"A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner takes place during Reconstruction following the Civil War, when the South was left to deal with the results of emancipation. The Southern economy had been built on the slave trade, and when slavery ended many Southern aristocrats found themselves working alongside former slaves. Miss Emily's family is part of the Old South—rich Southern families who benefited from slavery and were forced to adjust to a new social world once it ended.

The following quote exemplifies how Emily's father represents the Old South:

People in our town . . . believed that the Griersons held themselves a little too high for what they really were. None of the young men were quite good enough for Miss Emily and such. 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, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.

The horsewhip is a direct reference to slave owners. It also symbolizes the father's control over Emily. He drove away many young men that might have romantically pursued her.

When her father dies, Emily goes crazy as she struggles to find her place in the world without him—much like how the Old South was lost without slavery and struggled to find its status following the Civil War.

In the years before his death, Miss Emily Grierson's father had forged an agreement with Colonel Sartoris that the Griersons would pay no taxes in Jefferson. The fact that the "Colonel" was in charge of such matters calls to mind a Civil War-era South, one in which powerful men in town were defined by their Confederate military titles. Miss Emily's father's gentility and connection to the city's fathers symbolizes the Old South that operated on gentlemen's agreements that were eventually displaced by tax codes that did not exclude any citizen's tax liabilities, regardless of past practice.

Moreover, it is clear that the Grierson home was headed by a patriarchy, an Old South ideal that meant that Emily's life was controlled by her father. Consequently, after he dies, Miss Emily is suspended in time without a father to lead her (or a husband to fulfill the role of patriarch).