The House

Here's a Gothic lit pro-tip: watch out for the houses. Whether you're reading straight Gothic or Southern Gothic, the house usually houses (hey-o!) some pretty potent symbolism.

And Miss Emily's house is no different: it packs a symbolic punch.

For most of the story, we, like the townspeople, only see Miss Emily's house from the outside looking in. Let's look at one of the descriptions we get of the house:

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. (1.2)

The fact that the house was built in the 1870's tells us that Miss Emily's father must have been doing pretty well for himself after the Civil War.  (For an idea of the kind of house Miss Emily lived in, take a look at artist Theora Hamblett's house in Mississippi, built, like Emily's, in the 1870's.) But the narrator's description of it as an "eyesore among eyesores" suggests that it's fallen into pretty spectacular disrepair: it's even uglier than the surrounding gasoline pumps.

Right away, we see Miss Emily's house serving as a symbol of the American South. The former grandeur of the South—which, of course, was built on the foundation of slave labor—has fallen into disrepair after the Civil War.

But Miss Emily's house is more than a symbol of the former glory of a long-dead way of life—it also symbolizes the stifling power of the society in which she lives. Societal mores dictated that Miss Emily progress from the role of daughter to wife to mother: there was no alternative path for her to follow. But because she never married, the domestic dreams that she had hoped to make reality never materialized. She was stuck in one phase of a traditional woman's life—being a daughter. And, as such, was literally confined to live in her father's house.

It doesn't stop there, though. The house grows more decrepit as Emily grows older, which seems to suggest the way the town of Jefferson views her. She's hopelessly old by the time she turns thirty, and each passing year takes her further away from marriageable age and potential happiness. The house, like the image of Miss Emily, is that of squandered beauty. In the eyes of the citizens of Jefferson, an unmarried woman is like a beautiful but dilapidated manor: a tragic eyesore.