Author's Website

Joyce Carol Oates

     The link, http://www.usfca.edu/jco/, will bring you to the official website of Joyce Carol Oates. It is here where I found pictures of her ranging from early adulthood to much later in life. This was very interesting in itself because I was used to picturing a very old woman writing everything, when in fact she was young when she started her career in writing.
     The most intriguing thing on her website to me was under the "Biography" tab. The following written passage from Oates was found here:

Stories That Define Me

A drunken peasant in czarist Russia is beating his overburdened, dying horse, a mare, and the child Raskolnikov and his father happen upon the scene. Raskolnikov wants to save the horse, but his father pulls him away, saying, as fathers have so frequently—so necessarily—said: It's none of our business.

When I first read "Crime and Punishment" some time in my late teens, and came upon this image, it struck me as neither melodramatic nor lurid; nor was it, in its subtle configuration (child-witness, helpless "civilized" father, brutal "natural" peasant, female horse), anything other than a paradigmatic image, for me, of how the larger world—the world outside the home, the schoolroom, the library—is constituted. A melancholy vision, a "tragic" vision, but inevitable. Uplifting endings and resolutely cheery world views are appropriate to television commercials but insulting elsewhere. It is not only wicked to pretend otherwise, it is futile. If all a serious writer can hope to do is bear witness to such suffering, and to the experience of those lacking the means or the ability to express themselves, then he or she must bear witness, and not apologize for failing to entertain, or for "making nothing happen"—in Auden's derisory phrase.

—Joyce Carol Oates



     The most important part of this passage is when Oates says, "Uplifting endings and resolutely cheery world views are appropriate to television commercials but insulting elsewhere. It is not only wicked to pretend otherwise, it is futile." This outlook shows the reasoning behind Oates's harsh, realistic, and violent writing style. She uses the passage from "Crime and Punishment" as inspiration in her writing because so often that is what happens in real life. More often than not, people will stand by and watch something wrong happening instead of standing up and doing the right thing. Joyce Carol Oates portrays this reality in her writing instead of giving people false hope by writing with happy endings and demonstrating that most people in the world are good and will stand up for what is right, when in reality, as much as we would like to think that most people have other's best intentions in mind, that is not the case. This might give further insight and also be a reason why Oates is an atheist.

Online Video Featuring Oates

     In this video, Oates gives us the reasoning behind why she chose to dedicate her short story, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" to Bob Dylan. At the time she was writing this short story, Bob Dylan just came out with his song, It's All Over Now Baby Blue, and several other songs in the same album. Oates says, "That song and other songs were like fairy tales, or rather nursery rhymes that had gone wrong." She continues to expand on that thought by saying the gothic imagery in the song is very much like the imagery she uses in this story, so she decided to dedicate it to him. We talked about why she might have dedicated it to him in class, so I thought it would be a good idea to get the reasoning clarified.

Short Story #3: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

     I am not going to give an overview of this story because we have to read it for class anyway, but this short story of Joyce Carol Oates instead of focusing on violence, hints at it through Arnold Friend's threats to come into her house if she doesn't give in to what he wants. This story is sexually based, which is also a pattern that I have noticed throughout Oates's writing in "Will You Always Love Me," and her novel, Them. Her writing focuses a lot on rape, sexual innuendoes, and murder (both physical murder and emotional murder). In "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" the main character, Connie, is being emotionally murdered because she loses all sense of herself, who she is, and what she should do when Arnold tries to get her to come to his car. She has no adult there to protect her. 
     It is definitely interesting to discover certain patterns in Oates's writing, and discerning her short stories.