William Faulkner was one of the leading novelists of this century, and he drew upon his own town of Oxford, Mississippi for his stories, his setting, and his themes. The Civil War was the defining moment in history for the South, and the fact that the South had lived by slavery before that was an indictment of the old families of the South and a reason for the people of the new South to atone. The heavy hand of the past can be seen as having a hold on the present in stories such as "That Evening Sun," "Barn Burning," and "A Rose for Emily," and in each case Faulkner infuses the story with a political and social structure related to the slave-owning past of the South and showing the effect of that past on the present. Jean-Paul Sartre noted the way Faulkner treated past and present:
The past here gains a surrealistic quality; its outline is hard, clear, and immutable. The indefinable and elusive present is helpless before it; it is full of holes through which past things, fixed, motionless, and silent, invade it (Tuck xiv).
In many ways, "A Rose for Emily" is unusual for Faulkner. He said he was trying to write a ghost story, which would make it very different from the realism of his novels. Emily is a woman who is separated from her neighbors by a terrible secret, and the mere fact that she is so separated creates a tension between herself and her neighbors. The people of the town view Emily as a person who is not a complete human being. At the same time, her social position requires a certain sort of match to satisfy the town, and Homer Barron does not fit the bill: "Of course a Grierson would not think seriously of a Northerner, a day laborer" (Abrams 2047). Ultimately, though, a marriage with any man is better than no marriage at all: "Then we were sure that they were to be married. . . We were really glad" (Abrams 2048). Emily may have separated herself from much of the town, but still she lives as if in a go...