Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Pre-reading
Past Elaine Showalter
Originally published in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Edited and with an introduction past Elaine Showalter. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers UP, 1994
Among the four hundred short stories that Joyce Ballad Oates has published during her career, "Where Are You Going, Where Accept You Been?" remains the best known, most anthologized, and about widely discussed. Inspired by a magazine story almost a teenage killer in Arizona, it was kickoff published in the literary magazine Epoch in fall 1966 and then selected for The Best American Short Stories (1967) and The O. Henry Awards (1968). 
In recent years, it has been reprinted as part of the feminist literary canon in The Norton Album of Literature by Women (1985), edited past Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar; and Oates has drawn attention to the centrality of the story in her literary development by using it every bit the overall title of two collections of her short stories: Where Are You Going, Where Take You Been?: Stories of Young America (1974) and Where Are Y'all Going, Where Have You lot Been?: Selected Early Stories (1993). In 1986, the story was the basis of a commercially successful film, Smoothen Talk, directed by Joyce Chopra, which in its turn became the subject of much feminist contend.
Following the changes from Life reporter Don Moser'south account of "The Pied Piper of Tucson," to Oates's masterpiece, to the movie Shine Talk gives us the opportunity to come across how the literary imagination transforms raw material into art, and to understand these different genres and texts as related but democratic works. Oates has described her many stories and novels as "tributaries flowing into a single river"; so it is non surprising that "Where Are You Going" should incorporate many elements that have been characteristic in her work, including the blurring of realism and the supernatural, and the effort to show "for those who can't speak for themselves."1 The story likewise takes up troubling subjects that take continued to occupy her in her fiction: the romantic longings and express options of adolescents, especially girls; the sexual victimization of women; the psychology of serial killers; and the American obsession with violence.
Oates has described the form of "Where Are Yous Going" as "psychological realism"; or "realistic allegory," a fictional fashion that is "Hawthornean, romantic, shading into parable."2 At the aforementioned time, the story deals with a terrifying possibility of contemporary American life, a situation of invasion, abduction, and likely rape and murder, which meets u.s.a. in every morning's headlines and every evening's idiot box news. For women who live with these fears, as the white women of Hawthorne's age did non, the formal and abstruse elements of "Where Are You Going" will be measured against its indictment of an American social disorder.
Joyce Carol Oates is amongst the most distinguished writers ers of her generation, but the success story of an American woman writer is always different from the normative success story designed for men. Nosotros have no expectations of the slap-up American woman novelist, no myths of her growing upwardly, or coming of age. "I don't accept whatever long list of things like busboy, Western Union boy, short-guild cook, naval officer—all of those things are on well-nigh people's dust jackets," Oates has commented almost her relatively uneventful life.3 While her career more closely resembles the pattern of early inventiveness, literary immersion, and intellectual omniverousness established past American women writers like Margaret Fuller and Edith Wharton, she has written more than, in a variety of genres, than any comparable American writer of this century.
Built-in on June 16, 1938, in rural Lockport, New York, Oates grew up in a working-class Catholic family unit and attended a one-room schoolhouse, where her teacher, Mrs. Dietz, taught eight grades. "For decades," she writes, "my memory of my beginning instructor was that of a childs'-eye view of a giantess, or a deity: could Mrs. Dietz really have been equally tall as I remembered?"iv Equally a schoolchild, she read the American classics in a tattered copy of the Treasure of American Literature: Franklin, Irving, Hawthorne, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Poe, and Twain. Few women writers were included amid these start literary Gods, for in the process of national canonization, American women writers and artists such equally Harriet Beecher Stowe or Kate Chopin had been left out of anthologies. Later, in her teens, she read Emily Dickinson and the Brontës, and still later, Flannery O'Connor.
