¶ … Miss Emily and Miss Brill are two highly interesting yet complex characters that refuse to accept change and are thus stubbornly or naively living in the past. The two women symbolize destruction and decay of the past and of those who refuse to move ahead with times and prefer to live in their own fantasy world. Past is meant to perish because forces of change are more powerful than memories of yesteryears. Those who refuse to acknowledge this fact lead a lonely life and become as rusty a figure as the past they hold on to. William Faulkner's character Emily is one such stubborn obstinate woman who cannot move ahead with time. She refuses to accept that world is changing and that new values are replacing old ones. She is scared that she would not be able to keep pace with changing times and therefore simply closes her eyes to the future and turn deaf ears to bells of change. The story is written about a time when change was entering America with a vengeance. It was not like ordinary times when some minor changes occur, but was a time of massive global change where industrialization completely altered the reality, as people knew it. We must understand that this kind of change must have been very hard on some people and therefore they created a world of delusion around them. This is what Emily did too. She wanted to believe that past was still intact and could not come to terms with the fact that life moves and we are required to leave the past behind and accept the future with open arms.

Though we agree that this story would touch the hearts of many readers because Emily's character certainly arouses sympathy but we should take the time when it was written into account to understand what Emily actually represents. Faulkner does not want people to simply sympathize with this character and read the story as a mystery,...

Instead the story was primarily written to describe the psychology of some people during times of massive nationals and global change. The story is about romance of the past, freshness of the future and fear of the unknown. Emily represents the struggle of the past to overcome the future but future ultimately wins because that it is destined to beat the past. Note these lines below from the story, which make it, clear that Faulkner wrote this story to illustrate the victory of future over the past:
Miss Emily as if she had been a contemporary of theirs, believing that they had danced with her and courted her perhaps, confusing time with its mathematical progression, as the old do, to whom all the past is not a diminishing road but, instead, a huge meadow which no winter ever quite touches, divided from them now by the narrow bottleneck of the most recent decade of years."

There is another interesting incident in the life of Emily that illustrates her desire and obsession to stick with the past and stop the influx of new traditions and ideas. This incident takes place when a man with quite modern views enters her life and Emily falls in love with this man. We see that Faulkner is using symbolism here to represent past and the future. While Barron Homer is a true representative of the future and was a product of the age of industrialization, Emily simply represented the past and one of those people who have stood steadfastly against the future. When these two people meet, it is actually a meeting of the past with the future and that is why problems begin. It is interesting to read the story in this context because that is when we…