Secrecy and Obsession

Emily Grierson was a pivotal figure in the town she lived in, despite not really having taken any significant part in the activities of the community. She represents a “fallen monument,” a woman whose life was lived almost entirely behind closed doors and known only to the Black servant who lived with her. As a result of this secrecy, the “whole town” is driven by enormous “curiosity” to see the reality of Emily’s life. The narrative frame of the story, which is written in the collective third person, underlines this idea that the town existed on one side and Emily on the other; she was an object of fascination.

The story is written very much from the perspective of those who were on the outside of Emily’s life, desperate to understand the realities of it. Hints are dropped: the narrator mentions “the smell” whose source was never established because it was vanquished by night, in secret, by men who did not speak to Emily about it for fear of offending her. The truth of Emily’s life is revealed to the reader slowly, through suggestion. Like the townspeople, the reader’s concern and pity for “poor Emily” is overtaken by a fascination to uncover what was really happening to her: had she truly taken a lover? They reader is intrigued by Homer Barron, not least because he was of a different social class than Emily and they are aware that Emily’s father would have disapproved of the match. They reader likely wants Barron to treat Emily well but at the same time may yearn for the dramatic alternative outcome. When he vanished, the townsfolk were eager to know what had happened to him but were aware that they had no means of approaching Emily, more “monument” than person, to find out.

The developments in Emily’s life were something of a soap opera for the inhabitants of the town. Everybody was wildly curious to know how she was and what she was doing, but absolutely nobody ventured to reach out and ask her, such that the final revelation in the story—that Homer Barron’s corpse had been kept in her house for decades—simply comes as the last dramatic incident in a series of scandals.

The Old South

The Old South as it was in the antebellum era looms large in this story through the person of Emily, who represents a “monument” to the way things used to be. In many ways, Emily behaved throughout her life as if nothing had changed. She kept a Black servant in her house, who was her only confidant. Her house, once “select” and “white,” had decayed over the years and become soiled, just as the pre-war aristocracy had fallen as a result of a changing society. At the time of her death, Emily’s home is the only one that remains of the “august” group who once held power in the town.

Emily, however, did not accept the shifts taking place, and the town indulged her to a considerable degree. They considered her to be a “tradition” and an “obligation.” When Emily declared to the committee that she had “no taxes in Jefferson,” she explicitly suggested that the current ruling authority was only an imagined authority and that perhaps the current sheriff indeed “consider[ed] himself” to be so. She told the men to refer to Colonel Sartoris, who had, by that time, been dead for almost a decade. She was willfully living in the past, but nobody dared to correct her. In many ways, it was as if the town had collectively decided to allow the...