Although their own education had been cut short by the Depression, her parents, Frederic and Carolina Oates, were both devoted readers who supported their daughter's emerging intellectual and literary gifts. She was given a typewriter by her grandmother when she was fourteen, and began to train herself "by writing novel after novel."5 When she was fifteen, she submitted her first novel to a publisher; it was rejected as besides depressing for immature readers.half-dozen But Oates won all the schoolhouse prizes, including a New York Land Regents Scholarship to Syracuse University. There she devoured philosophy and literature, especially Nietzsche, Kafka, and Faulkner, and graduated course valedictorian, summa cum laude, and Phi Beta Kappa in 1960. During her inferior year at Syracuse her short story "In the Old World" won the Mademoiselle fiction laurels. "We never really idea she'd be this successful," her male parent remarks. "It all started when she was in college and won that fiction contest at Mademoiselle. Everything just took off from in that location."7
At this stage of her life, Oates was planning to become an English professor; she entered graduate schoolhouse at the University of Wisconsin, where she met and married some other pupil, Raymond Smith. She was starting time her doctoral work at Rice University when 1 of her stories was selected for the honor scroll of Best American Brusk Stories, and she gave up academic criticism for fiction, although she has continued to teach throughout her career. In 1962, Oates and Smith moved to Detroit, and she was deeply marked by the racial violence that finally exploded in the riots of 1967. "Moving to Detroit in the early 1960s changed my life completely," she has said. "I would have been a author . . . merely living in Detroit, enduring the extraordinary racial tensions of that metropolis . . . made me want to write directly near the serious social concerns of our time."8 Her novel them, which reflects the apocalyptic sensibility of the menstruation, received the National Book Award in 1970. From 1967 to 1978, Oates and Smith taught at the University of Windsor in Canada, a decade in which she published 20-seven books—curt stories, novels, poetry, plays, and criticism. "I take a laughably Balzacian ambition to go the whole world into a book," she told an interviewer in 1972.nine
In 1978, Oates joined the faculty of Princeton University where she is now Roger Berlind Professor of the Humanities. Like Virginia and Leonard Woolf, Oates and Smith are a literary team who take established a journal, The Ontario Review, and a publishing company, The Ontario Review Printing. Having their ain press gives them the ability to sponsor other writers, artists, and translators as well as to publish some of Oates'due south ain work. Oates also writes fiction nether the pseudonym "Rosamond Smith." The move to Princeton inaugurated a new, more than public phase of her career. She has travelled extensively tensively in the United States and Europe, and her writing continues to reflect an enormous range of interests in contemporary American life, from boxing to politics. "For a serious American author—especially for a adult female writer," Oates told an interviewer in 1992, "This is by far the best era in which to live."x
The huge appetite, formidable intelligence, and vast range of Oates's work has nonetheless unsettled the stereotypes of those critics who even so equate greatness with masculinity. From early on in her career, Oates has often been judged in terms of the gender-determined norms of American literature, criticized for her enormous literary productivity and for the violence of her drama and fiction. She has always scorned such criticism as sexist. "If the lot of womankind has non however widely diverged from that romantically envisioned by our Moral Bulk," Oates wrote in 1981, ". . . the lot of the adult female author has been but as severely confining. War, rape, murder and the more colorful minor crimes apparently fall inside the exclusive province of male action."xi In the 1980s and 1990s, her work has moved toward more explicitly feminist themes.
Withal Oates has likewise been reluctant to describe herself as a "adult female writer" or a "feminist writer." Instead, she calls herself a "(woman) writer," an artist whose imagination and ambition is genderless, nonetheless who knows her social identity constrained by cultural expectations and by the literary traditions of sexual difference. Her thinking on the "ontological status of the author who is also a woman" is securely sympathetic to feminist concerns merely firm in its distinctions between the serious writer'due south genderless imagination, and the sexually-specific reception and critical agreement of her work. "A woman who writes is a writer by her own definition," she has observed, "but she is a woman author by others' definitions."12
"Where Are Yous Going" reflects many of the ideas and attitudes of the 1960s, just is set in a teenage civilization more like the 1950s. Such recognizable details of American adolescent life as popular music, radio disc jockeys, cars, drive-in restaurants, and shopping plazas feature in the plot, yet they likewise seem fixed in an unreal and stylized teenage past shaped by movies, earlier mall rats, drugs, date rape, or The Pill. Connie'southward fantasy world is the world of James Dean, Natalie Forest, and Rebel Without a Cause. Her coming-of-age story likewise anticipates the coming-of-age of American society, its emergence from the hazy dreams and social innocence of the 1950s into the harsher realities of random violence, war, and crime. Oates has located the story in the "transformational years" of the 1960s, when she saw "a new morality . . . emerging in America," a morality "intuitively understood" by her younger readers who could encounter in it not "morbidity, absurdity, and a sense that life is meaningless," but rather the portrayal of "human beings struggling heroically to ascertain personal identity in the confront of death itself."13
