an idol" (Faulkner 27). In this description Faulkner suggests with a picture the forbidding nature of Miss Emily's personality
putatively higher in spirit and body than the common folk, shadowed in mystery. The impact of that image is confirmed by Miss Emily's intransigence with regard not only to the town's
investigation of the smell, but equally to the question of her
paying town taxes, buying arsenic "for rats," and revealing
information about her personal life. She could wither officialdom and weaker spirits with a look, stand in silent dignity above the concerns of lesser human beings. When the peripheral narrator comments that in poverty, isolation, and moral disrepute because of the assumed affair with Homer Barron she "carried her head high enough . . . as if she demanded more than ever the recognition of her dignity as the last Grierson" (28), it is clear that the force of Miss Emily's personality is the ultimate determinant of how her actions ought to be perceived by Jefferson.
The upstairs window, concealing in stark shadows and light, first, the apparent love affair "behind jalousies closed upon the sun of Sunday afternoon," and later the sickening sight that closes the story is very much an emblem of this intransigence of spirit. In the first instance, the activity behind the shutters appears to arise from Miss Emily's quiet but nonetheless (or for that very reason) deliberate flouting of moral convention. In the second instance, the window symbolizes the impregnable shield--physical and spiritual--between Miss Emily and the hoi polloi . Hence it is ultimately to Miss Emily's intransigence that the events in the upstairs bedroom can be attributed.
Scholarship on "A Rose for Emily" is sparse compared to that for such works as The Sound and the Fury. Yet layers of meaning can be discerned in various interpretations of the events that appear to have occurred behind Miss Emily's upstairs bedroom window. ...