Assignment 8

Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)

Oates is one of contemporary America’s most prolific writers. She has published some eighty books-- novels, plays, short stories, poetry, and literary criticism. In her works she explores the multilayered nature of American society, writing about urban slums, decaying rural communities, and exclusive suburbs in a dense and compellingly realistic prose style; her method of expression ranges from the realistic to the experimental.. In some of her most recent work she reveals her deep fascination with the tradition of nineteenth-century *gothic writers–Edgar Allan Poe, Fyodor Dostoevski, Mary Shelley--as she attempts to explore the profound issues of evil and innocence, betrayal and revenge and atonement. Critics have often called her works violent, lurid, even depraved. Oates replied to this criticism that in these violent times only tales of violence have reality.

“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” (pp. 752-65)

This odd and troubling story has generated substantial critical comment. Oates indicated that the story’s central episode is based on actual events reported in a 1955 Life magazine story about the rape-murders of three high-school girls committed by twenty-three-year-old Charles Schmid, who drove a gold car around Tucson, Arizona. Furthermore, the epigraph “To Bob Dylan” highlights the difference between the music Connie and her friends enjoy and the clear-eyed, somber vision Dylan’s lyrics often project. And critics point out the affinity of the story to the old popular ballad “The Demon Lover,” which narrates the ruin of a good wife and mother lured to death and damnation by the blandishments of a satanic lover.

Add to these the numerous suggestive allusions to various folk and fairy tales within the story. Is Arnold Friend some perverse Pied Piper? Does the pumpkin-like grinning face on Arnold’s golden car suggest the magical coach that carried Cinderella to the ball? Do Arnold’s big and white teeth suggest the wolf in “Little Red Riding Hood”? And does the image of the house as a “cardboard box [Arnold] can knock down anytime” allude to “The Three Little Pigs”? Does his persistent trouble with his boots suggest that Arnold stands on wolf paws or cloven hooves? (For an interesting exploration of these elements of the story, see Gretchen Schulz and R.J.R Rockwood’s “In Fairyland, without a Map: Connie’s Exploration Inward in Joyce Carol Oates’ ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’” Literature and Psychology 30 (1980): 155-67. In the article the authors’ psychological approach to the story draws upon Bruno Bettelheim’s famous study of the fairy tale. The authors also report that in an interview with Oates, the writer claimed that she did indeed intentionally allude to many fairy tales in this story.)

No academic analysis of allusion, myth, folklore, or fairy tale is really required to enjoy this story. It remains sufficiently realistic, even if Arnold does seem to have a supernatural awareness of events. In fact, insisting on the story’s allusiveness will create some interesting problems. How do Cinderella, who, after all, does get the prince, and Little Red Riding Hood, who, after all, is rescued in most versions, and the three little pigs, who, after all, are saved by the sturdy brick house of the wisest brother, figure in this story of a doomed young girl?

The more interesting question is: Why does Connie go out to Arnold and, presumably, to her rape and death (if that in fact is what happens to her)? How accurate is Arnold’s assertion: “The place you came from ain’t there any more, and where you had in mind to go is cancelled out”–is he speaking literally or metaphorically? The world of mooney fifteen-year-old adolescents is the place that Connie came from. And where Connie had in mind to go is, doubtless, that shapeless happily-ever-after that followed the closing romantic embrace in her favorite movies. For Connie inhabits two worlds–the constricting and disagreeable life within her family and the promising, exciting world of the mall, the movies, and the hamburger joints where she gossips with her friends and tentatively experiences her first episodes of romantic love with young boys she can control.

Within her home and family Connie feels condemned and rejected, and she returns the disapproval. Outside these familiar precincts lies a world defined by movies, the drive-in restaurants, and the ever-present popular music. It is not the music of Bob Dylan, as Tom Quirk assures us, but her comparatively mindless, sentimental, and romantic music against which the early 1960s Dylan stood out in such bold contrast. Connie’s idea of the world into which, at the age of fifteen, she is beginning to make her first tentative forays is shaped by these songs and occupied by boys: boys who can be snubbed with impunity, boys who merge into one undifferentiated and safe blur in her mind, boys who offer hamburgers and “the caresses of love.” And that love is “not the way someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs.” To these boys Connie presents herself as undifferentiated girl, and she is concerned that she look attractive to them.

The world, however, is occupied not only by frank and tentative boys but also by determined and deceitful men, by evil as well as by innocence, by hypocrisy, perversion, and violence–an exponent of all of which Connie attracts in Arnold Friend. Although in the course of their interview Connie sees through his disguise, the impoverishment of her world provides her no way to resist his advances. Her home offers no refuge, her father does does not come when she needs him (he has always been absent anyway), and she is unable to manipulate the telephone because of her panic. Meanwhile, Arnold, who presents himself in the guise of a movie hero, a teenage “boy,” and her lover, offers to take charge of her. He places his mark upon her and gives her a role to play in a world of his devising. Because she is cut off from her past and has no idea of a future, she is at his mercy in determining what to do in the present–she simply has nowhere else to go. Not only does Arnold show Connie that she is desired, he also provides her a way to be “good”: by going with him she will save her undeserving family from getting hurt. Connie does not so much decide to go out to Arnold as she watches an alien being that Arnold has called into existence in her body respond to his desires. The final ironic horror, of course, is that she will be raped and murdered and buried in the desert not as brown-eyed Connie but as the imaginary “sweet little blue-eyed girl” of Arnold’s sick imagination.

She has no defense against the older Arnold Friend; he knows her world and crafts his blandishments for effect. But she has no insight into his world, and will become his victim. Arnold points out to her, “This place you are now–inside your daddy’s house–is nothing but a cardboard box I can knock down any time. Ultimately, Connie has no protection–neither physical nor emotional–in a real world that nourishes the unimagined evil of smooth-talking Arnold Friend; her past is gone and her future is canceled out.

couple standing by convertible