In an early essay, Oates noted that she often wrote stories based on newspaper headlines: "Information technology is the very skeletal nature of the newspaper, I recall, that attracts me to it, the need it inspires in me to give flesh to such neatly and thinly-told tales."14 The skeleton of "Where Are You Going" was the saga of an American teenage murderer, Charles Schmid, which was written up in Life mag, besides equally other news magazines, during the winter of 1965-1966. Oates has commented that she deliberately did non read the Life commodity all the way through, in social club not "to be distracted by also much item," just that information technology captured her interest: "There take always been psychopathic killers, serial murderers, and interest in them; as how could at that place neglect to be, given our human predilection for horror, 'the fascination of the abomination' . . . . For the writer, the series killer is, abstractly, an counterpart of the imagination'southward caprices and amorality; the sense that, no thing the dictates and even the wishes of the witting, social self, the life or will or purpose of the imagination is incomprehensible, unpredictable."15
Charles Schmid was a twenty-3-year-erstwhile ex-high school student who had been suspended in his senior year for stealing tools from a welding grade. He had taken to hanging out by the high school, picking up girls for rides in his gold convertible. Ultimately he murdered three of them, while other teenagers served every bit accomplices. In March 1966 Schmid was convicted of murder and sentenced to die in the Arizona gas sleeping room, but he was killed by another inmate before the sentence could be carried out.16
Schmid'southward story attracted a smashing bargain of attention during a period when teenage runaways, the evils of stone and gyre, and boyish sexuality were much debated in the news, and before the American public had become numbed by stories of series killers. Readers were fascinated past the way Schmid had modelled himself on his idol, Elvis Presley, and past his self-dramatizing lies. But the teenage girls he entranced and murdered are much less colorful characters in the news stories. Such girls were the other side of the American fantasies of the early 1960s—the Barbie dolls, Gidgets, and groupies of the years merely earlier the women's motility. Oates, however, turned the familiar story of the series killer within-out by taking the victim as her protagonist, and past taking her seriously. Her sense of what is tragic in Connie'south "trashy dreams," and what is heroic in her fate, is typical of her pity for the women often rendered silent and inarticulate in American society.
In 1970, Oates included "Where Are You lot Going" in her third collection of short stories, The Wheel of Love. While her earlier collections had included all her published brusque fiction, with The Cycle of Beloved she began to select and shape her books of stories around a theme, so that they were "non assemblages of disparate material but wholes with unifying strategies of organization."17 The unifying theme of The Cycle of Love, she told an interviewer in 1970, was "unlike forms of dearest, mainly in family unit relationships"; she had originally planned to phone call the book Honey Stories.eighteen Other stories in the collection included the prize-winning "In the Region of Water ice," "The Cycle of Dear," and "How I Contemplated the Earth from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again."
Oates has written and commented on "Where Are You Going" in numerous interviews and essays in the decades since its publication. She has explained that the story came to her "more or less in a piece" after hearing Bob Dylan's song "It's All Over Now, Baby Blue" and so reading almost a killer in the Southwest and thinking almost "the old legends and folk songs of Decease and the Maiden."19 She dedicated the original story to Dylan because the "hauntingly elegiac" vocal seemed appropriate "to the dreamy, nevertheless highly charged atmosphere of Connie's world"; in recent versions she has omitted this dedication equally existence dated, but it is office of the critical history of the story.20 Every bit she notes in the essay in this book, she first imagined ined Connie every bit both a realistic American teenager of her time and identify, and the doomed "maiden" of legend. Initially she saw the story as "an apologue of the fatal attractions of expiry. . . . An innocent immature girl . . . mistakes death for erotic romance of a particularly American/trashy sort." But as the story developed, she became more interested in its "moments of grace"—the "dramatic turn of action" at the terminate, "when the presumably doomed Connie makes a determination to accept her fate with dignity and to spare her family's involvement in this fate."21 "At the terminate of the story," she has commented, "Connie transcends her Connie-cocky—her merely local, teenage, American cocky. And so, confronted with decease, we are obliged to be equal to it. Or to try. To merely sexualize the story trivializes it."22
