Miss Emily refuses to pay her taxes; she will not even allow postal numbers to be put on her house, a symbolic gesture on her part to resist what the town sees as progress.
Emily Grierson did not even pay her taxes because the old mayor Colonel Satoris claimed that her father loaned money to the town and she did not have to pay taxes for the rest of her life (731).
One of the first mentions of Emily's father comes when, after his death, Emily refuses to pay taxes on her estate.
In order to keep him permanently around, she bought poison from a druggist. Many of the people in the community assumed that this poison would be for Miss Emily to kill herself. The community then realized, after coming upon this secret, that this poison was to keep Homer in Miss Emily's life.
Emily refused to show change even with something as simple as mail delivery: ''When the town got free postal delivery, Miss Emily alone refused to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door and attach a mailbox to it. She would not listen to them.
Miss Emily suffers from schizophrenia because she shows symptoms of withdrawing from society. Throughout Emily's life, her aristocratic father the townspeople highly respected, kept Emily closed in believing no suitors are worthy enough for her.
Miss Emily refuses to change with the town because her family once dominated it, and change means her family may not be the center of attention anymore.
Why did Emily buy arsenic? Emily buys arsenic to poison Homer Barron because anyone that she has ever been close with has left her, and this was the only way Emily could ensure that Homer would not leave her.
''I want some poison,'' she demands, though she refuses to tell the druggist the purpose of her purchase. The law requires that the druggist know what the poison will be used for, so he eventually gives in and writes ''for rats'' on the box. Emily actually intends to use the arsenic to kill her suitor, Homer Barron.
Her struggle with loss and attachment is the impetus for the plot, driving her to kill Homer Barron, the man assumed to have married her. She poisons and kills Homer as she sees this as the only way to keep Homer with her permanently.
When Emily dies, the townspeople learn that she has kept Homer's corpse. Her loneliness had been so severe that she has been sleeping with his corpse for years.
When the city authorities in Jefferson visit Emily in her old age to try to collect her taxes, they notice that the home, which no one had visited in ten years, 'smelled of dust and disuse - a close, dank smell.
''A Rose for Emily'' contains verbal irony when Colonel Sartoris promises the Grierson family that if they loan the town money, they won't have to pay taxes and when Emily tells the new mayor to see Colonel Sartoris, who has been dead for ten years, about her taxes. Neither party means or believes what they are saying.
She faces depression right after her strict dad dies and her sweetheart dumps her. As a consequence, she poisons Homer Barron, her ex-boyfriend, and keeps his body in her room for many years.
When Miss Emily was about forty, what had she done to earn money? Miss Emily gave china-painting lessons. In Part V, who returns to hold Miss Emily's funeral?
In 1894, Colonel Sartoris, the mayor, remits Miss Emily's taxes.
In a sense, Emily's disregard of time also means that she is oblivious of death and decay. Keeping her father's and Homer's bodies indicates that she does not accept death. She can love both in life and in death, as if subjects were still living.
However, Emily ends up murdering Homer by poison. It was known that Homer “liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club—that he was not a marrying man” (4). He would never marry Emily because he was a homosexual.
The rose represents the idea of love since young lovers often give each other roses to express their affections. With so many suitors in her youth, it seems inevitable that Emily will accept a rose from one of them, but she never does. When she meets Homer, it seems like she may finally have true love.
But Miss Emily is also a sociopath who kills her fiancee with rat poison, plays dress-up with his corpse until he starts to decompose, and then continues sleeping next to his moldering skeleton until she dies.
Long-term effects
The first symptoms of long-term exposure to high levels of inorganic arsenic (for example, through drinking-water and food) are usually observed in the skin, and include pigmentation changes, skin lesions and hard patches on the palms and soles of the feet (hyperkeratosis).
[7] These copper arsenic greens were technically pigments, not dyes, but they were used to color fabrics. More commonly, they were used in paints, wallpapers, and even in coatings for candy.
One of these themes is betrayal. Emily betrays the wishes of her father when she falls in love with someone who is both a Northerner and a day laborer. He would have felt that Homer was beneath her. Emily, likely, may have also felt betrayed by her father because he left her alone with no husband.
She originally intended to marry Victor, even though it meant she was (unknowingly) stealing Victoria Everglot's happiness Barkis Bittern stole from her years ago.
The story's opening lines announce the funeral of Miss Emily, to be held in her home — not in a church — and the reasons for the entire town's attending-the men out of respect for a Southern lady, the women to snoop inside her house.