h. Homer is the symbol for those people that deny the changing customs and the passage of time. Miss Emily's position in time was clear to her. Time didn't march on and things didn't change. Emily's room above the stairs was timeless. In it, the living Emily and the dead Homer were together as she pretended that death could never separate them.Emily Grierson faces a tragic life full of internal conflict because she cannot to let go of her past. Her refusal to pay taxes and the murdering of Homer Barron are two examples of this. Emily’s stubbornness to accommodate to the new town officials and their request of taxes supports the argument that Emily is unable to deal with conflicts because she is unable to let go of the past. Along with her refusal to pay taxes, Emily’s murder of her lover, Homer Barron, also emphasizes her desire to hold on to the past. Emily’s lover plans on leaving her, so she murders him, lying him down next to where she sleeps in bed, which is implied when it was “noticed that in the second pillow was the indentation of a head” and a “long strand of iron-gray hair”(353). While Emily’s inability to let go of the past is shown in the examples of her refusal to pay taxes and her murdering of Homer, the true cause of her inability to let go of the past lies in her conflict with in herself. Emily tries to embrace the tradition and background of getting married, having a family, and being in love. However, these aspirations caused her to break down in her prime when Homer was about to leave. Even Emily, monument to past and to genteel values, could not make that antiquated system work for her. She “knew that you do not murder people.” She had been trained that you do not take a lover, but that you do marry. Yet, if no one would agree to marry her, how else was she to make that marriage ideal come true for herself, but to claim the actual life of the man? The decor...