In the 1960s and 1970s, "Where Are You lot Going" was most frequently read past critics as an apologue of expert and evil, with Arnold Friend as a satanic figure. Many critics took the female parent'south point of view, condemning Connie's "trashy values," and boy-craziness, and blaming the debased boyish culture of her globe for her susceptibility to the fatal seduction. Critics analyzed the story's use of popular music, compared Arnold Friend to Bob Dylan and Ellie Oscar to Elvis Presley, and tried to decipher the numbers on Arnold'due south machine. They were shocked by the catastrophe of the story, but did not see Connie's yearnings equally meaningful or view her final act as courageous. Only very recently has Oates been discussed as a feminist author. Indeed, in 1970, a reviewer of The Wheel of Love insisted that the characters "have no connection with the motion for women's liberation."23 Feminist critics who wrote about Oates in the 1970s emphasized her negative images of women, rather than the feminist consciousness behind the work. Greg Johnson, a critic who is besides writing a biography of Oates, is amid those who accept the opposite view. He argues that "Where Are You Going?" is among the primeval of Oates's stories to show "explicitly feminist concerns." Indeed, co-ordinate to Johnson, the story is a "feminist apologue" in which Connie is "surrendering her democratic selfhood to male want and domination. Her characterization as a typical girl reaching sexual maturity suggests that her fate represents that suffered past most young women—unwillingly and in hole-and-corner terror—even in America in the 1960s." Overall, he concludes, "Where Are Yous Going?" is "a cautionary tale, suggesting that young women are actually 'going' exactly where their mothers and grandmothers accept already 'been'"—into sexual bondage at the easily of a male person "Friend."24
The bug of feminist allegory became more than evident in 1986, when "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" was made into a movie chosen Shine Talk, with a screenplay past Tom Cole and direction past Joyce Chopra, who had fabricated her reputation as a feminist director of documentary films including Girls at Twelve and Joyce at 34. Smooth Talk starred Laura Dern as Connie, Treat Williams as Arnold Friend, and Mary Kay Place equally Connie's mother, with songs by James Taylor. In a dark irony that strikes at the very middle of the story, the picture was shot in Petaluma, California, so imagined as a model of safe, small-town America, merely in 1993 the identify where twelve-year-former Polly Klass was abducted and murdered by a psychopath who broke into her firm. In adapting the story for the screen, Cole and Chopra fabricated a number of changes in the plot, developing the roles of Connie's girlfriends and family. Most important, they revised the ending, so that later on driving away with Arnold in his convertible, Connie returns to her home. She tells Arnold firmly that she does not desire to see him again, and then seems softened and reconciled to her family.
The success of the film sent reviewers dorsum to the story, and occasioned an intense debate over the feminist implications and contemporary relevance of both story and movie. To many critics, the story was shockingly anti-feminist in its mobilization of women's fears about sexuality. Writing in the picture journal Cinéaste, for example, Elayne Rapping described the story equally a Cinderella tale in reverse, where the "wicked stepmothers and ugly stepsisters become their revenge on the 'popular' one, the one who 'thinks she's so pretty.'" In Rapping'due south view, both film and story were "preoccupied with sexual danger and fear, with the menacing paradigm of men every bit ruthless, semi-deranged predators," and despite its ending, the film "resurrects a puritanical fear of female sexuality and the sometime adept girl/bad girl dichotomy which uses that fright to keep women sexually repressed and at war with each other."25
A major deviation betwixt the story and the movie was the intense caste of identification viewers, peculiarly women viewers, felt with Connie. Whether they were teenage girls or middle-aged mothers, ordinary filmgoers or experienced picture critics, women viewers had strong reactions to Connie's beliefs. Audiences used to Hollywood horror films most stalkers and slashers, and to everyday fears of sexual violence, were disturbed by Connie's recklessness, and frightened by her come across with Arnold Friend, and thus the film's effort to incorporate both the realistic and the symbolic elements of the story ran into serious difficulties. As Andrew Sarris pointed out, this could partly be explained by the difference in genres: "The tendency of readers of fiction is to identify with the sensibility of the author and to discern that sensibility through the transparency of the literary characters. Moviegoers place more with the corporeal identity of the actors and actresses on the screen, and associate their own destinies and fantasies with the idealized figures on the mobile and luminous canvass."26
Oates has ever fabricated clear that "Smooth Talk, with its different title, is an democratic piece of work."27 In an essay originally written for the New York Times and reprinted in this volume, she discussed her own reactions to the film, emphasizing the historical and generic differences betwixt her ending and the 1 chosen past Joyce Chopra. Whereas "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" "defines itself as allegorical in its conclusion," the flick makes Connie a "'typical' teen-anile anile girl" of today, whose "loss of virginity is bittersweet merely not necessarily tragic." The resonances of Oates's ending, with its allusions to "the vast sunlit reaches of the land" to which Connie is going, suggests an awakening that is "impossible to transfigure into flick."
