Q3 essay: Joyce Carol Oates feminist reading

UnJi Nam

Mrs. Elliott

AP English Literature

4 March 2009

Feminist Reading of Joyce Carol Oates

In Joyce Carol Oates’s short story, “Where are you going, where have you been?” Oates explores the effects of society’s expectations on the young, particularly on teenage girls. Through the main character Connie, Oates shows her readers the full effects of a society that emphasizes emotions, fleeting pleasurable experiences, and the tying in of romantic love as the fulfillment of adolescent dreams. Oates, by sketching Connie’s ultimate helplessness in the face of reality, shows her criticism of such standards. By use of imagery, Oates emphasizes the allure of the modern world with its promises of true love and hence excitement and social esteem for a girl. Details, however, also delve into the essential shallowness of such a world. Symbolism is used to shed light on the dangers of reality that exist hidden underneath the bright world of impressions and dreams that Connie buys into. Finally, with extensive dialogue throughout the story, Oates shows her audience the extent of Connie’s weakness in the face of male persistence, showing her ultimate lack of maturity in a society that has emphasized the need for girls like her “to be sweet and pretty and give in”. By all these techniques, the author delineates the need for change in a system that has made male attention and social popularity the driving goal for women. A system that emphasizes looks and attention above all is one that victimizes both the women who seek appearances, and the men who must adhere to them to win over women. In a sense, this short story is a rejection of romantic love and sexuality as marks of maturity and value for women: ideals that modern Western society has ingrained for decades.
Connie is sketched by Oates to be a typical teenage girl, who chafes under her mother’s authority and expectations, seeks romantic attention from older boys and in other times is carried away by materialistic hobbies such as shopping or daydreams. She encapsulates at heart the basic needs of the teenage youth to break away from tradition and blaze a new path in life, the childish dreams where anything is possible, and the needs to be accepted by society as a valuable member. However, society has channeled those desires into less wholesome and pure activities. Connie is taught that to be wanted by men and experience true love like the media portrays it is a mark of social value. Hence, being a physically attractive woman is essential for experience of such things—“She was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything.” When she dreams of better things, she dreams of romantic love to fulfill all her desires—“dreaming and dazed…her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how sweet it always was, not the way someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs” Ultimately, all of Connie’s energy and youth goes into getting male attention as the only mark of validation. It is this typical teenage girl’s self absorption and need for male validation that Oates sketches out, and in doing so, she criticizes the materialistic society that teaches girls so. A society that found that in order to sell their products more effectively, it was easier to groom girls to believe and search for dreams of love than how to respect their own selves irregardless of men and personal appearances. However, such values not only harm women and their self autonomy, but men as well. The reader can see the cracks in the disguise of Arnold Friend’s debonair persona “As if he was smiling from inside a mask. His whole face was a mask…tanned down onto his throat but then running out as if he had plastered makeup on his face but had forgotten about his throat” The details presented show a tragic tableau of a girl who blindly follows what society has deemed will make her happy, and a man who follows the ideals of female fantasy to get what he wants. Both characters are false to their public persona, and are made almost comical in how they take up disguises in order to seek self esteem. “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home, and one for anywhere that was not home” And in this desperate attempt for validation, things become twisted and dark—Arnold Friend’s barely disguised threats to Connie if she doesn’t fulfill his desires—“But if you don’t come out we’re gonna wait until your people come home and then they’re all going to get it”; Connie’s basic shallowness and immaturity such as abandoning her friend for a boy, contemptuous of the women in her family for not being pretty and exciting. Though never mentioned explicitly, Oates’s use of details paint a picture of tense individuals in a society that cannot supply them with a true ideal in life, whose attempts to stay within the boundaries set by society are tempered with frustration.
