When reading the short story "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner, one is at first taken aback by the sheer eeriness of the main character, the haunting setting, and the unexpected twist at the ending. Faulkner writes the story in such a way that the audience will see, on the surface, a failed romance between an old, Southern woman and a young, flamboyant man. Upon analysis of the descriptions of the main characters and their personal habits and attributes, the short story "A Rose for Emily" is a story about the distant relationship between the old generation of the Southern Civil War and the new generation of Northern technology and industry. 

In the opening paragraphs of the story, Miss Emily and her house are both described as very Southern, and nearly ancient. Her house had "once been white" (Faulkner, 226), and had had very vintage-styled Southern architecture, decorated with "cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies" (226), suggesting that the houses' style was out-of-date, if not deteriorating. Because Miss Emily has an African American servant and because her father serving in the Civil War, that the "seventies" suggests the 1870's, fitting with Faulkner's point of Miss Emily being old-styled, traditional, and straight-and-narrow minded. Additionally, Miss Emily's house "smelled of dust and disuse   when the Negro opened the blinds of one window, [one] could see that the leather was cracked" (227), and "when they sat down, a faint dust rose sluggishly about their thighs, spinning with slow motes in the single sun-ray" (227), which implies poor aging of the once-mighty generation growing up during the Civil War. 

As for Miss Emily, she is written by Faulkner to be "a small, fat woman in black, with a thin gold chain descending to her waist and vanishing into her belt, leaning on an ebony cane with a tarnished gold head" (227). Faulkner also portrays Miss Emily as having no idea of the perception of time passing, because she does not know that the old mayor, Colonel Sartoris, "had been dead almost ten years" (228), and that her watch doesn't make a sound, implying it doesn't even tell the time. She also refuses all modernism, from "[refusing] to let them fasten the metal numbers above her door" (232) when the town was offered delivery from the new United States Postal Service, to scoffing at the idea of courting a "Northerner and a day laborer" (229). 

Miss Emily's lover, Homer Barron, on the other hand, represents the newer, younger generation. Not only is he a foreman for a sidewalk-paving company, which was quite the innovation in the late 19th to early 20th century, but he was also "a Yankee" (229). Homer Barron also drove a new, "glittering buggy" (230). However, the most intriguing part about Homer Barron was that "he liked men, and it was known that he drank with the younger men in the Elks' Club   that he was not a marrying man" (230). A century ago, the idea of homosexuality (hence the name "Homer") was a taboo; unmentioned and ignored by anyone who felt to align themselves with such indecency. It is in this fact where the courtship of Homer Barron and Miss Emily Grierson begins to fail.

By the time Homer Barron is introduced into Miss Emily's life, "she [was nearly] thirty and still single" (229); an abomination for women of her generation. Her father having just died, she is "left all alone, and a pauper" (229), which is why she was desperate to find someone to date. When Homer Barron appeared, everyone around the town knew of his preference men, but Miss Emily ignored the whispers and the gossip. "She carried her head high enough   even when we believed that se was fallen" (230). The people even began to see "[Homer] and Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable" (229), implying that the old-fashioned Miss Emily was having a taste at experiencing something new. However, as Faulkner stated, Homer Barron was not a marrying man, which was what Miss Emily, or any woman of her time, would have wanted. Miss Emily, after several years of being with him but without marriage, realized the truth his ways and went to the local druggist for some poison, and buys some arsenic "for rats" (230). According to the town, Homer Barron disappeared. The rumor throughout the town was that "her sweetheart   the one who believed would marry her   had deserted her" (228), leaving the audience to believe that perhaps Homer Barron would have married Miss Emily in order to hide his homosexuality, but decided that he couldn't do it and had plans to leave her. She kept his body from her early thirties until the day she died, locked away in an upstairs room upon a bed, decorated as though he were a young bridegroom who was just married that day by laying out "a man's toilet things backed with tarnished silver, silver so tarnished that the monogram was obscured" (232) and "a collar and tie, as if they had just been removed  upon a chair hung the suit, carefully folded; beneath it the two mute shoes and the discarded socks" (232-233), and  "the body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace" (233). By the end of the story, Miss Emily is so desperate to get married and no longer be lonely that she would have done anything to prevent the one man who she had been with from leaving her. 

After analyzing the story, "A Rose for Emily", one can see that it is about the failed relationship between the old Southern generation and the technologically advanced Northern generation. Because the South is unable to accept change and the North is unable to accept traditional appropriateness, the relationship is doomed from the start. Miss Emily; a desperate woman caught living in a dying age, and Homer Barron; a young man who is the epitome of innovation, come together to try to create a love story that all but fails entirely. 

