Her need for love makes her kill Homer. He was her last chance for love and her only chance to avoid being alone every night for the rest of her life. Dead in her bed was one way she knew she could have him forever. Death keeps Emily's dream alive. Emily's life is one of loss. From the beginning of the story, we know Emily is protected and sheltered by her father. He was doing his best to keep her from getting hurt but all he did was make her life after his death more difficult. He had " driven away" (455) all of Emily's suitors in her younger days. Her father keeps Emily from partaking in some basic aspects of life so that when he dies, she is lost. She misses out on opportunities and friendships because he father is in the way.

"A Rose for Emily" is a love story. Albeit a love story gone wrong,...

Emily is not a cold-blooded killer in the sense that Jeffery Dahmer or even Dexter Morgan are. She does not kill for fun nor is she seeking some type of justice in the world. Emily kills for love or, more specifically, the lack of love in her life. Murdering Homer was a last resort for an aging woman who never found a healthy kind of love with a man with which she grow old. In a moment of prolonged and painful desperation, she kills Homer in order to keep him in her life. Love makes the world go round but it also creates obsessive, crazed individuals when things do not go as planned.
Work Cited

Faulkner, William. "A Rose for Emily." The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction. Cassill, R.V.,

ed. New York W.W. Norton and Company. 1981. pp. 451-8. Print.