Gossip, Social Conventions, and Judgment Theme Analysis

“A Rose for Emily” is narrated by a plural “we” voice, which stands in for the memory of the collective town. In this way, the story can be read as the town’s collective, nostalgically tinged, darkly disturbed memory. And yet that collective voice has a darker edge than a simple collective memory. Because of that collective narrator, “A Rose for Emily” is also a collection of town gossip centering on Miss Emily, generated by decades of intense scrutiny on her life.

The townspeople watch Miss Emily very closely, both because their own nostalgia for the pre-Civil War South makes her necessary to them as a representative of their aristocratic heritage, but also because, as an individual, she is eccentric, pitiable, exciting to watch and exciting to judge behind closed doors. Indeed, the “we” narrator almost seems sometimes aware that they have darker motives for scrutinizing Miss Emily’s life, like taking a pleasure in her fall to poverty, a feeling of social superiority over her when she begins to court Homer and the like. But it is also through scrutiny and gossip that the society in Jefferson enforces its social conventions: for example, it is the gossip of “ladies” that leads the Baptist minister’s wife to write to Miss Emily’s cousins, who themselves come to Jefferson to scrutinize and oversee Miss Emily’s conduct with Homer, whom, not serious about marriage, the town implicitly judges a danger to Miss Emily’s virginity (and her ability to uphold the lost social conventions the town requires her to). It is almost as if the town needs Miss Emily to be the representative of its lost, mythologized past, and hates her for it.

Ironically, for all that the townspeople watch and judge Miss Emily, for all that they intervene to make sure that she doesn’t violate the social conventions of Jefferson, they nevertheless fail to realize—despite her buying the arsenic, despite the bad smell issuing from her place—that Miss Emily has in secret committed a dreadful and horrifying crime, nor do they realize just how damaged a woman she is prior to committing the crime itself. The implication is that close scrutiny does not a close community make; social bonds consisting solely of gossip and judgment are not enough for people living together to truly know and care for one another.