A Rose for Emily Isolation

This funeral moment at the beginning of the story sets up the divisions that exist between Emily and the town. This sets the framework for Emily's isolation in life by talking about her funeral. Who's the most isolated person at the funeral? The corpse, of course.

More proof of what we already know: Emily is isolated. Here we have two more major aspects of the isolation. Her father isolated her from men, and then the whole Homer Barron thing permanently isolated her form everybody (except Tobe), which seems to be what her father intended.

In this line the narrator gives us both the vicious clucking of the town, and their assessment of her father's control of Emily. These factors work together toward Emily's withdrawal from the world.

This moment gives us another big component of Emily's isolation. The smell was the beginning of the end. The interesting thing here is the word "vanquish." If Emily vanquished the lime-tossing guys, that means she conquered them. How, we ask, did Miss Emily conquer those men?

Was there hope for Emily here? Her former students are the ones keeping their children away from her. Perhaps those china-painting lessons were scary and creepy. Perhaps the waft of death reached them and allowed them to put together the bits of whispered gossip they heard around town.