Symbolism, Imagery, Allegory
In "A Rose For Emily," the struggle between the past and the future threatens to rip the present to pieces. And this tension is apparent in this story's symbols of time: the pocket watch, the stationary, and Miss Emily's and Tobe's hair.
When members of the Board of Aldermen visit Emily to see about the taxes a decade before her death, they hear her pocket watch ticking, hidden somewhere in the folds of her clothing and her body. This is a signal to us that, for Miss Emily, time is both a mysterious "invisible" force, and one of which she has always been acutely aware. With each tick of the clock, her chance for happiness dwindles .
Another symbol of time is Emily's hair. The town tells time first by Emily's hair, and then when she disappears into her house after her hair has turned "a vigorous iron-gray, like the hair of an active man" (4.6). When Emily no longer leaves the house, the town uses Tobe's hair to tell time, watching as it too turns gray.
The strand of Emily's hair found on the pillow next to Homer clues us in to a particularly gruesome bit of time-telling: too, Emily's hair didn't turn "iron-gray" until approximately 1898, several years after Homer's death. That means Miss Emily was snuggling with a long-dead corpse.
The stationery is also a symbol of time, but in a different way. The letter the town gets from Emily is written "on paper of an archaic shape, in a thin, flowing calligraphy in faded ink" (1.4). Emily probably doesn't write too many letters, so it's normal that she would be using stationery that's decades old.
While these symbols are interesting enough taken individually, they combine to form something even more intriguing. This story analyzes the way the traditional values of the South—especially it's deeply encoded sexism and prejudice towards Northerners—bring about the downfall of one woman. The Southern past keeps Miss Emily in a state of arrested development and the watch, stationary, and hair serve to show how, even as time marches forward, Miss Emily has remained stuck in a bygone era.