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What is the purpose of the short story "A Rose for Emily"?
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The purpose of "A Rose for Emily" is to explore themes of resistance to change, the impact of repression, and the conflict between the Old and New South. The story illustrates how Emily Grierson's inability to adapt to societal changes leads to her isolation and tragic actions, such as murder, to maintain control over her life. Faulkner uses Emily's "blighted life" as a cautionary tale about the dangers of clinging to the past and the consequences of emotional repression.
Faulkner's short stories, like his novels, contain many themes, and one of the most consistent is the struggle between what we will call the "Old South" (the pre-Civil War south) and the "New South," which grows out of the Civil War and the Reconstruction period. In this story, Miss Emily is part of the Old South, as is her father and Colonel Sartoris, and she is constantly in conflict with the rising New South.
For example, the New South, represented by the town council, tries to get her to pay city taxes in Jefferson. She refuses on the basis that Colonel Sartoris remitted her taxes permanently because her father loaned the town some money, and the town is paying the loan back by remitting Miss Emily's taxes. Faulkner tells us that Colonel Sartoris made up the story in order to, in effect, provide some charity to Miss Emily, which...
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she would not have accepted had she known it was charity. As she does in other battles with the town, Emily prevails and sends the town council packing.
Perhaps more important, however, to your question is a comment Faulkner made about why he named the story "A Rose for Emily." Essentially, he said that Emily deserves a rose because she had what Faulkner called a "blighted life," a life ruined by her cruel and repressive father, who kept her from having a normal life by not accepting any of her suitors when she was young. Faulkner pointed out that if someone is repressed and denied the opportunity to have a normal life--with a husband, a home, children--that repression may come out in horrible ways.
The story centers on repression and how it can twist a soul into something unrecognizable.
Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily" serves as a warning to his reader. In it, we learn that nothing, no matter how much we might wish it to, truly lasts forever. Emily tried to keep things around her the same, but she soon learned that she could not prevent change from occurring. When her father dies, Emily refuses to acknowledge it and refuses to let people in to remove his body for three days. Later, while seeking to keep Homer, her first real beau, from changing, growing, and leaving her, she poisons him with arsenic and sets his corpse in their bed. Rumors had spread through the town that he wasn't willing to settle down, but she prevents him from moving on by killing him and keeping him as hers.
Emily's father felt that no one was good enough for her, and he drove away all her suitors during his lifetime. By the time he died, her beauty and allure had already begun to fade. She holds on to his dead body for several days after his decease, and she seems to be in denial that he is really gone. It appears that Emily greatly fears being alone, and, with her father's death and no suitors clamoring for her hand anymore, that is exactly how she finds herself.
Later, she seems to try to spite her father's memory by starting a relationship with a Yankee construction worker, Homer Barron—someone her father would have deemed wholly unacceptable. When, perhaps, it seems as though he is going to leave her as well (as her more distant relations have made it clear that they oppose the match), Emily buys rat poison, evidently, with the purpose of murdering Homer. In this way, she is able to keep him from leaving her, and she shares her bed with his rotting corpse until her own death.
We see, then, that the most terrible fate some people can imagine for themselves is being alone. Finding someone to love and care for, and who loves and cares for us (and not even necessarily in a romantic way), is more important than status or tradition or money. In fact, the appearance of importance of all of these latter considerations vanishes when one is faced with the possibility of being alone forever.
This purpose seems to me to be quite significant, and in many ways universal—applicable across time and space and culture. Further, it is achieved quite compellingly as readers are so taken aback by the revelation of Emily's willingness to murder in order to avoid solitude. We have to ask ourselves why and how she could murder and then retain the decomposing body, as such a series of actions is so foreign to us. She was desperate, to put it simply, and desperate people will do desperate things.
You could look at it as if the main purpose is Faulkner's warning that not everything can last forever. Emily attempted to hang on to the past and not evolve and change as the times changed around her. She clung to what she has always known resulting in isolation, rejection, and judgement from the town and all who knew her, and eventually death. Perhaps Faulkner, like Shirley Jackson in "The Lottery", is telling us that tradition for tradition's sake is deadly. That we must adapt and evolve in order to survive.
If an abstract explanation is allowed, try this: the purpose is to show the dangerous interplay of identity, desire, and context. Or, to put that more simply, everything that happens in the story happens because Emily is who she is, because she's in that specific context, and because she wants certain things and the context (town, father, etc.) wants others. They clash, and the result is isolation and death.