“I do not consider myself to be a follower, just a lonely deserted soul in a barbaric city, who walks his own treacherous path in life.” (McGready, 10) I, like many women before me covet love deep in my soul. I have gone to many lengths to protect that desire from those that seek to destroy it, at a price only I will know. An all consuming desire so strong as to change the course of the soul, back into ones self. How far will one go for the craving of love? What part of your soul will you be willing to sacrifice in exchange for the need to fill the void in your heart? When we look at stories about desperate love and the longing of the human heart we might look at William Faulkner. Born in 1897 into an old Mississippian family, the reader may find that most of his stories focus on the vast emotions that one feels when trying to understand the heart and the soul in small town southern life. “A Rose for Emily” written by Faulkner in 1950, tells the story of a proud southern belle robbed of her chances for love and to belong, by an overbearing father and a culture so stifling as to lock her away her with desire forever. Faulkner writes this story from an objective point of view as the reader is told only what Miss Emily does with her life as it is picked apart by the town gossip. “The Griersons held themselves a little too high”, as most would say and Miss Emily, a well bred southern daughter, described as “a slender figure in white”, (Faulkner, 84) a young woman, to be envied and hated for her privileged status. Approaching the age of an old maid, Miss Emily is shown to be suffocating by the shadow of her father, unable to even feel a whisper of love. Young men, intimidated by the “spraddled silhouette” (Faulkner, 84) of a horsewhip toting father, turned away time after time, “none of the young men were quite good enough”, (Faulkner, 84), as Miss Emily is pushed behind, watching yet another figure disappearing from her. The reader finds that instead of being freed by the death of her father she clings to the body, unwilling to let go to the one who held her chained. “We did not say she was crazy then” (Faulkner, 84). When we meet Hulga, in “Good Country People” written by Flannery O’Connor in 1955, we find a woman whose very soul was forever marked by a single moment in time. The reader finds a young woman, wounded by the tragedy of losing her leg. Suffering from a weak heart, struggling with the desperate need to be accepted, she hides her heart in a soul as wounded as her body. Her leg, once a living object is now just a piece of wood, as hard and unfeeling as she portrays her self