A proud woman born to a highly respected Southern family, Miss Emily seems frozen in the past, bearing herself aristocratically even when she is impoverished after her controlling father’s death. Though her thoughts and feelings… (read full character analysis)
The story is narrated by “we,” the townspeople in general, who also play a role in Miss Emily’s tragedy. The townspeople respect Miss Emily as a kind of living monument to their glorified but… (read full character analysis)
The “big, dark, ready” foreman of a construction company that arrives in Jefferson to pave the sidewalks, Homer is from the North but nonetheless becomes popular in town, a social drinker at the local Elks’… (read full character analysis)
A proud Southern gentleman, controlling of his daughter, who thinks that no suitor is worthy of her hand in marriage. As a result, she never does marry when he is alive, and is close to… (read full character analysis)
Sells Miss Emily arsenic even though she does not comply with the law requiring “‘you to tell what you are going to use it for’,” as he puts it.
Miss Emily’s two female cousins
Even haughtier than Miss Emily is, these cousins come from Alabama to Jefferson to live with Miss Emily and oversee her conduct, presumably to make sure that she doesn’t violate their Southern society’s strict code of propriety while she and Homer are romantically involved with one another.
The mayor of Jefferson some time before Sartoris, Judge Stevens receives complaints that Miss Emily’s property is issuing a bad smell, but, so as not to humiliate the woman, he dispatches men to investigate the smell in secret and to neutralize it by spreading lime around Miss Emily’s property.
Miss Emily’s black servant.
Miss Emily’s great aunt; according to the narrator, she went “completely crazy,” and in this her fate foreshadows Emily’s own.