Setting Analysis Exercise

"A Rose for Emily" is an example of Southern Gothic literature in which the plot, characters, and themes are inextricably tied with the environment and history of the American South. What particular thematic issues are connected to Faulkner's Jefferson, Mississippi in "A Rose"? What kinds of gender, racial, and class issues are featured in this southern setting that might have less relevance in Northern or British gothic texts? How do the main characters react to their settings? Specifically, how does the progress towards modernity impact Emily as a character who belongs psychologically to the past?

Exercise: 
In this passage, the narrator focuses on setting, describing the street where the dead Miss Emily used to live. However, this description is full of details that extend beyond the appearance of the street. What else do we learn about the town, about Miss Emily and her family, and the potential themes of this short story from this early setting-focused paragraph?

"It was a big, squarish frame house that had once 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. But garages and cotton gins had encroached and obliterated even the august names of that neighborhood; only Miss Emily's house was left, lifting its stubborn and coquettish decay above the cotton wagons and the gasoline pumps--an eyesore among eyesores. And now Miss Emily had gone to join the representatives of those august names where they lay in the cedar-bemused cemetery among the ranked and anonymous graves of Union and Confederate soldiers who fell at the battle of Jefferson" (Faulkner, "A Rose" 322).