In the story "A Rose for Emily," what does the depiction of the manservant tell us about the historical and social context in America at the time...

Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" was published in 1931, and it can be inferred that the story takes place between the very late 1800s and the first few decades of the 1900s. The story takes place in the American South, specifically a town in Mississippi called Jefferson. This setting, both the time and the place, are important to understand what Miss Emily Grierson's manservant represents.

The manservant is a peripheral figure in the story....

Faulkner's story "A Rose for Emily" was published in 1931, and it can be inferred that the story takes place between the very late 1800s and the first few decades of the 1900s. The story takes place in the American South, specifically a town in Mississippi called Jefferson. This setting, both the time and the place, are important to understand what Miss Emily Grierson's manservant represents.

The manservant is a peripheral figure in the story. He is first mentioned in Part I when the narrator says "no one save an old manservant -- a combined gardener and cook -- had seen [the inside of Emily's house] in at least ten years." Over the course of the story, the narrator describes Emily as becoming increasingly reclusive, "with only a doddering Negro man to wait on her." Here and in a couple of other lines, it is established that Emily's servant is a black man. The narrator says, "he talked to no one, probably not even to [Emily], for his voice had grown harsh and rusty, as if from disuse." These details imply that Emily's manservant is seen, at least by Emily herself, as a kind of relic from an earlier time. While the manservant is not a slave, he seems obliged to remain Emily's servant despite her increasing eccentricity. When she dies, the servant lets some of the ladies from the town into the house , and "then he disappeared. He walked right through the house and out the back and was not seen again." 

Throughout the story, Faulkner depicts Emily as a symbol of the dying past of the South, the past that once included slavery and that once saw the Grierson family as as respectable, honored family. As society changes, Emily desperately wants to  hold on to the past. We see this in many of her actions -- from refusal to pay taxes or put a number on her house to her physically holding on to the body of Homer Barron. The manservant is yet another example of Emily's association with the Old South. Once she is dead, "a fallen  monument," Faulkner implies that much of what she valued and stood for is also dying out. The manservant's disappearance after Emily's death supports this reading. The manservant shows us the contrast between the contemporary moment in the American South (1920s-1930s) and a previous time that is quickly fading into the past and into memory but is no longer relevant in the modern world.