The critical essays and reviews in this volume provide a cross-department of the near stimulating responses both to the story and the film. They represent different phases in the critical reception of Oates'southward piece of work, and in the interpretation of her psychological realism. No case book on Oates's fiction, however, can supply a total set up of answers to all the disturbing questions the story will enhance for a reader. Equally Oates has warned, "Every person dreams, and every dreamer is a kind of artist. The formal artist is ane who arranges his dreams into a shape that can be experienced by other people. In that location is no guarantee that art will be understood, not even past the artist; it is non meant to be understood but to exist experienced."28
The first two essays illuminate the differences between social and metaphorical interpretations of the story. Is information technology reality or dream? At one extreme, Marie Urbanski's essay describes the story as an "existential allegory," in which the author'due south realistic "trappings" should not obscure her allegorical pattern of "Lowest's transition from the illusion of complimentary will to the realization of externally determined fate." On the other side, in opposition to Urbanski and other critics who meet the story as a legend, Tom Quirk announces his discovery of Oates'southward source: the case of Charles Schmid. In his 1981 essay, he shows how many of the details of the story were indebted to details of news reports of the Pied Piper of Tucson, and insists that the people, events, and evil Oates portrayed in her story were all also real. In Quirk'south view, the story is non a timeless allegory of existential fate, but a specific critique of the "antique values" of the American Dream.
Even so, as Quirk also acknowledges, Oates is an artist rather than a journalist, and her fiction is an imaginative transformation of the bodily into something new and foreign. Thus other critics have emphasized the story'southward literary and mythic elements. In "The Stranger Within," Joan Winslow notes the parallels betwixt Oates and Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" as stories of sexual initiation and repression. Winslow focuses on the passage which describes the ii sides of Connie's personality, "ane for home and one for anywhere that was non abode," and sees Connie'due south encounter with Arnold Friend every bit a meeting with a devil figure who is really the demonic side of herself. In both Hawthorne and Oates, the story can be read as a dream and "as a psychological analysis of the emotional state which could create such a dream."
Joyce Due west. Wegs'due south essay focuses on Oates's use of the grotesque to show the terror and mystery backside everyday reality. In her reading, Connie's "grotesquely imitation values" derived from romance and pop culture substitute for a deeper morality or spirituality; and her family unit and society are equally devoid of religious content. Arnold Friend is a satanic figure, "the incarnation of Connie's unconscious erotic desires and dreams, only in uncontrollable nightmare course." Picking upward on suggestions by Winslow and Wegs, Larry Rubin argues that the Arnold Friend episode is actually Connie's dream, a quasi-rape fantasy that she falls into when she is alone at home drying her hair. In Rubin'due south view, Oates is portraying Connie'southward "compulsive sexual activity drive" every bit a subversive force which will ruin her non only physically merely likewise morally. For the "uninitiated female person," a "deep-rooted desire for ultimate sexual gratification" may be greatly dangerous.
In contrast to essays which see Connie'southward fate as the issue of her trashy teenage dreams or her dangerous sexuality and arraign the vapidity of her society for her false values, Gretchen Schulz and R.J.R. Rockwood locate the story in a tradition of cautionary narratives and folklore about women'due south identity and behavior, interpreting Connie'southward behavior from a psychoanalytic perspective. They direct our attention to motifs from the many fairy tales—the Pied Piper, Snowfall White, Cinderella, Sleeping Beauty, Rapunzel, Little Cerise Riding Hood, and the Three Little Pigs—woven into Oates's story. Following the work of Bruno Bettelheim, they debate that these fairy tales are symbolic maps of female person boyish disharmonize, and that Connie is a troubled adolescent struggling with "unresolved oedipal conflict, aggravated by sibling rivalry" and unable to integrate her unconscious and conscious desires. Schulz and Rockwood regard the encounter with Arnold Friend as both some other fairy tale and a case written report of Connie's lapse into psychosis, "a terrifying schizophrenic separation from reality, with prognosis for recovery extremely poor."
