Violence in “Where Are You Going…” by Joyce Carol Oates

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One of J.K. Oates’s best-known works in the field of the small form is the short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? on which a feature film was made in 1986, after which a broad public discussion ensued. What is remarkable in this story is that in it, the writer turned to the study of psychological violence, not direct – physical violence. The conflict depicted in work grows out of a small sketch of the act of seduction by a young man – a mysterious stranger – Arnold Frand girl Connie, who was left alone at home while her parents and sister went to visit a relative.

The entire story is a dialogue between Arnold and Connie, which results in Connie’s agreement to go beyond the threshold of her parent’s house and go on a picnic with Arnold. Connie’s seduction occurs through a dialogue process in which Arnold demonstrates his male authority and Connie his female subordination. Many researchers view power as the ability to terrorize, to use self and power to induce fear. Acts of terror lie in a wide range, from rape to insult by action, to sexual abuse, to verbal abuse, to the threat of death, to the threat of pain (Sleiniute 7). This is precisely the kind of act of terror, of violence, that D.C. Oates portrays in the story. These phenomena of abuse, mental terror are viewed through the perspective of neurology. Personal traits of the characters play secondary role in this work. (Burn 11). The poles of the story told by the author are innocence and experience, beginning and end: the beginning of life after psychological destruction and the end of childhood, the end of parental protection, and the end of selfhood.

Connie and Arnold’s acquaintance begins with play and flirting and ends with Connie’s psychological repression. The writer shows how Connie’s romantic expectations are transformed into the cold and painful process of being seduced by Arnold. The seduction takes place not only on a verbal level but also through an intrusion into the personality and an immersion into the girl’s inner world. Defining the process of seduction by the term “psychological attack,” the researches saw the reasons for seduction as the desire of the subject to commit an act of internal repression of the object. D.C. Oates does not limit Arnold’s desire to the psychological framework. His words contain a direct threat of physical violence and a desire for physical possession (Moorthi 8029). The action of the story takes place in a limited space, which is determined by the content and meaning of the work: the heroine is at home, in the kitchen, and the hero is outside, near the car, on the street.

The kitchen is traditionally “feminine,” the car is traditionally “masculine,” and the writer identifies the characters through attributes that are socially prescribed for the female or male sex. By placing the characters in these very loci, D.K. Oates further emphasizes the existing binarity, showing that in this compressed physical world, the female, being private, becomes open and accessible to any male external interference. The nature of woman fails to be self-sufficient when it meets the men’s world (Banet-Weiser and Portwood-Stacer 887). Moreover, the internal (female) is unable to resist and therefore is forced to transform under the pressure of external (male) power.

Spatial constraints appear to be exceptionally significant for the realization of the idea of the work. The threshold of the kitchen assumes the function of the main boundary of the narrative, and it represents a certain line, an existential strip, crossing which the heroine leaves the world of home and family and enters the world of Arnold Frand, where she will be suppressed and psychologically destroyed. The title of the story unites in the past is “where you’ve been” and the future is “where you’re going”. In depicting Connie’s character as it develops, D.K. Oates asserts the idea that the future is directly dependent on the past. Just as time is divided into past and future, space is divided into two main areas: the world inside (home, family) and the world outside (the outside, Arnold’s world). The heroine lives in these two antagonistic worlds simultaneously, adapting to them, and even her clothes have this ability to adapt.

The inner world, the world of home in Connie’s perception is not static. It changes, becoming ” small,” “blurry,” and “not real,” depending on Connie’s position in accepting the outer world and denying the inner world (Oates 4). The outer world absorbs the inner world – Arnold’s world absorbs Connie’s world, and only the boundary situation, the situation of Arnold’s taking over Connie’s consciousness makes obvious the tragedy of this absorption.

Home is the world of daylight; domestic order and parental experiences evoke Connie’s negative desires and dreams: the death of her mother, the destruction of her sister, and her in-laws. The relations existing family in childhood have become a great negative psychological pattern (Gomez 5). Her entire home life is built through resistance and rejection of the existing order. Connie longs for independence, for freedom from her mother’s tutelage, for an outlet to the outside world, the nightly world of neon, music, young people, and new experiences. However, even in the outside world, Connie does not feel harmony and complete comfort.

Feeling somewhat confused about the outside world, Connie nevertheless adamantly refuses to go back to the daylight. This is why she is annoyed by the voice of her mother, who used to be quite beautiful, but, according to the character, her attractiveness is now gone, which means that she was now always behind Connie. Connie’s life is a life of romantic dreams and expectations. Inwardly, she is ready to break away from the past, “where she was,” and come to an imagined beautiful future. However, what happens to the heroine, not in her imagination but in reality, frightens her and shatters the entire ideal story of the relationship with the Other built in her mind. The Other, Arnold Friend, poses a real danger to Connie. And from this danger, Connie tries to escape within the confines of her home world.

Arnold seeks to penetrate Connie’s personal physical world – the space of her kitchen, the space of her world. It turns out that the girl is under Arnold’s total control: he knows her name, he knows that her father, her likely protection, will not return home soon and that the family is on a picnic. He imperiously tells Connie to go with him and his friend, who turns out to be a grown man with the face of a forty-year-old baby. Arnold not only possesses Connie’s mind but also seeks to possess her body.

Thus, in the story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, the concept of “violence,” acting as a plot device, is multidimensional: the story of the girl’s seduction is presented by D.K. Oates as a story of psychological and alleged physical violence. But despite the dramatic finale of the work, the idea inherent in it is constructive: it is impossible to realize oneself, to realize one’s desires through the acceptance of another’s experience, through dependence on the orientation to the Other. Oates, who opposes all forms of violence, explores this concept to the level of an author’s supra-objective, addressing it at all stages of her oeuvre.

Works Cited

Burn, Stephen J. “The Gender of the Neuronovel: Joyce Carol Oates and the Double Brain.” European Journal of American Studies, vol. 16, 2021, pp. 12-32.

Gomez, Esther. “Family Relationships in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 5, no. 2, 2020, pp 1-14.

Moorthi, R., and C. Govindaraj. “Stylistic Analysis in the Select Short Fictions of Joyce Carol Oates.” Think India Journal, vol. 22, no.14, 2019, pp. 8026-8030.

Banet-Weiser, Sarah and Laura Portwood-Stacer. “The Traffic in Feminism: An Introduction to the Commentary and Criticism on Popular Feminism.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 17, no. 5, 2018, pp. 884-888.

Sleiniute, Modesta. “The Representation of Different Kinds of Obsessive Behaviour in Eight Stories by Joyce Carol Oates.” Feminist Media Studies, vol. 3, no. 5, 2020, pp 1-14.

Oates, Joyce Carol. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?: Selected Early Stories. Reissue, Ontario Review Press, 1994.

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Violence in “Where Are You Going…” by Joyce Carol Oates

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