Jenny Esparza
ID 1884999

The Irony of Love

Love is a funny sentiment that sends a rollercoaster of emotions to swirl in a person’s body and soul. Love often plays an ironic role as displayed in A Rose for Emily and A Good Man Is Hard to Find in which two instances are portrayed; one represents desperation for love and the other a cry for the lost innocence of love. First of all, in A Rose for Emily a woman is portrayed as arrogant and haughty in which she looks down on a whole community. Emily was raised on the biased fact that she was always superior and no one was ever good enough for her companionship. “We did not say she was crazy then. We believe she had to do that. 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” (II). Emily’s father was the only man she was allowed to love and whom was worthy of her love. This presented a terrible dilemma for Emily, if she was unable to marry a man whom her father kept away then she was destined to live a life in solitude. No person wishes to be alone and this was the same case with Emily, when her father died she tried to live as if he was never deceased.
“She was sick for a long time. When we saw her again, her hair was cut short, making her look like a girl, with a vague resemblance to those angels in colored church windows—sort of tragic and serene” (III). The only way Emily was able to recover to a point where she was able to carry on was to disillusion herself. Emily convinced herself that was still a young beautiful woman that could catch any man’s desire. Naturally when a new man is stumbles in her life and no longer having to restrain herself from her father Emily lashes out and tries to preserve her new found love. “Presently we began to see Miss Emily on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable” (III).
To love someone on a level that to be without them it feels as if a part of you is missing and to live without them is unbearable. Emily loved Homer so much that she could not bear to lose him, so she did the unthinkable. “I want some poison. She was over thirty then, still a slight women, though thinner than usual, with cold, haughty black eyes in a face the flesh of which was strained across the temples and about the eye-sockets as you imagine a lighthouse-keeper’s face ought to look” (III). Emily poisoned Homer in order to be with him forever. Her love for him was unconditional and no other important man in her life was going to leave her; from either walking away or by death. “The body had apparently once lain in the attitude of an embrace, but now the long sleep that outlasts love, that conquers even the grimace of love, had cuckolded him (V).
In A Good Man is Hard to Find an elderly woman fantasies about her younger days and the various young men whom courted her, while on a roadtrip with her son’s family to Florida. She reminisces to a time where everyone was courteous and where it was a safer place to live. “In my time,