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The narrator states that Emily had vanquished those men “just as she had vanquished their fathers,” and goes on to describe a time thirty years prior when she resisted another official inquiry on behalf of the town leaders, this time in regards to “the smell.” It was two years after the death of Emily’s father, and the townspeople had begun to detect a powerful odor emanating from her property. Emily had also recently been abandoned by the man whom the townsfolk believed she would eventually marry, and she was rarely seen; “the only sign of life” was Tobe entering and leaving the house. The women of the town assumed that Tobe, because he was a man, was unable to maintain the house, and attributed the smell to his inability to clean properly.
As complaints mounted, Judge Stevens, the mayor at that time, was unwilling to confront Emily, even after a meeting of the Board of Aldermen. At eighty years old, Judge Stevens appeared stymied by a sense of propriety, claiming he wouldn’t dare to accuse a lady like Emily of smelling bad. He eventually decided to have lime sprinkled along the foundation of the Grierson home in the middle of the night, in an effort to counteract the smell. As the men crept away, a light appeared in a window that had previously been dark, and they spotted the silhouette of Emily, watching from above.
Within a couple of weeks, the odor subsided, but the townspeople began to pity the increasingly reclusive Emily, remembering how her great-aunt, known as old lady Wyatt, had succumbed to insanity. The townspeople had always believed that the Griersons thought too highly of themselves, with Emily’s father driving off the many suitors deemed not good enough to marry his daughter. With no offer of marriage in sight, Emily was still single by the time she turned thirty. When her father died and it was revealed that he left her no money, just the house, they both pitied her and felt vindicated. The incident humanized her in the eyes of the town.
The day after Mr. Grierson’s death, the women called on Emily to offer their condolences, in keeping with custom. Meeting them at the door, Emily stated that her father was not dead; she was wearing her regular clothes and did not appear to be grieving him at all. She maintained her father was still alive for three days; ministers and doctors reached out to her in vain, trying to convince her to let them dispose of the body. Just as town officials were about to force her, Emily finally turned her father’s body over for burial. The narrator explains they didn’t believe her to be insane at that time; because her father had driven everyone else away, he was all she had left, and they believed this was something she “had to do” in order to process his death.
