In 1894, Colonel Sartoris, the former mayor of Jefferson, remitted Miss Emily’s taxes for the rest of her life after her father passed away. Colonel Sartoris told Miss Emily that remitting her taxes was the town’s way of repaying her family.

Colonel Sartoris lied to Emily by telling her that her father had loaned money to the town in the past and this was Jefferson’s way of repaying Mr. Grierson. Colonel Sartoris was a traditional man and was considered part of the Old South.

Who is Colonel Sartoris and what lie did he tell Miss Emily? He was the mayor she said she didn’t have to pay taxes because they owed her dad for paying the town.

After Emily’s father dies, Colonel Sartoris invents a way to help Emily survive financially without embarrassing her by revealing that she’s actually accepting charity from the town. Everyone has to pay property taxes on their houses, of course.

Emily didn’t want to pay her taxes because she couldn’t afford to. She truly believed her father had an arrangement where he didn’t owe taxes, however she had no money to pay the taxes either.

Yes it is significant that Miss Emily is the last of the Griersons. Miss Emily is the last of her kind, certainly. She is the last living Grierson, of course, and she does represent the dying vestiges of the Old South, as the posts above point out.

What did the townspeople think Miss Emily was going to do with the poison? What makes the minister’s visit to Miss Emily ambiguous? She taught China painting lessons. What change took place in Miss Emily’s relationship with the town for a period of several years when Miss Emily was in her forties?

When members of the Board of Aldermen pay her a visit, in the dusty and antiquated parlor, Emily reasserts the fact that she is not required to pay taxes in Jefferson and that the officials should talk to Colonel Sartoris about the matter. However, at that point he has been dead for almost a decade.

Emily’s main reasons for killing him were because she was angry that he had turned her down, and that she knew that this was her last, best chance at matrimony. There were no other men in the town in whom she was interested (and vice versa), and no other prospects were likely.

”A Rose for Emily” contains verbal irony when Colonel Sartoris promises the Grierson family that if they loan the town money, they won’t have to pay taxes and when Emily tells the new mayor to see Colonel Sartoris, who has been dead for ten years, about her taxes.

With his machinery, Homer represents modernity and industrialization, the force of progress that is upending traditional values and provoking resistance and alarm among traditionalists.

How does the Miss Emily spend the last decades of her life? Miss Emily spends the last decades of her life locked up in her house away from society. The hair represents that Miss Emily had recently laid next to the corpse. She poisoned him and kept him all these years so he would never leave her.

The townspeople respect Miss Emily as a kind of living monument to their glorified but lost pre-Civil War Southern past, but are therefore also highly judgmental and gossipy about her, sometimes hypocritically.

What did the townspeople think of MIss Emily and her new boyfriend? The townspeople started gossiping. They were very nosy and they thought that since he was a manual laborer he was beneath her.

In “A Rose for Emily,” people of the town think it would be the best thing for Emily to “kill herself” because they pity her. They feel sorry for her as a poor spinster left with nothing but a decrepit house by an overbearing father who prevented her from marrying.