Christina Chiliad. Gillis acknowledges the importance of fairy tales, fantasies, and dreams in "Where Are You Going," but also stresses women's vulnerability to seduction and rape, both in the real world and in the traditions of fiction, where the interior spaces of the female body and of the habitation emphasize issues of threshold, invasion, privacy, and set on. Gillis places responsibility for the story's outcome on Arnold Friend, the invader who does not respect the spatial limits of Connie's globe and who finally uses threats against her family to strength her out. In Gillis's reading, Connie's age and gender, not her values or desires, make her a vulnerable victim.
The essays past B. Ruby Rich and Brenda O. Daly provide different viewpoints on the movie adaptation, Smooth Talk. Writing in The Village Voice, Rich protests the movie's seeming endorsement of a retrograde message: sex is dangerous for teenage girls. Connie is punished for her flirtatiousness, her sexuality, her sense of adventure: "She was request for it, wasn't she? Only looking for it, correct? We're back in the familiar terrain of Arraign the Victim Land." Only while Daly agrees that Chopra uses the camera and the soundtrack to "enforce a sexual/spatial system of inequalities," she also argues that the motion-picture show is non a typical Hollywood horror film which exploits female sexual vulnerability. In the picture show, Connie survives; the development of her consciousness, which was the subject of Oates'south story, is transformed into assertiveness and will. Her story is one of "joy in her awakening sexuality" and rebellion against the conventional morality of her mother and sister. While Oates's ending is metaphysical, involving self-knowledge in the face of darkness, Chopra'south ending is more than textile, involving Connie'south triumph over the invader. "The difference between Oates's Connie and Chopra's Connie," Daly concludes, "is but i instance of our cultural metamorphosis during the by 20-25 years."
For the fullest understanding of "Where Are You Going," 1 which takes Connie seriously, we demand to consider its place in a tradition of women'southward writing, besides as within the classic male person tradition virtually critics have examined every bit influences or parallels. The championship "Where Are You Going, Where Take Yous Been?" first strikes the states as the parent's nagging question to the kid. Nonetheless it is also a metaphysical question most Connie'due south life, and about the experience and destiny of women. Oates invokes both concrete detail and literary mythology to emphasize the double story of adolescent coming-of-age and female sexual vulnerability.
Ane important myth is the story of Demeter and Persephone, which has been paradigmatic for American women writers at to the lowest degree since the nineteenth century.29 In the classical version of the myth, as told in Ovid's Metamorphoses, the young Persephone is gathering flowers in a field when she is surprised by Hades, who carries her away in his chariot to the underworld. There she grows hungry and eats the seeds of a pomegranate. Because she has consumed the seeds, her mother Demeter cannot bring her back to earth, just must take the gods' proposal that Persephone should spend half the yr in the realm of the dead with Hades and only half on earth with her. As the story has been interpreted by American women writers, however, it becomes a parable of the woman artist'south rite of passage, her necessary separation from the female parent'south world of reproductive sexuality and nurturance to the dark underworld of passion, creativity, and independence.30 Every bit Oates has commented with regard to her novel American Appetites, the daughter "has to ascertain herself in terms of the female parent and she has to define herself in opposition to the mother, in order to have any identity. . . . Many daughters are close to [and] love their mothers enormously, but the beloved is so strong it has to be denied if they are to be ii people."31
The myth of Demeter and Persephone can likewise be described in Freudian terms, as the daughter's necessary individuation and transfer of zipper from the mother to the father. But this process is fraught with internal and external violence. As Marilyn Wesley has explained, the dangers of the transition are "frequently expressed in stories of imminent rape," as the daughter finds "not liberation from the female parent'south values, merely the overwhelming testify of her powerlessness within the patriarchal organization." Wesley has traced a three-stage process of the American daughter'southward individuation in Oates'due south fiction: Commencement, the necessity of differentiating a self separate from the mother; 2d, the consciousness of rape as a cultural condition that implies the victimization of the female; and 3rd, the attempt to counter the threat of violence through the discovery of forms of perception such as art, literature, or didactics that may balance order and vitality. She sees this design in "Where Are You Going," especially in the ending. Although Arnold Friend is a psychopath, his office in the story is also to force Connie into recognizing the limiting codes of the familly. He is a transgressive effigy "of limit and challenge" who appears in various guises throughout Oates's work.32
In "Where Are You Going," Connie is eager to separate from the dull domestic world of her mother and sister, but likewise plays out a charade of conflict with her female parent that masks an uneasy intimacy and identity. Connie fears that life is taking her to a moment in which she besides will exist scuffling around in sometime bedroom slippers with goose egg but photos to remind her of her adolescent flowering, nothing only a tired, silent husband to remind her of the sweet caresses of love. In the pre-feminist milieu of the story, sisterhood is no more powerful than motherhood. Bonds between women are weak and superficial. Connie and her sis June seem to have zero in common; Connie'due south girlfriends are scarcely important enough to be named. When they go out together, information technology is not to exist together but to escape from their parents and to find boys. In the world of the story, women cannot group together for common support, simply only gang up against a third, every bit Connie'south mother shows when she "complained over the telephone to one sister about the other, then the other called up and the two of them complained about the tertiary one."
