What happens in Section IV of A Rose for Emily?
Section IV begins with the townspeople recalling Emily's only brief romantic interest: Homer Barron, a Northern day-laborer who came to oversee the sidewalk paving. The two are spotted riding together on Sunday afternoons, causing a stir among the older citizens who see the relationship as beneath Emily's status. The Baptist minister's wife writes to Emily's cousins in Alabama, who come to Jefferson to intervene. Homer disappears for a time, supposedly to give Emily space to send her cousins away. Once the cousins leave, Homer reappears and is seen entering Emily's house one evening. After that, he vanishes completely. Soon after, a terrible smell starts coming from Emily's property, leading neighbors to complain to the Board of Aldermen. Instead of confronting Emily directly, the aldermen sneak into her yard at midnight and sprinkle lime around the foundation and in the cellar. Within a week or two, the smell fades. The section ends with Emily completely withdrawing from public life: she stops her china-painting lessons, keeps her door shut, and is only occasionally seen at a window—a figure frozen in time, becoming heavier and greyer, until her death at seventy-four.
Analysis
Section IV is where Faulkner's slow-burn Gothic machinery really kicks into gear. The narrative’s well-known jumbled timeline comes together here: the courtship, the cousins' meddling, Homer's final appearance, and the strange odor are laid out in quick succession, pushing the reader to start piecing together the horror that the townspeople have spent years avoiding.
Faulkner's use of collective narration—the shared "we"—is particularly illuminating. The town gossips, moralizes, and ultimately plays a part in Emily's secrecy; the late-night lime-sprinkling becomes a darkly humorous act of civic cowardice that unwittingly preserves the crime. The aldermen's discomfort reflects the reader's own growing hesitation to accept the implications of the clues.
The theme of thresholds grows stronger: Homer crosses Emily's door and disappears, while Emily retreats behind hers. Windows become her only connection to the outside world—a figure seen "like the carven torso of an idol in a niche"—an image that blends the sacred with the mummified. Time, Faulkner's main preoccupation, is depicted in spatial terms: Emily doesn’t just age; she effectively hardens.
The tone shifts subtly from social satire (the shocked Baptist wives, the intrusive cousins) to something colder and more mournful. Faulkner refrains from passing explicit judgment, allowing the town's performative respectability to condemn itself. The section concludes not with a revelation but with a disappearance—Emily behind closed doors, the smell vanished, the evidence hidden under lime—a formal representation of the South's tendency to mask its own decay.
Key quotes from Section IV
“So she had blood-kin under her roof again and we sat back to watch developments.”
The narrator describes the town's voyeuristic satisfaction when Emily's cousins arrive to break up the courtship with Homer Barron, exposing the community's role as complicit spectator rather than moral authority.
“The next day we all said, 'She will kill herself'; and we said it would be the best thing.”
After Homer's apparent abandonment, the townspeople coolly speculate on Emily's suicide, revealing the casual cruelty beneath their veneer of sympathy.
“And that was the last we saw of Homer Barron.”
The flat, declarative sentence that closes Homer's story functions as a trapdoor—its very understatement signaling the horror the narrative has been carefully constructing.