" It 's simple enough," he said. " send her word to have her place cleaned up. give her a certain tome to do it in, and if she don't ....""A Rose...

In "A Rose For Emily," at a certain point in the story, a
terrible smell is emitted from the house. The "elders" of the town try to meet with Miss
Emily to discuss the problem. First of all, she will not tolerate the intrusion of
visitors. And as one person puts it, 'How are you going to tell the woman to her face
that she smells?'

This is the result of a long-standing
Southern tradition to show families of high social standing the utmost respect,
especially the women of those families.  And although the town has changed over the
years, Miss Emily and her expectations of society to show her respect and acknowledge
her right to privacy have not changed.

In theory, the
elders feels that it is nothing more than asking her to clean up an old car sitting on
cinderblocks in front of her home: it is a business arrangement that "normal" people
might not want to comply with, but could see the logic driving it.  Miss Emily is having
nothing to do with it. She is important enough "in perpetuity" that no one will defy
her: others have tried and failed.

What makes this so
significant besides the fact that she has her way with the town elders, is that they end
up sneaking around her house one night to sprinkle lime to battle the smell--and soon it
does disappear. However, what makes this occurrence so central to the eerie plot is (as
we learn at the very end of the story), the smell came from the rotting corpse of her
lover, Homer Baron, who she had poisoned and placed in their bridal bed. (Of course, if
that's not enough to raise the hair on someone's neck, the long strand of iron-grey hair
on the pillow next to the skeleton indicates that she has been sleeping in that bed
since Homer disappeared so many years ago.)

That detail is
pivotal to understanding what this upright member of society was doing under the
public's nose years before.