"A Rose for Emily" is an example of Southern Gothic literature. Here are some of the characteristics of Southern Gothic that this story contains:
- An exploration of the behavior and social order of the South
In the exposition of the narrative, Emily is described as a "tradition" and "a duty" and a "sort of hereditary obligation upon the town." She grows up in the Old South, a patriarchal society in which her father has paid no taxes because Colonel Sartoris had invented a tale in which Mr. Grierson had donated money to the town years before. Emily believes this tale and after her father dies, she insists that she owes no taxes when the aldermen pay her a visit.
- Damaged and delusional characters who try to make sense of the world around them
Later, Miss Emily makes an exhibition of herself when she rides around the town with Homer Barron, a common laboring man from the North. Many of the townspeople are concerned about Miss Emily as she has lost "noblesse oblige." Her relatives from Alabama are called upon to visit Miss Emily in order to discuss her behavior, and to urge her to act more appropriately. Instead, she purchases arsenic, and she stops going out, leading the townspeople to think Emily will commit suicide. But Emily acts even more strangely.
- Death and madness/Grotesque themes
Emily insists that her father is not dead when he has been dead for three days. Then, when the ladies of town pay her a visit, Miss Emily greets them as follows.
. . . She met them at the door, dressed as usual and with no trace of grief on her face. She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her...trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body. Just as they were about to resort to law and force, she broke down, and they buried her father quickly.
At the end of the narrative, after Miss Emily's funeral, it is discovered that she has slept with a cadaver for years. For, when Homer attempted to leave her, Emily poisoned him and kept him in a bedroom.
The townspeople know that "with nothing left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will." (Her father ran off beaus when Emily was a young woman.)
When Homer Barron supposedly leaves town, it is Miss Emily who is shamed by his departure. She decides to keep him and purchases arsenic. So, it is not in marriage, but in death that she holds the Yankee in her home. In the most bizarre turn of the story, after Emily's death, Homer's skeleton is discovered on a bed where the other pillow has an indentation with one long strand of iron-grey hair.
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