

"So the next day we all said, "She will kill herself"; and we said it would be the best thing. When she had first begun to be seen with Homer Barron, we had said, "She will marry him." 

Here we can see the town gossiping about her. She often behaved in ways that were atypical for a Southern lady of that period; specifically, how she refused to pay her taxes and how she never married. The fact that she never married went against the expected role of a Southern woman—get married and have children.

Also, men were expected to be chivalrous and take care of their women. Homer Barron, however, did not do this. He did not marry Emily (and he paid greatly for it).

Moreover, "the negro," who Emily employs, is another example of how she tries to cling to the old ways of the South by still having an African-American servant tend to her.

The Southern setting is also key in this story. Many houses in the South were large houses like those of plantations and had big front porches with rocking chairs. Emily's house is described as

"...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."

But now the house is falling down, which is representative of the old ways of the South falling. The story takes place after the Civil War, and society is changing. There is no more slavery, gender roles are starting to shift slightly, and the culture in general is changing. Emily and the setting are symbols of the Old South that is reluctant to change, even though the change is inevitable.

In other words, both Emily and the setting (the house, the town) are beginning to decay, to exist no more, as the old ways of the South will cease to exist. Decay, of course, becomes most literally represented at the end of the story, after Emily's death, when the townsfolk enter her falling-down house and discover the old, decaying body of Homer Barron, Emily's old sweetheart and the man she had wanted to marry but who had refused her. Thus Emily killed him and kept his body, neatly dressed, on her bed, and she slept next to him at night (which we know because of the "long strand of iron gray hair" found on the pillow next to Homer's corpse). Emily's resisted change to the point of creating her own reality. 

All of these issues—social, setting, and decay—are intertwined in the story. They all work to illustrate the decline of the old ways of the South, and this inevitable change no matter how hard anyone tries to cling to the old ways.

William Faulkner did not typically write Gothic literature; however, it is hard to miss the Gothic elements in "A Rose for Emily." This short story is actually considered Southern Gothic literature, which is slightly different than a more traditional Gothic style. 

Like traditional Gothic writing, the story contains elements of the grotesque, including a rather foreboding tone (the story starts with an announcement of death) as well as the more obvious decay and decomposition (putrefication) in the form of dead bodies being kept from burial (both her father and Homer Barron). The mansion is crumbling from age, and Miss Emily herself is a rather grotesque and putrid figure. She is 

a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head. Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.

Even her servant, Tobe grows more stooped and misshapen over the years.

As a Southern Gothic tale, the story is concerned with antisocial behavior, usually because of changing social mores and traditions. Miss Emily is certainly antisocial and lives in her own world which has nothing to do with the more modern world in which she is living. This alienation from the world is no more obvious than when Miss Emily's necrophilia is revealed.

This genre of literature is also concerned with the concept of appropriation and transformation--taking something familiar and showing it in the grotesque. In this case, Miss Emily is a princess-like figure (no one is worthy to marry her, according to her father) who is transformed into a psychologically unstable old maid. 

The Gothic elements in this story are hard to miss and one of the reasons the story is so haunting. 

"A Rose for Emily" perfectly represents the Southern Gothic genre of which Faulkner is a leading author. Stemming from the Romantic genre, Gothic literature has unique and specific traits that distinguish it from any other forms.

• a) fate versus personal choice
• b) the intervention of the supernatural
• c) isolation, nostalgia, desolation
• d) inevitability in life and death
• e) a decrepit, run down manor or estate that shows signs of long-gone grandeur.

"A Rose for Emily" reunites these very characteristics, and they are mainly described to the reader in Part One. During this part of the story, the townsfolk narrator describes the current conditions of Emily Grierson's estate as "an eyesore among eyesores" (the decrepit, run-down building Gothic motif), and the condition of the late Miss Emily as a "poor", lonely and somewhat unstable woman who once belonged to the upper classes during her lifetime (inevitability in life and death). This is the way in which the story clearly introduces itself as a representative of the genre.

