Feminist Literature

In their article entitled, “Introduction: Feminist Paradigms,” authors Julie Rivkin and Michael Ryan write:

For the women’s movement of the 1960s and early 1970s the subject of feminism was women’s experience under patriarchy, the long tradition of male rule in society which silenced women’s voices, distorted their lives, and treated their concerns as peripheral. To be a women under such conditions was in some respects not to exist at all (Rivkan & Ryan 765).

This paragraph was exciting, for my mind immediately went to Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Where are you going, Where have you been?” Oates presents these noted paradigms to the reader through her main character Connie, a fifteen year old girl, whose societal shaped influences lead to a terrifying “uncertain” conclusion. I find this example applicable to our feminist discussion, for it is through Connie’s point of view that Oates loudly cries for a return to traditional family values, and begs the question: Does un-involved parenting leave children vulnerable to the outside world? According to Oates, who is considered by many to be a feminist author, the answer is a resounding yes. Through Connie’s point of view, Oates sculpts a girl marked by sin, lack of parental guidance, and in the end a realization that culture should not be a substitute for family—using the youth as the tragic symbol of what can happen if families don’t bring their children up in a nurturing environment.

Rivkin and Ryan write, “. . . gender is made by culture in history” (766). In Oates’s story, society itself lays the mortar in shaping Connie’s identity. In their article entitled “In Fairyland, without a Map: Connie’s Exploration Inward in Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’”, author’s Gretchen Schulz and R. J. R. Rockwood make an interesting assertion to societies role in shaping our identity. The authors’ write:

This journey is an essential part of the adolescent’s search for personal identity, and though it is a quest that he must undertake by himself, traditionally it has been the responsibility of culture to help by providing symbolic maps of the territory through which he will travel, territory that lies on the other side of consciousness (528).
We note the maps, rules, or “language” adopted by women. The “language” of appearance laid out by culture in Connie’s “two selves” personality. Oates attacks this directly with, “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home” (510). When Connie is home she is a girl, but when she steps out into society, with its scrutinizing eyes, Connie must present herself as a woman.

Due to the lack of parental guidance, culture sits in the drivers’ seat—guiding Connie to false truths about her own identity. Music and impressing boy’s supplements church with, “They went up through the maze of parked and cruising cars to the bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant, their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed out of the night to give them what haven and what blessing they yearned for” (510). Oates is mocking the mid-sixties radical, free, and erotic culture—by paralleling its description to that of a large church.

In the end Joyce Carol Oates’s short story offers a perfect example of a females response to a male dominated society.

Work Cited
Rivkin, Julie and Michael Ryan, Eds. Literary Theory: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Malden: Blackwell, 2004.

Schulz, Gretchen and R. J. R. Rockwood. "In Fairyland, Without a Map: Connie's Exploration Inward in Joyce Carol Oates' 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been' " reprinted in Literature: Reading, Reacting, Writing. Fort Worth: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1991.