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Family Matters : Joyce Oates 's Story About A Young Girl Being Stalked

Decent Essays

Kaylee Coughran
Professor Royster
Comp 2
7 October 2017
Family Matters
How much of an impact does family have on a person’s life? “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” Joyce Oates’s short story about a young girl being stalked, shows just how much of an influence families are on children. Connie was a fifteen-year-old girl living with her parents and sister in the 1960s. Connie started sneaking off as way to rebel from her less than perfect family and encountered the man who would later become her kidnapper. This story portrays the negative effects of a toxic family environment. It emphasizes how important your home life really is. In this narrative, the way fifteen-year-old Connie’s family treated her played a large part in her …show more content…

From the beginning, Oates paints an image of the mother that isn’t very pretty. She is shown to be condescending, hypocritical, and downright rude. Connie recalls her mother’s tendency to compare her to her older sister. Connie’s sister June, was by no means the definition of perfect. She still lives at home at the age of twenty-four and did mediocre work as a secretary. Even so, her mother deemed her to be someone Connie should strive to be like. Willing her youngest daughter to follow in the older one’s footsteps illustrated just how low the mother’s expectations for the both were. She didn’t dream of a better, more successful life for her daughters. Along with being compared to her sister, Connie was also bashed by her mother for her appearance. Demands to “stop gawking at yourself,” and “you think you’re so pretty?” (Oates 1033), contributed to her self-image issues. Often times, Connie felt that she would rather die than listen to her mother’s criticisms. By revealing this, Oates emphasizes just how detrimental a mother’s support is to a teenager. Receiving no positive assurance from her mother, Connie turned to others for validation. Her mother’s disproval of her was the main reason she felt the need to sneak out and meet boys. She changed her appearance and behavior when she went out, hoping to become a different person completely. Hanging out with the wrong crowd led her to run into Arnold, an older man who

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