Miss Emily preserves all the dead, in memory if not literally. “See Colonel Sartoris,” she tells the new town fathers, as if he were alive. The townspeople are like Miss Emily in that they persist in preserving her “dignity” as the last representative of the Old South (her death ends the Grierson line); after she is dead, the narrator preserves her in this story. The rose is a symbol of the age of romance in which the aristocracy were obsessed with delusions of grandeur, pure women being a symbol of the ideal in every phase of life. 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.