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Why does the father kill Emilia in Emilia Galotti?
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Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
Gotthold Lessing, detail of an oil painting by Georg May, 1768; in the Gleimhaus, Halberstadt, Germany.
In Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's play Emilia Galotti, the father kills his daughter, Emilia, to protect her from being seduced by an absolutist prince.1
By adapting the Roman legend of Virginia to an 18th-century setting, Lessing used this act as a powerful indictment of the political system of the time. The tragedy serves as a critique of the power dynamics inherent in absolutism, where the father feels forced to take his daughter's life to preserve her virtue against the prince's unwanted advances.1