The year 1865 saw the end of the Civil War between the Union and the confederacy, and saw the beginning of the "New South." With the many changes pressed upon the South, the so-called "Old South" could no longer exist. For example, people could not own slaves as they has in the past, and they couldn't survive anymore simply by belonging to a family with an "august name." These changes didn't happen overnight however; they took place in the little town of Jefferson, and we see how Miss Emily Grierson, survivor of the Old South, resists these changes.
Jefferson was once inhabited by many well-off families who were members of the Old South's aristocratic class. As time, and the Reconstruction, marched on, these families slowly disappeared. Eventually, the last true living legacy of the Old South in Jefferson was Miss Emily Grierson. She had been raised to be a Southern Belle, an upstanding member of society, and she clung to her world of the Old South. She kept a black servant, Tobe, who did everything for her, just as if he were a slave, and she lived in a "a big, squarish frame house that once had been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies, set on what had once been our most select street" (par. 2). With the infiltration of the New South, however, "garages and cotton gins.encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood" (par. 2). Yet the house remained, "lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps," just as its willful inhabitant "carried her head high.even when we believed that she was fallen" (par. 33).
The house was all that Miss Emily really had left after her father died. When he passed away, Miss Emily spent three days denying his death and not letting the doctors and ministers dispose of the body. Though it is not told first in the story, this was the first time Miss Emily had rejected the truth in order to retain her world of the past: a world in which other members of the Old South, such as Colonel Sartoris, lived on after they too had died.
