Why Is Miss Emily A Tragic Hero

Miss Emily is a character from a short story A Rose for Emily by William Faulkner. She is a young lady who lived lonely with her strict and selfish father. When her father died, she has to lived by herself and the only thing that was left for her is just her house. Until one day she meets Homer Barron and she fell in love with him, but sadly that life does not turn out the way she wanted. Miss Emily is a truly tragic figure in this short story, a poor young lady who just wanted a normal life, but instead she has to go through all cruelness that mentally and physically grieve her. The main reasons why miss Emily is a truly tragic character because of her father and Homer Barron that hurt her feelings from the very beginning till the end of her life.

Miss Emily always lonely when her father was alive. As the narrator says, “Then we knew that this was to be expected too; as if that quality of her father which had thwarted her woman’s life so marry times had been too virulent and too furious to die” (824). Her father controls her life completely until his death and also after his death. He isolates miss Emily form the outside world, pushing everyone who tries to get close to her away and make sure she didn’t have any lovers. He does not let her have a normal woman’s life even to experience love and care from the others. She has to do whatever her father’s will is like robot that does not have a heart. After her father’s death, “That was two years after her father’s death and short time after her sweetheart—the one we believed would marry her—had deserted her” (820). Even though her father died, but the actions of her father cause the man that wants to get closer to her deserted her, which basically means she has no one by her side and will stay with her anymore and that she will be a lonely woman and lived by herself alone through out her life