Emily is a Negro woman who people like to gossip about. She does many things that are out of usual like not paying taxes, furiously denying that her father is dead even though he clearly is, and more.
When the officials tell Emily to pay the taxes, she ignores all the letters that were sent to her. When she finally replied, she said that she doesn’t have to pay the taxes because one of her ancestors contributed and that makes her an exception.
Then, when her father died, for days she would insist that he was still alive. At the end of the story, the curious villagers looked in her room and found out that she had been sleeping with his corpse.
When she was with Homer, people thought that she was too good for him. Emily then poisoned him with rat poison.
The villager’s overall view of her is that she thinks she is better than everyone else and that she is superior to the normal people. When her father dies and she kills Homer, the villagers think, “Finally she can live like a normal person now.”
Emily is anything but a normal person and the story explains her life before her death.