Symbolism is used to add depth to the story. Music has a particular place for Connie. It is the stuff of dreams, and hence often about love. “’My sweet little blue-eyed girl’” It is the sign of her self-absorption and childishness, giving importance and meaning to everything in her newly unfolding life, “it might have been the music…She drew her shoulders up and sucked in her breath with the pure pleasure of being alive.” For Connie, it is almost a religious, divine experience, and in many places, serves as her stand-in to religion. “The music was always in the background like music at a church service” or the fact that she chooses to listen to the radio program on Sunday rather than go to church. Music, among other things, promises her fulfilling, exciting things: grand opportunities and experiences just beyond the horizon. It is the symbol for her teenage youth, found at teenage haunts such as the drive-in restaurant, teenage items such as ostentatious gold cars, and hanging around Connie on a Sunday afternoon like perfume. At the end, when she leaves with Arnold Friend, the symbol has changed along with Connie. Arnold murmurs a line of music “My sweet little blue-eyed girl” and it no longer has the simple connotation of romance. Now music has become false to her, “a half sung sigh that had nothing to do with her brown eyes.” a shallow tool of the society that she is leaving behind as she leaves. This marks Connie’s maturity, as she realizes all her teenage dreams of love and attention proving false and insignificant. These dreams, used by Arnold Friend to manipulate her into leaving with him, are left behind for a wider world beyond feminine submission to romance and men as in the movies and promised in songs. Arnold Friend also takes on a symbol in literature of the dashing tempter of the world, dressed in black, driving a gold car, decked out in all the familiar things of an appearance-driven world. However, the male seducer in literature usually proves to be a scoundrel that ruins the purity of the heroine and leaves her in appropriate distress to be rescued by a hero who would whisk her back into the arms of society’s conventions. In Oates’s tale, Connie is empowered by her leaving with Arnold, taking on new knowledge of a world without the illusions of romantic love and exalted human experiences.
By dialogue, Oates brought home the extent of Connie’s innocence in the face of real danger, and also just how much she was just a typical teenage girl. She poses and preens for attention “craning her neck to glance and mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right.”, takes much of her actions from pop culture, including her slang and dreams. She does not initially react to Arnold Friend as a danger because he comes in a blaze of glory, recognizably brass as the men in the movies, and hip to teenage culture’s fads. “She recognized most things about him…that sleepy dreamy smile that all the boys used to get across ideas they didn’t want to put in words.” Her words and actions to Arnold at first are also studied and almost scripted, taken from a tradition of teen culture that demands the girl to be not too eager, cool, distant but ultimately still available. “She spoke sullenly, careful to show no interest or pleasure…Connie smirked and let her hair fall loose over one shoulder. She pretended to fidget, chasing flies away from the door.” As the story progresses, she gets more and more panicky, reacting to Arnold’s words in a more childlike way, instead of taking action to protect herself. “’Shut up! You’re crazy!’ Connie said. She backed away from the door. She put her hands against her ears as if she’d heard something terrible.” The reader develops sympathy for Connie, despite her shallowness and posing—she is depicted as the little girl she still is. And hence, the reader has to wonder at the end of the story how the current system of inculcating rosy dreams and ideals to girls is justified in existing. If it can’t protect Connie from Arnold, what good is it for her to trust in true love and the innate goodness of the universe?
Ultimately, Connie discovers the flimsiness of the world she was brought up in. That love can be used for a darker agenda by men instead of sweet ideas of protection and admiration. That the things of the world she loved such as music and boys can be used to violate her free will. Oates showed that Connie reaches maturity not by following the dictates of society which prescribes make-up, edgier fashions, edgier behaviors and boyfriends as marks of adulthood for women. Connie grows up by realizing that there is good and evil in the world, a basic part of the human condition. At the end of the tale, Oates is subtly advocating for the end of such traditions in society that ultimately delay maturity of women as they pursue surface things, and for a broader society that can include the widespread maturation of women as fellow human beings struggling in an uncertain world, instead of idealistic beings to be cosseted and protected. A society that Connie can enter into, with her newfound knowledge of life.