Tradition vs. Progress Theme Analysis

Even as white Southerners in the short story cling to their pre-Civil War traditions, ideals, and institutions, the world around them is quickly changing. Agriculture is being supplanted by industry, and aristocratic neighborhoods with their proud plantation-style houses like the Grierson’s are being encroached upon by less grandiose but more economically practical garages and cotton gins. Likewise, the post-Sartoris generation of authorities in Jefferson—those men who belong to the Board of Aldermen that governs the town—are increasingly moving away from their forbears’ aristocratic and chivalric ideals toward “more modern ideas” and practical, progressive governance—hence their decision to try to exact taxes from Miss Emily after all (even if unsuccessfully). While many years earlier, the gallant old Judge Stevens balks at the idea of telling a lady to her face that her property stinks, the authorities from this newer generation, we might imagine, would have fewer qualms about doing so.

The principal figure of progress in Jefferson is Homer Barron, who has not only been contracted to pave the sidewalks in town—thereby making the town more accessible to all members of society, in what is a small act of both technological progress and a small act of democratization—but who also becomes a great favorite in town despite being from the North. It seems like the North and South, torn apart during the Civil War, are becoming reconciled to one another and reintegrated once more. However, the townspeople’s conflicted attitude toward Homer—they think him a fine fellow, yet don’t think he is good enough to court Miss Emily—is indicative of their broader ambivalence about progress in Jefferson. They are perhaps prepared to industrialize and modernize their infrastructure and methods of governance, they are even prepared to socialize with Northerners, but they are not yet prepared to part with the last vestige of the Old South or its rigid social hierarchy and culture of honor and sexual propriety.

Miss Emily herself is perhaps the character in the short story most conflicted over tradition and progress, and most victimized by her society’s cultural paralysis. She retains her aristocratic manner even after sinking into poverty, she refuses eligible suitors as beneath her even as she passes from the prime of her youth, and she even bizarrely denies her father’s death, as though incapable of psychologically surviving the financial and social change his death entails for her. But, just as a future of spinsterhood seems imminent, Miss Emily almost miraculously adapts to the times by becoming romantically involved with Homer, a man not only from a lower social class than she but a Northerner to boot. Financial necessity no doubt influences her change in standard and manner, but also a genuine human need for companionship. However, the townspeople, who are charmed and friendly with Homer, nonetheless think this a step too far in the direction of progress, and are at first piteous of Miss Emily’s fall, and later scandalized by the possibility that she is having physical relations with a man not serious about marriage—progressive behavior indeed. It is her society’s inability to commit wholly to progress, to adaptation, that in part compels the already mentally unstable Miss Emily to create with poison and dusty secrecy a private world safely frozen in the past, unchanging.