h a town official. When the representatives of the new, progressive Board of Aldermen called on Emily about her delinquent taxes she declared that she had no taxes in Jefferson, basing her belief on a verbal agreement made with Colonel Sartoris, a past mayor of Jefferson who had been dead for ten years. Emily refused to acknowledge the death of Colonel Sartoris or of his genteel manner of governing the city. He had given his word and according to the traditional view, his word knew no death. This scene pitted the past, with all its honor and social decorum against the present, where everything goes by “the books.” Both her father and the official are long since dead but Emily is certain the agreement still stands. Those still in government who are older and remember her father and the agreement know that it stemmed from lack of funds and was an act of charity and they are loathed to bring this fact to light by asking Emily to pay taxes. The younger officials in the town, who represent the new way of conducting business, have no such sense of honor. They want Emily to pay like all the rest of the citizens. In this scenario, Emily is matched against progress. The town also had another conflict with Emily. Everyone believed that a long lost love, Homer had jilted Emily, but Emily had a way of preserving the past through denial of reality. She would not allow her father’s rules or Homers inclination to leave her to prevail. She took matters into her own hands in a gruesome way, but because Emily took refuge in her ideal world, when she poisoned Homer it was with the sense that he would be with her in the permanent, unchanging form of death. In a simplest sense, the death of Homer shows that this story is about an old woman holding so tightly to past ideals that she becomes a gruesome friend; sleeping with the dead. On another level, the death of Homer is a symbol for the death of the past, of the traditions of the old sout...
