What are some of the literary elements used within "A Rose for Emily", and how are they used?

Perhaps the main literary element employed by William
Faulkner in this novel is that of Southern Gothic. This literary tradition of Gothic
found its way into Southern literature, but in a different manner from Gothicism; the
grotesque and bizarre elements are used less for frightening effects and more for what
they uncover in the human psyche. That is, the Gothic serves to reveal the psychology of
human beings on the fringes of society (the grotesques) and their underlying and dark
motives.

While Faulkner's narratives are not normally
confined to a particular genre, "A Rose for Emily" with its decay and forbidding old
mansion where suitors and aldermen alike have been turned away, added to a character
singularly odd in appearance and behavior, qualifies this narrative as Southern Gothic.
As a character, Emily is a grotesque; for
instance, she is damaged psychologically by her intensely
patriarchal environment in which suitors have all been turned away, so she refuses to
let her father be buried, insisting that he is not
dead.  

We
remembered all the young men her father had driven away, and we knew that with nothing
left, she would have to cling to that which had robbed her, as people
will.

Of course, Emily's
poisoning of Homer Barron and her necrophilia demonstrate further her bizarre character.
After a long time of being shut away, she dies in one of the downstairs rooms in a large
bed with a curtain, "her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and
lack of sunlight." However, when the townspeople come into the house after her burial,
they find upstairs the skeleton of Homer, what "was left of him, rotted beneath what was
left of the nightshirt." On the pillow next to him "lay that even coating of the patient
and biding dust," but also on this second pillow is the indentation of a head and "a
long strand or iron-gray hair."