Connie'south past and hereafter, the identify where she has been and where she is going, is symbolized by her mother'south torso and her mother's house. Her abduction from this claustrophobic globe at the easily of Arnold Friend is both terrifying and liberatory. "Where Are You Going" shares many characteristics of the fictional genre of the Female Gothic, a classic form of feminine narrative from the eighteenth century to the present, which deals with female person sexuality, motherhood, and creativity. In its original class, established by novels like Anne Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, a young heroine is kidnapped by masked bandits and taken to a haunted castle or ruined abbey, where she is threatened by an older, dark, powerful man, who may turn out to be her lover or her father. (Oates has commented in the essay on the film reprinted hither that she wished that she had "congenital upwards the father, suggesting, equally subtly as I could, an attraction there paralleling the attraction Connie feels for her seducer, Arnold Friend.") Often the heroine'south mother is too a prisoner in the castle or has died there and indeed the castle or enclosed space is some other symbol of the maternal body. In bravely confronting these spectral images in her family romance, the heroine comes to terms with her own identity and destiny.
The Gothic heroine is kidnapped in function because conventions of femininity make information technology otherwise virtually incommunicable for her to motility. Connie, likewise, is virtually immobilized by her sex and her age. At 15, she is too young to drive a car, but in whatever instance, in the story only boys and men seem to drive. If the girls want to become to the movies, they have to find a father to drive them; if they want sexual privacy with a boy, his machine provides it. Connie is ever at the mercy of men who will come up with a vehicle to accept her away, to take her somewhere else. Women have no agency, no vehicle, no wheels. It's not coincidental that Arnold Friend'south golden convertible is part of his magic.
Moreover, like Austen's Catherine Norland in Northanger Abbey, Connie's "trashy daydreams" are shaped by popular civilization, and she sees her piffling world through the rosy lens of romantic films. The drive-in restaurant is a "sacred building" and Connie does not imagine anything bigger or improve in the city. The shopping plaza and the moviehouse are enough for her; and boyish sex has been just "the way it was in movies and promised in songs." Merely whatever the promises of songs, the story gives Connie few real choices for the hereafter. She can exist a working grubber like her sis, or a housewife grubber like her female parent. Connie's father, the homo inside the house—information technology is, according to Arnold Friend, her "daddy'southward house"—likewise models a future. His role in Connie's fantasies and her existent life is negligible, though he plays a subtle part as a potential liberator and object of desire. Just a hazy eroticism, a combination of the sun, the music, and youth, gives Connie joy; simply in the Gothic tradition she inhabits, such tearing delights have violent ends.
Yet we demand to call up that allegories also have a history, and belong to historical moments. Oates's Connie both transcends the moment of her cosmos and belongs to it, but every bit Chopra's Connie reflects the assumptions and values of 1986. Returning to the story of teen-age girls in 1993, Oates wrote Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang, in which another group of girls in the late 1950s get concord of their ain car and fight back against the sexual violence of men. Although Connie's efforts to ascertain her own identity take her into a nightmare globe where sexual initiation and female desire have fatal consequences, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is a classic which confronts us unforgettably with the power and freedom of the imagination.
Notes
i. Joyce Carol Oates, "Afterword," Where Are You Going, Where Have Y'all Been? (Princeton: Ontario Review Press, 1993), 519, 521.
ii. Joyce Carol Oates, "Preface," Stories of Young America (Greenwich, Connecticut: Fawcett, 1974), x; "`Where Are Y'all Going, Where Have You Been?' and Smooth Talk: Short Story into Film," reprinted here.
three. Linda Kuehl, "An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates," Commonweal (December 5, 1969), in Lee Milazzo, ed., Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989), xiii.
four. Joyce Carol Oates, "Introduction," The All-time American Essays 1991 (New York: Ticknor & Fields, 1991), xiv.