Yet, a specific quote from the story that exemplifies how the Gothic elements move the plot forward can be found in Part Two. This is the part of the story that focuses on the strange smell that kept coming from Emily's house. The reader will later realize that this smell was the smell of death, itself; of the decaying body of Homer Barron. However, this is an unknown fact when the section starts, as it is said to have occurred

...two years after her father's death and a short time after her sweetheart--the one we believed would marry her --had deserted her.

When the city government had no choice but to execute an order to obligate Emily to clean her home, people who were sorry for her came late during the night to spread limestone around her decaying house. This secret mission was aimed to, both, extinguish the smell and to avoid a confrontation with Miss Emily.

Yet, it is the fact that the smell really comes from a dead man, plus the fact that this is something only known to Miss Emily,  what makes the following quote all the more Gothic; for it depicts Emily as a form of supernatural, strange, and almost mythical creature, that looks down on them from a dark, creepy distance.

They broke open the cellar door and sprinkled lime there, and in all the outbuildings. As they recrossed the lawn, a window that had been dark was lighted and Miss Emily sat in it, the light behind her, and her upright torso motionless as that of an idol.

This quote describes a very strong Gothic trait;  the touch of the supernatural in the general description of a passage which, in itself, hides a deep, dark secret. Therefore, the combination of what is known and what is unknown plus the use of darkness, light, and mystery, come together to push the plot forward toward the final surprise: the finding of Homer Barron's carcass laid on Miss Emily's bed after all these years.

The story exemplifies the tension between the New South and the Old, between a world of certainty and order and the much more chaotic modernist world, where all the old uncertainties have been undermined.

We see this tension illustrated right throughout the story. Miss Emily represents the old world, and she is placed on a pedestal by the townsfolk as the last surviving link to a supposedly more gracious past. Yet modernity cannot be stalled forever. The town needs to function and taxes raised for that precise purpose. This means that Miss Emily must contribute her fair share. However, because of her exalted status in town, Emily is able to cut a sweetheart deal with the local authorities which means she doesn't have to pay any taxes. That's definitely a win for the Old South.

Another win is Miss Emily's being able to buy rat poison without specifying the precise purpose for doing so. Modern laws require her to do precisely that, but Emily triumphs in her brief battle of wills with the pharmacist and once again gets a pass.

Modernism eventually triumphs over the forces of the Old South, but by then it's too late. It's only when the source of that revolting stench emanating from the Grierson residence is finally revealed that the modern world triumphs over the old. We can see this as a prime illustration of a key aim of modernist literature, namely to reveal what's really lurking beneath the surface of the ostensibly ordered, respectable world in which we live.

Southern Gothic authors like Faulkner, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Conner, Harper Lee, Eudora Welty, and others focused the Gothic horror in some of their stories on the way a strict society can hide inner psychological horrors. "A Rose for Emily" fits this characterization perfectly. 

Decay is a major motif in Gothic and Southern Gothic writing movements and images of it – both literal and figurative – litter the prose of the story, encompassing the setting and the social mores of the Southern town of Jefferson. Miss Emily's house itself is a symbol of decay, literally, at the end of the story, when the upper floor has been abandoned and has an actual dead body in it. It is also a symbol of figurative decay, as it represents the lost way of life of the antebellum South. It is described as:

"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."

Though the house sounds beautiful and ornate, the area around it has fallen to northern industry and progress and it now sits "lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps--an eyesore among eyesores."

Like the house itself, the society that Miss Emily and several older Confederates still subscribe to is in a state of decay. Emily is born at the end of the Civil War, and so the trajectory of her life encompasses huge changes in Jefferson and the South as a whole. Some of the older folks and the aristocratic families cling to their values: Emily's father's Grierson pride keeps him from accepting any suitors as good enough to marry Emily, while chivalrous gentlemen like Colonel Sartrois and Judge Stevens see her as a damsel and remit her from taxes and refuse to confront her about the smell after her father's death. As the years go by, though, these attitudes and behaviors die out, making Miss Emily a decaying relic of a dying culture.

