Which Is Better - Freedom Or Purpose?

Last week,  we looked at Haze’s search for a place to call home in Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood.  This week, we looked at a character from William Faulkner’s “A Rose For Emily” who had the opposite problem.

 It is clear that Miss Emily has a place to call home.  While Haze was defined by his lack of belonging to any specific place, Miss Emily is swallowed up by the place she calls home.  Although she lives in a “big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies” (I), Miss Emily’s home is suffocating, trapping her inside of its spacious walls.  At no point in her entire life is she able to break free of its grasp; the furthest we see her venture from it is when she with her beau, Homer Barron, “on Sunday afternoons driving in the yellow-wheeled buggy and the matched team of bays from the livery stable” (III). Tragically, this relationship was not meant to be, and Miss Emily retreated into her home once more.  

As the years moved on, Miss Emily became a tradition, passed from generation to generation--dear, inescapable, impervious, tranquil, and perverse” (IV).  Aside from a select few interactions, Miss Emily was seen only in shadows through the window, “like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which” (IV).  Eventually, entombed in the house that had made her its own, “she died in one of the downstairs rooms, in a heavy walnut bed with a curtain, her gray head propped on a pillow yellow and moldy with age and lack of sunlight” (IV).  This is a direct contrast to Haze’s death, outdoors, all alone in a random ditch.  

So, which is more tragic - Haze, the drifter who wants a place to belong, but never quite finds it?  Or Miss Emily, desperate for meaningful human companionship, trapped in a home and a history that she can never escape?  Haze had too much freedom but no driving purpose.  Miss Emily was smothered in purpose - noblesse oblige - but had no freedom.  Ultimately, what they were both missing is what truly makes life worthwhile -people to share their lives with.