Immediately after the narrator refers to Miss Emily as being like an “idol” and to her great-aunt as “crazy,” Faulkner presents this image, symbolic of the aristocracy: “We had long thought of them as a tableau, Miss Emily a slender figure in white in the background, her father a spraddled silhouette in the foreground, his back to her and clutching a horsewhip, the two of them framed by the back-flung front door.” Her father’s rejection of her suitors is like the defeated aristocracy’s rejection of new methods of creating a future. Emily’s refusal to accept the fact of her father’s death suggests the refusal of some aristocrats to accept the death of the South even when faced with the evidence of its corpse. Perversely, “She would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people will.” However, the modern generations insist on burying the decaying corpse of the past.