Hamilton is an English teacher at Cary Academy, an innovative private school in Cary, North Carolina. In this essay she analyzes the dramatic unity in the vague elements of Lispector's "Family Ties" that cohere into a formal tragedy.

The tight form of the tragedy, in which a character moves relentlessly towards catastrophe, seems to lie in direct opposition to the amorphous flow of a phenomenological or existential work such as "Family Ties." However, because Lispector's fluid narrative concerns the epiphanies of life, what the character does in response to his or her epiphanies constitutes a decision that is not unlike those made by the more traditional tragic hero, who, because of some inherent tragic flaw, can make no other decision than to fulfill his or her tragic destiny. In a conventional tragedy, the catastrophe results in death or madness, but in Lispector's hands, the tragedy is the...