What happens in Section II of A Rose for Emily?
Section II takes us back thirty years to the unsettling smell — a foul odor coming from Emily Grierson's property that leads to complaints from the residents of Jefferson. The Board of Aldermen meets but, hesitant to confront Emily directly, sends four men under the cover of night to spread lime around her cellar and outbuildings. These men creep around her property like intruders, and eventually, the smell fades away. The narrator then shifts focus to Emily's father, who had driven away all her suitors, leaving her alone when he passed away. After his death, Emily initially refuses to accept it, keeping his body in the house for three days before finally giving in and turning it over to the authorities. The townspeople, who had long felt sorry for Emily because of her father's control, now see her refusal as a sign of grief — the only thing she had left was the very man who had dominated her life.
Analysis
Section II is where Faulkner's time-scrambling structure really starts to shine. By placing the smell episode before the father's death in the narrative timeline — even though the smell likely comes from a later horror — Faulkner encourages readers to see the odor as a minor annoyance rather than a significant clue. It's an impressive example of misdirection through sequencing.
The midnight lime-sprinkling scene highlights the town's collective cowardice. The aldermen, all men, struggle to speak frankly with a woman of Emily's status; they sneak around her property "like burglars," a simile that subtly critiques the patriarchal deference fueling Emily's issues. The town is complicit in its own confusion.
Emily's refusal to let go of her father's corpse introduces the story's central theme: the denial of death as a form of possession. Faulkner presents her actions with a clinical distance — "she told them that her father was not dead" — and then quickly provides a social context: she had nothing else. The narrator's sympathy feels genuine but remains unsentimental, acknowledging that the townspeople "could pity Miss Emily" only after realizing her dispossession. The tone here is elegiac and somewhat detached, with the community mourning both its failure to act and Emily's loss. The father's imposing portrait, described as blocking the doorway, illustrates how patriarchal authority continues to haunt long after the body is gone.
Key quotes from Section II
“She told them that her father was not dead. She did that for three days, with the ministers calling on her, and the doctors, trying to persuade her to let them dispose of the body.”
The narrator describes Emily's response to her father's death, presenting her denial in plain, affectless prose that makes the act feel both pitiable and deeply unsettling.
“We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip.”
The narrator recalls the image of Emily and her father as the townspeople always pictured them — a frozen, painterly composition that encodes his dominance and her erasure.
“So she had blood-kin under the same roof again and we sat back to watch developments.”
Spoken of the arrival of Emily's cousins later in the story, but the communal 'we' here captures the town's habitual voyeurism — observation as a substitute for action.
Check your understanding
Ask about this work
The reader has this chapter in front of it — the summary, the analysis, the key quotes and the vocabulary — along with the rest of the book’s chapters. Ask what happens and why it matters, or push back on a reading.
It cites the chapter or the line it is working from, and it says so plainly when the guide doesn’t cover something. It’s instructed never to write an essay, a paragraph or an answer for you to hand in, and never to grade anything — it will show you how to approach the question instead.
Sign in to ask the reader about this work — 1 credit a message.
Create an accountSign inVocabulary in Section II
- tableau
- A still, silent scene that looks like a painted picture — here, two people frozen in a fixed, symbolic pose that the townspeople have come to expect and remember.
- spraddled
- Standing or sitting with legs spread wide apart in a domineering, space-claiming way, suggesting power and control over the space around him.
- silhouette
- A dark outline or shadow-shape of a person seen against a lighter background, showing only the figure's form with no detail of features or expression.
- horsewhip
- A long, stiff whip used to drive horses, carried here as a symbol of the father's harsh authority and his power to drive away anyone who approached Emily.
- dispose of
- To remove and properly deal with something — in this case, to take away and bury a dead body according to normal funeral custom.
- blood-kin
- A person related by birth — a biological relative — as opposed to someone connected only by marriage, friendship, or community ties.
- aldermen
- Elected members of a town's governing council, responsible for making local laws and decisions about public matters such as taxes, sanitation, and civic complaints.
- lime
- A white powdery chemical substance — calcium oxide or calcium hydroxide — spread on the ground to neutralize and mask foul odors, especially those from decay.