Introduction to Literature

Lesson Ten: Oates Teenagers

Margarette Connor

Joyce Carol Oates

(b. 1938)  “Unyielding in her attempts to chronicle how violence and tragedy can corrupt women and those around them. It's a recurring theme in Oates's work, but certainly not the only one. In her varied writing, which ranges from fiction to plays to nonfiction, Oates is exposing the darker side of America's brightest facades.”

Chronicler of society

 "I am a chronicler of the American experience," Oates says. "We have been historically a nation prone to violence, and it would be unreal to ignore this fact. What intrigues me is the response to violence: its aftermath in the private lives of women and children in particular."

Prolific writer

 Over 70 books.  She also writes plays, essays, and book reviews, edits anthologies and

Ontario Review,

– she and her husband, Raymond Smith, founded in 1974.

Quantity over quality?

 "Some criticism is plainly envious; Oates herself has noted that 'perhaps critics (mainly male) who charged me with writing too much are secretly afraid that someone will accuse them of having done too little with their lives.'" – Elaine Showalter, critic, colleague and friend

Honors:

         National Book 1970 Bobst Award for Lifetime Achievement in Fiction, 1990 Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1993 and 1995 The PEN/ Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction O'Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the Short Story 14 O. Henry Awards 16 stories selected for the annual Best American Short Stories anthologies 6 Pushcart Prizes member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, 1978

And…

 Twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for Literature

Parents

 Born 1938, in Lockport, New York  Parents Frederic and Caroline Oates.

 She attended grammar school in a one-room schoolhouse.

University

 Graduated from Syracuse University as valedictorian.  While a student there, she won the coveted Mademoiselle fiction contest, just like Sylvia Plath.

 Received an MA in English from the University of Wisconsin, 1961.

Marriage and Detroit

   She married Raymond J. Smith in 1962 and settled in Detroit, Michigan.

Started teaching college in Detroit.

From 1968-78, she taught at the University of Windsor in Canada, just across the border from Detroit.

Oates, Smith and her parents

Princeton

 Since 1978, Oates and Smith have lived in Princeton, New Jersey  She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University.

Publishing

 Published her first book, a collection of short stories called By the North Gate, when she was 25.

 Since then she has published two to three books a year!

“ Where are you going, Where have you been?”  The “story encompasses many of Oates’s themes: the romantic longings and limited options of adolescent women; the tensions between mothers and daughters; the sexual victimization of women; and the American obsession with violence.” – Elaine Showalter

Story into film

 Smooth Talk starring Laura Dern and Treat Williams.  Won the Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival, 1986 Laura Dern as Connie

Based on a real incident  Some questions we should ask first:  What importance should be given to the background material?

 Does the story benefit from outside material or should it rather be discussed "as is", as a self-contained text?  Does there exist something like a self contained text anyway?

The Pied Piper of Tuscon

 Name was Charles Schmid.

 In 1964 he brutally murdered three girls.

His description

 “he stood five feet, four inches tall, but added three more inches by padding his stack-heeled cowboy boots with rags and tin cans. He also dyed his reddish-brown hair black, used pancake make-up, whitened his lips, and applied a fake mole to his left cheek—a ‘beauty’ mark.”

Oates on Schmid

 She writes about Schmid and the influence of his story in an article originally published in the New York Times, March 23, 1986  I’m going to quote at length, because I think it’s important.

Schmid quote pt one

 “Some years ago in the American Southwest there surfaced a tabloid psychopath known as "The Pied Piper of Tucson." I have forgotten his name, but his specialty was the seduction and occasional murder of teen-aged girls.

Schmid quote pt two

 “He may or may not have had actual accomplices, but his bizarre activities were known among a circle of teenagers in the Tucson area, for some reason they kept his secret, deliberately did not inform parents or police. It was this fact, not the fact of the mass murderer himself, that struck me at the time. And this was a pre-Manson time, early or mid-1960s.

Schmid quote pt three

 “The Pied Piper mimicked teenagers in talk, dress, and behavior, but he was not a teenager—he was a man in his early thirties. Rather short, he stuffed rags in his leather boots to give himself height. (And sometimes walked unsteadily as a consequence: did none among his admiring constituency notice?)

Schmid quote pt four

 “He charmed his victims as charismatic psychopaths have always charmed their victims, to the bewilderment of others who fancy themselves free of all lunatic attractions. The Pied Piper of Tucson: a trashy dream, a tabloid archetype, sheer artifice, comedy, cartoon—surrounded, however improbably, and finally tragically, by real people. You think that, if you look twice, he won't be there. But there he is.

Schmid quote pt five

 “I don't remember any longer where I first read about this Pied Piper—very likely in Life Magazine. I do recall deliberately not reading the full article because I didn't want to be distracted by too much detail. It was not after all the mass murderer himself who intrigued me, but the disturbing fact that a number of teenagers—from ‘good’ families—aided and abetted his crimes.

Schmid quote END

 “This is the sort of thing authorities and responsible citizens invariably call ‘inexplicable’ because they can't find explanations for it. They would not have fallen under this maniac's spell, after all.”

Oates on Arnold Friend

 "Arnold Friend is a fantastic figure: he is Death, he is Imagination, he is a Dream, he is a Lover, a Demon, and all that."

Arnold

 Connie has two sides. Arnold plays her two sides to manipulate Connie.

 Broken glass  dangerous.

 Everything about Arnold is fake.

 Paragraph 72  Arnold is a very dangerous guy.

 He is taking over Connie’s life

Connie

 Connie has two sides mentioned in paragraph 5.

 Home v.s. everywhere not at home  At the end, Connie decides to die in order to protect her fmaily.

Oates on Connie

 “ Connie is shallow, vain, silly, hopeful, doomed—but capable nonetheless of an unexpected gesture of heroism at the story's end. Her smooth-talking seducer, who cannot lie, promises her that her family will be unharmed if she gives herself to him; and so she does. The story ends abruptly at the point of her ‘crossing over.’ We don't know the nature of her sacrifice, only that she is generous enough to make it.”

And again

 “ My story had an ending one might call tragic, since the heroine surrenders to death. She in a sense is transcending her mortal self; she arises above her particularity and she's going to ascend to death. She looks out from the screen door, and she sees the organic world, which is the world from which we come, and we're composed of, and she's going to go to that world and she's going to die. A man has come for her, a rapist, and he's going to kill her.”

 Arnold creates a illusion for Connie that he’s a protector.

 He constructs him as Connie’s only hope

Imagery in the story

 Music -regulate Connie’s mood -sth makes Connie to go to somewhere  Religion -the hamburger restaurant -work with music together

Imagery in the story

 Death - Connie wishes her mother to be dead; and herself suffers death  Sexuality - Connie’s proud of that she can attract boys, but she’s nervous, too.

Imagery in the story

 Dreams/Reality - Connie is going back and forth from reality in the story.

- dreams become scary - through dreams, she still has to face the reality

A close look at the story~

 Her name was Connie. It’s past tense already, like a police report.

 Paragraph 8: sad picture.

 Connie and her mother are sometimes like friends, but she still suffer from a hard time with her mother since she’s a teenager.

 The music is really getting into Connie.

 Connie is isolated  a predicted danger.