A theme in the short story A Rose for Emily is the dangers of biases. The town all pitied Emily and thought of her as a bit larger than life, so they ignored many of the suspicious and illegal things she was doing. They’re biases didn’t allow them to suspect Emily.
The story, chronologically, starts with Emily Grierson’s controlling father’s death, with Emily refusing to acknowledged his death for three days, keeping the body. The townspeople dismiss this as her way of grieving. After that, she meets Homer Barron and falls in love with him, but he wasn’t marrying. She then proceeds to buy arsenic without a proper reason, followed shortly by Homer’s disappearance into her house forever. The town again dismissed it, believing that Homer went away somewhere. After she died, Homer’s rotting corpse was found in Emily’s house, showing signs of her sleeping with it.
In the story, the town kept excusing all the signs of Emily’s insanity, because of their pity towards her. She and everyone else thought that she deserved to get what she wanted because of what she went through. When she went to buy arsenic to poison Homer, the druggist gave her a reason, labeling it “for rats,” and not suspecting a thing when Homer mysteriously disappeared soon after. From all the pity the town gave Emily, they raised her onto a pedestal, making her untouchable. They thought insisting that her father was alive was just how she coped, they thought she was going to kill herself with the arsenic, and they thought Homer just left when he disappeared. They firmly believed that she could do no wrong, so they either ignored or made up a reason for everything she did