An essay covering the psychology of the townsfolk in a rose for emily

A rose for Emily is an intriguing tale of a woman who gets away with murder in the post Civil War American south, due to the nostalgia in the town in which she lives. The south is depicted in many stories of Faulkner as a region where "reality and myth are difficult to separate." Many southerners would not accept that their conditions had changed, though they had to realize that the old days were gone. …

…passes and that conditions change as Miss Emily had for so long. In the end, their grand symbol of nostalgia was no less than a depraved, cold blooded killer. If they had opened their eyes to see the truth of Miss Emily's character and not tried to live in her nostalgic inherited world of pre-modernism, perhaps they could have realized she was no more a symbol for divinty than she could comprehend what that meant.