Once the town believes that Miss Emily is engaging in adultery, the narrator's attitude about her and Homer's affair changes from that of the town's. With great pride, the narrator asserts that Miss Emily "carried her head high enough — even when we believed that she was fallen." Unlike the town, the narrator is proud to recognize the dignity with which she faces adversity. To hold one's head high, to confront disaster with dignity, to rise above the common masses, these are the attitudes of the traditional Southern aristocracy. For example, when Miss Emily requests poison from the druggist, she does so with the same aristocratic haughtiness with which she earlier vanquished the aldermen. When the druggist asks why she wants poison, she merely stares at him, "her head tilted back in order to look him eye for eye," until he wraps up the poison for her. In the Southern culture of the time, to inquire about a person's intent was a vulgar intrusion into one's privacy. Yet, at this point, despite the narrator's admiration of Miss Emily's aristocratic haughtiness, we question a society that allows its members to use their high positions, respect, and authority to sidestep the law. We wonder about the values of the narrator.
Who, then, is this narrator, who seemingly speaks for the town but simultaneously draws back from it? The narrator makes judgments both for and against Miss Emily, and also presents outside observations — particularly in Section IV, when we first learn many details about her. At the beginning of the story, the narrator seems young, is easily influenced, and is very impressed by Miss Emily's arrogant, aristocratic existence; later, in Section IV, this person seems as old as Miss Emily and has related all the important things Miss Emily has done during her lifetime; and by the story's end, the narrator, having grown old with her, is presenting her with a "rose" by sympathetically and compassionately telling her bizarre and macabre story.
