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Faulkner was noted of the Southerners’ association with the South tradition, not only physical, but spiritual as well, so he took pains to picture a group of Southerners who were desperately submitted to the old way of life. But as an artist of the twentieth century, he observed the gradual changes of the South: the old veterans were dying off, and the old loyalties were adjusted to conform to new conditions. The loss of the South tradition and the appearance of the North industrialization aroused not only the devastation of the Southern plantation system. But also the macabre disillusionment to the Southern descendants, as the South knew them, they saw that world changing into another kind and they were themselves of that new changed world, yet apart from it. Faulkner revealed with intensity the rootless of the Southern descendants. They witnessed that Northern industrialization penetrated the South, but their inherited Southern aristocracy forbade their acceptance of the new order of life. They stubbornly objected to the invasion of the northern way of life, but in vain, so the Southern descendants had to suffer from the loneliness and bitterness of being a part from a new world. The disillusionment of the Southern was well revealed in the portrayal of Emily in A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner which was a short fiction that has roots in the southern United States with appealing overtones of mystery that was told in a historical context. It was published in 1930. It was one of the best known and the most widely read among Faulkner’s short stories. The story took place in a mythical town that William Faulkner called Jefferson, Mississippi, the time of the story was during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when the town was learning to live with South loss in the Civil War of 1861-1865 and the consequent dismantling of the slavery based society that had preceded it. The story expresses Faulkner’s theme of the confrontation of the old South and the civilized modern society. In A Rose for Emily Faulkner wrote the conflicts between the old tradition and the new order, and the doomed defeat of the old tradition. Emily lived in her “big, squarest frame house...set on what once had been our most select street” (88; ch. 6), but her house was on its way to “coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and gasoline pumps” (88; ch. 7). And the once “most select street which was filled with houses decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies” (88; ch. 9) was then encroached and obliterated by “garages and cotton gins” (88; ch. 8). The invasion of the northern industrialization did not stop that, it also intruded into the minds of the Southerners. Faulkner admired somewhat the merits of the South tradition—the compassion and humanity men like Colonel Sartoris and his peers inherited forced them to tell a kind lie to Emily so as to look after the single lady without insulting her dignity.
The story described a white woman, Emily and her tragic life under the South’s loss in the two civil wars. Emily’s life was strongly dominated by her father, and she had no right to date with males and choose her lover. After her father’s death, she could only date with a northern worker. But to her disappointment, the worker refused to marry her, and the refusal drove her to kill him by using poison, then she let his body company her. After Emily’s death, the town people discovered a skeleton in the house, and found out that the poor Emily was a murderer, and people were shocked by the discovery.