William Faulkner's "A Rose For Emily" portrays a post-modern culture of the old south. More specific in this story, images of death are shown by Faulkner's use of symbolism. In this story, death is symbolic within the past, present and future in the form of the stench, the house, and the arsenic.
When anything becomes a stench, either rotting or decomposition is present. As many of the townsfolk observed, a stench arose from Ms. Emily's estate. They then blamed the smell on the black man that worked for her, claiming that a man couldn't keep a kitchen properly or that it must be a varmint he killed in the yard. The Aldermen even go as far as sprinkling the yard and the cellar with lime to suppress the rank odor. The stench presented here is a superb symbol for the death that has occurred.
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