The setting of the story also relates to the theme of anti-social behavior and isolation that so interested the Southern Gothic writers. Miss Emily is a mysterious figure in the town. When the narrator speaks of the present, no one talks with or visits her and she's even given up giving her china painting lessons. When she dies, mourners come "mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old man-servant--a combined gardener and cook--had seen in at least ten years." When Jefferson begins getting the post mail system, Miss Emily refuses to affix the metal numbers to her house – she is literally off the grid. Setting up Miss Emily and her house as isolated and mysterious makes it clear that she is hiding her twisted psyche – shown by the fact that the townspeople aren't surprised to see the decaying body of Homer Barron in a room on the top floor.

A key component of modernism is that things aren't always what they seem on the surface. Beneath each individual's conventional exterior, there's always a lot more going on. Modernist works of literature often explore the inner life of the individual, a self that stubbornly refuses to be shaped by the norms and conventions of society. On the face of it, Miss Emily Grierson is a refined—if somewhat eccentric—Southern lady, the last surviving remnant of an old respectable family. Yet beneath the conventional surface there beats the heart of a psychologically damaged individual.

It's no accident that the rise of modernism as a literary movement coincided with the rapid development of psychoanalysis, with its exploration of the subconscious. On a Freudian reading of "A Rose for Emily" once could argue that Emily has a subconscious desire to be loved, valued, and wanted; a desire that has been suppressed by a tyrannical, overbearing father. But she hasn't been unable to sublimate or control that desire, and so it has manifested itself in an especially grotesque, transgressive act.

According to Trent Lorcher in "Lesson Plans: Modernism in Literature," modernism is:

...marked by a strong and intentional break with tradition. This break includes a strong reaction against established religious, political, and social views.

In "A Rose For Emily," Faulkner uses a modernist style in laying aside the perceptions of the proper Southern woman, a member of polite society. He presents—"speaking" as a member of the community—the impressions the townspeople have of Emily who is the daughter of a well-to-do leader in the community in which Emily still lives, many years after the death of her family and peers.

Where authors previously chose to write in the Realist mode, with modernism, writing took on topics that questioned the status quo and presented themes that would have been considered unsuitable or "inappropriate" by earlier writers and audiences.

Faulkner writes a story of a woman who shatters the perceptions the townspeople have of the culturally and economically elite: members of society who have been put up on a pedestal, who are "better" than the common folk.

Emily does not follow the dictates of society: she is seen riding around in an open carriage with Homer Baron, a member of the working class, and a highly visible bachelor who would be perceived as being beneath her.

Emily also is unapproachable about the smell emanating from her home. The town's "elders" are unable to get her to speak to them about taxes, later, about the odor. She is a law unto herself. This would have been expected of a woman of her status: in the absence of a man in her home, she lives alone and does not rely on a man for her survival in any way. The men of the society would have expected her to marry, but the women would have understood that her father made it impossible, as no man was ever good enough. Because she was a member of the upperclass, everyone would have excused her unusual behavior.

Faulkner's "unmasking" of Emily's "real" self is the true mark of the modernist style of writing. All the town's (and readers') preconceived notions of Emily are disproven—literally blown apart—and Faulkner achieves this by not only methodically giving brief glimpses of Emily's existence, but telling her story while jumping around on the timeline of her life.

The truly taboo subject that would have stunned readers in 1930 when it was first published (and still stuns readers today) is not that Emily has murdered her lover, Homer Baron, but that she was sleeping in the same bed with his corpse LONG after his death: this is evident with one small detail...the single strand of steel grey hair resting on the pillow next to the dead body's head.

This story can be identified as a text within the Southern Gothic tradition as a result of the story's mood, the characterization of Miss Emily Grierson, and the setting. Faulkner establishes an ominous mood by beginning with Emily's death and the secrecy surrounding the details of her life. The descriptions of her decaying home and the awkward juxtaposition of the old gentility with the new technologies and fashions is also disconcerting and off-putting.

Further, the implied revelation that Emily purchased rat poison to murder her lover, Homer Barron, so that he could not abandon her as her father did, helps to make her a rather grotesque character. She is distorted, physically and morally, as the narrators say,

Her skeleton was small and spare; perhaps that was why what would have been merely plumpness in another was obesity in her. She looked bloated, like a body long submerged in motionless water, and of that pallid hue. Her eyes, lost in the fatty ridges of her face, looked like two small pieces of coal pressed into a lump of dough as they moved from one face to another while the visitors stated their errand.

