Perhaps the narrator offers this story as a “rose” for Emily. As a lady might press a rose between the pages of a history of the South, she keeps her own personal rose, her lover, preserved in the bridal chamber where a rose color pervades everything. Miss Emily’s rose is ironically symbolic because her lover was a modern Yankee, whose laughter drew the townspeople to him and whose corpse has grinned “profoundly” for forty years, as if he, or Miss Emily, had played a joke on all of them.