5. Robert Phillips, "Joyce Carol Oates; The Art of Fiction LXXII," Paris Review (Fall 1978), in Conversations, 76.
6. Frank McLaughlin, "A Conversation with Joyce Carol Oates," from Writing! (September 1985), in Conversations, 123.
7. Quoted in Jay Parini, "My Writing is Full of Lives I Might Have Led," Boston World Magazine (August 2, 1987), 64.
viii. McLaughlin, "A Conversation," in Conversations, 125.
9. Walter Clemons, "Joyce Ballad Oates: Love and Violence," Newsweek (Dec 11, 1972), in Conversations, 33.
10. Interview with Elaine Showalter.
xi. Joyce Ballad Oates, "Why Is Your Writing Then Tearing?," The New York Times Book Review (March 25, 1981), 35.
12. Joyce Carol Oates, "(Woman) Writer: Theory and Practice," in (Adult female) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities (New York: Dutton, 1988), 27-28.
xiii. "Preface," Stories of Young America.
14. Joyce Carol Oates, "The Nature of Brusque Fiction; or, The Nature of My Short Fiction," in Frank A. Dickson and Sandra Smythe, Handbook of Short Story Writing (Writers Digest: Cincinnati), 14.
fifteen. Interview with Elaine Showalter.
16. See "Growing Upwards in Tucson," Time (March 11, 1966), 28.
17. "Afterword," Where Are You Going, 521.
xviii. Kuehl, "An Interview," in Conversations, 12, 13.
xix. "Interview with Joyce Ballad Oates," in John R. Knott, Jr., and Christopher R. Keaske, eds., Mirrors: An Introduction to Literature, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Canfield Press, 1975), 18-19.
20. Interview with Elaine Showalter.
21. "Afterword," Where Are Y'all Going, 522.
22. Interview with Elaine Showalter.
23. Charles L. Markmann, "The Terror of Love," Nation xiv (Dec 1970), 636.
24. Johnson, Understanding Joyce Carol Oates (Columbia: University of South Carolina Printing, 1987), 95, 103.
25. Elayne Rapping, "Smooth Talk," Cinéaste 15 (1986), 36-37.
26. Andrew Sarris, "Teenage Gothic," Village Phonation (March iv, 1986), 53.
27. Interview with Elaine Showalter.
28. Joyce Ballad Oates, "Fictions, Dreams, Revelations," in Scenes from American Life: Gimmicky Short Fiction (New York: Random House, 1973), vii-8.
29. Run across Josephine Donovan, Later on the Fall: The Demeter-Persephone Myth in Wharton, Cather, and Glasgow (University Park: Pennsylvania Country University Printing, 1989).
30. For an fantabulous business relationship of one writer's use of the myth, come across Candace Waid, Edith Wharton's Messages from the Underworld (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 1990.
31. "Joyce Ballad Oates" in Inter/View, ed. Mickey Pearlman and Katherine Usher Henderson (Lexington: The Academy Press of Kentucky, 1990), 44.
32. Marilyn C. Wesley, Refusal and Transgression in Joyce Carol Oates' Fiction (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Printing, 1993), 127-28, 44, 145-46.
Thanks to Madere Olivar and Wendy Chun for research assistance on this volume.
-East. Southward.
Elaine Showalter is Professor Emerita of English and Avalon Professor of the Humanities at Princeton Academy. She has written eleven books, most recently The Ceremonious Wars of Julia Ward Howe: A Biography (Simon & Schuster, 2016) and the literary historyA Jury of Her Peers; American Women Writers from Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx(Knopf, 2009), which was awarded the Truman Capote Prize for Literary Criticism.The Vintage Book of American Women Writers, an album to back-trail the book, was published in 2011. In 1994, she edited the casebook for "Where Are You Going, Where Have Y'all Been?" published by Rutgers University Printing; and in 2006, she wrote the introduction toThe Wonderland Quartet, 4 novels past Joyce Ballad Oates published together by the Modern Library.
Image: Proserpine by Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Randy Souther
I'm a Reference Librarian at the University of San Francisco's Gleeson Library, and I run the Joyce Carol Oates web site, Celestial Timepiece.
Source: https://celestialtimepiece.com/2016/10/09/introduction-where-are-you-going-where-have-you-been/