Her body is described as lots of things other than a living, healthy body, and there is something repugnant not only in her appearance, but also in her decisions. She refuses to accept her father's death, telling others that he is well, only allowing the authorities to remove his body after several days. She clearly has some deep-seated illness and insecurities about being alone.

“A Rose for Emily” is an iconic example of Southern Gothic literature, a subgenre of Gothic literature that developed in twentieth-century American fiction. Like Gothic literature in general, Faulkner’s story contains elements of mystery and horror, and the narrative is permeated with other Gothic elements, as well—ruin, decay, darkness, insanity, and hereditary curses. Gothic stock characters—the tyrant, the villain, and the madwoman—are found among the people in Jefferson, the small Mississippi town that serves as the setting. Faulkner weaves these Gothic elements seamlessly into an examination of Southern society and the post-Civil War culture of the South, the distinguishing characteristic of Southern Gothic fiction.

Through Faulkner’s narrator, who knows personally the history of Jefferson and the events of Emily Grierson’s life and death, the town itself becomes a character in the story, a collection of citizens imprisoned by Southern heritage, Southern social dynamics, and a singular point of view. Through the town’s obsession with Emily Grierson and her behavior, the weight of the past is revealed. The citizens of Jefferson live the shadow of the past, their attitudes and actions controlled by what once was but is no more, except in memory. The nineteenth-century Grierson house, once grand, now stands in “stubborn and coquettish decay” among cotton wagons, garages, and gasoline pumps, “an eyesore among eyesores”; the names of Jefferson’s august families are found in the town’s cemetery, “among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson.” The narrator’s description of Jefferson, its history, and its citizens establishes the culture and the atmosphere that make the events in the story and its macabre conclusion plausible.

The tyrant in Faulkner’s Southern Gothic is, of course, Emily’s selfish, domineering father, who destroys any possibility that she could marry and leave him. Homer Baron seems to be the villain of the piece, an itinerant Yankee who publicly pursues a romantic relationship with Miss Emily in a shocking disregard for her reputation and who apparently has no intentions of marrying her—or not. Homer’s intentions are never clarified, but Emily’s murdering him suggests that marriage was not a part of Homer's plans for the future. In the shocking conclusion of the story, Miss Emily is revealed as a woman driven mad, perhaps by the circumstances of her life or perhaps by inheriting the insanity that curses the Griersons. In any event, Emily Grierson is insane, the mystery of her behavior and the depth of her madness evident in the horror that lies behind the locked bedroom door in her house.

As the story unfolds, the mystery unfolds slowly, as Faulkner moves the reader backward and forward in time. In retrospect, clues throughout the story, when pieced together in chronological order, suggest Homer Baron’s fate, but the ultimate manifestation of Miss Emily’s insanity, revealed in the story’s final sentence, is not anticipated. Throughout the narrative Faulkner sustains the atmosphere of a Gothic mystery in scenes etched in darkness. Visitors to the Grierson house are admitted to “a dim hall from which a stairway mounted into still more shadow.” One evening at dusk, Homer is observed entering Miss Emily’s house, never to be seen again. Men slink about in the shadows in Miss Emily’s yard late one night, spreading lime to eradicate a terrible smell, and a light suddenly appears in a solitary darkened window, illuminating her silent, motionless form. The mysterious room in the “region above stairs that no one had seen in forty years” is permeated with dust, “[a] thin acrid pall as of the tomb.” The story is dark, both literally and figuratively.

Beginning with Miss Emily’s funeral and ending with Homer Baron’s decayed corpse in her bed, “A Rose for Emily” develops the primary motif found in many Gothic tales: death. In Faulkner’s hands, the motif is inextricably related to the past that continued to inform the culture of the South as he knew it. “The past,” he once wrote, “is never dead. It’s not even past.” The truth of his perception is evident throughout the story, making “A Rose for Emily” a classic Southern Gothic tale.