Fiction Analysis Paper: Where are you going, where have you been?
Joyce Carol Oates’s Where are you going, where have you been? is a post-modernist story. The primary theme is childhood versus adulthood. The story explores Connie’s, the main character’s, ambivalence about adulthood.
The plot of the story builds the theme. Throughout the story, Connie believes that she is playing 2 personas. One that is child-like, and innocent, and another that is lascivious and “adult-like” to the extent that she knows adultness. In the beginning, she is undoubtedly convinced that she wants adulthood; however, she doesn’t understand all the implications, and she becomes ambivalent when faced with the reality of adulthood, personified by the character
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It’s safe to say that Connie’s conception of adulthood also includes a notion of “independence,” separate from her family, but accompanied by a male admirer. June’s personality and interests foil with Connie’s and their mother’s constant comparisons cause Connie to resent June, and because June lives with them, this also likely attests to her desire for pseudo-adulthood. Her father is completely uninvolved, and because Connie specifically lacks the love of and closeness with her father, the pseudo-Freudian approach suggests that this could have a direct influence on her quest for pseudo-adulthood, which I defined as consisting of male attention, and her conception of independence. Now straying from her family, I’ll explain Eddie’s significance to the theme. Eddie gives the reader better insight into Connie’s character. The time Connie spends with Eddie in the alley shows the reader that her understanding of adulthood is lacking, and that she is just teetering around the line between childhood and adulthood, but keeping one foot neatly planted on childhood’s side. This becomes more obvious later in the story, once she encounters Arnold Fiend. Those 3 hours had to have been spent engaging in what was considered “adult-like,” but not quite adult. A lot couldn’t have happened, and the 2
Arnold Friend’s layers of deception. Connie’s blindness is the pretext of her loss of innocence
She tries to relate to sex through popular music that romanticizes relationships and life. The short reveals how it affects Connie when she is listening to a popular radio station, “…bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself and lay languidly about the airless little room” (Oates 424). Additionally, Connie felt her date with Eddie was similar to “the way it was in movies and promised in songs”(Oates 424). She felt she was living the dream and was beginning to relate to this sexualized, romantic media. In Marie Mitchell and Olesen Urbanski’s literary review of the story, they state “the recurring music then, while ostensibly innocuous realistic detail, is in fact, the vehicle of Connie's seduction and because of its intangibility, not immediately recognizable as such” (1). However, Arnold Friend was quick to remind her of her young age and innocence at the end of the story.
Another relationship that transformed Connie is the relationship she has with her father. Though Connie’s father is rarely mentioned in the story, he
In spite of the way that Connie tries to show the nearness of being a created woman who has learned about men, her involvement with Arnold reveals this is only an execution. She has made an engaging grown-up personality through her dress, hairstyle, and general direct and gets the thought she hopes for from young fellows. Regardless, Connie dumbfounds her ability to summon thought from young fellows with her longing to truly have
Adding on to that, Connie’s shortfall that rock music has molded her has come to light when Arnold Friend gives sexual advances to her. Joyce Carol Oates shows this by writing, “It was the same program that was playing inside the house. “Bobby King?” she said. “I listen to him all the time. I think he’s great.” “He’s kind of great,” Connie said reluctantly.” “Listen, that guy’s great. He knows where the action is.” (p.3-para.2). This shows how Connie feels shocked that Arnold was also listening to the same music as she was when she was inside the house last time. Since she was incompetent in realizing how teenagers interpret the music than adult figures, Connie is vulnerable when Arnold threatens her to come to him because of the rock music that is being allotted to teenagers. To sum it up, the sexual song lyrics and the image of rock music that is normally played and embraced in the American culture has influenced Connie, a teenager, physically and mentally; therefore, she is taken advantage of by Arnold because of her immaturity and youth.
Joan Carol Oates states, “But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July” (Oates 483). Connie was not attracted to one particular guy; however, she was enticed by certain qualities that she would like in a guy. She wants a guy who will treat her like the singers of the music she listens to: a misunderstood man with a kind heart who will treat a girl like a princess. Tracy Caldwell’s essay explains “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” through various forms including: religious, historic, and scientific views. She connects music and sexual desire in the story by stating, “Connie's very life seems dependant upon the music she hears that serves as a drug to both exhilarate her and drive her dangerously into fantasy…” (Caldwell, “Joyce Carol Oates”). Connie’s love for rock music has pushed her to be attracted to a rebellious guy. She refuses to believe that the song is full of exaggerations within the lyrics. It incorporates the singer’s hopes and
Joyce Carol Oates intrigues readers in her fictional piece “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by examining the life of a fifteen year old girl. She is beautiful, and her name is Connie. Oates lets the reader know that “everything about her [Connie] had two sides to it, one for home, and one for anywhere but home (27). When Connie goes out, she acts and dresses more mature than she probably should. However, when she is at home, she spends the majority of her time absorbed with daydreams “about the boys she met”(28). This daydreaming behavior is observable to the reader throughout the story. From theories about dreams, theories about
Connie’s identity is shown at the end of the story, but who she was at the beginning of the story differs to who she became at the end of the story. To start, Connie was a fifteen year old girl who was beautiful and adventuress, but failed to acknowledge and grasp the idea of a real family. Connie’s family or her mother is not the exact loving and caring mother some people have experienced. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”, Connie sated “Her mother, who noticed everything and knew everything and who hadn 't
The house being like cardboard can represent two things: Connie’s relationship to her parents, and innocence. Connie’s relationships with her family and tradition are too weak to save her. Due to her longings for independence, Connie appears to reject traditional roles of women and her mother and sister for following these roles. In the end, Arnold came to take her from these traditional roles and to break her connections with her family. The second representation is that Connie desires to be a woman and she experiments with sexuality. However, her experiments always bring her back to the safety of her family and home. However, Arnold started to talk with her using perverse and suggestive language. This leads to her to a hopeless state, where in the end
In the story the ending concludes that Connie gets into the car with Arnold Friend and drives off with him in his golden vehicle, an “open jalopy, painted a bright gold,” (Oates, para. 15) without any explanation of what occurs after the ride, leaving the reader in the dark about what had occurred “on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.” (Oates, para. 162) In the movie Smooth Talk the Connie is taken from her house by Arnold Friend and driven to an unknown field where something occurs with slight faint screams in the distance while the camera is focused on the golden vehicle. She is then driven back to her home, where apparently some time has passed, and is reunited with her family with a “new outlook” on life. The house is different and even Connie’s room is changed, creating an effect that Connie has passed on and her spirit returned to mend broken ties with her family. The cliffhanger that Oates leaves and the insight that Chopra allocates are significantly
From the songs and movies, she sings that boys around will act with her as the boys from the lyrics and motion picture. Connie, in fact, behaves with the opposite sex similarly. Finally, it can be said that all her behavior manifestations are such questionable because of the challenging transition from girlhood to womanhood experiencing by her. Until the end of the storyline, her role remains uncertain yet she managed to play numerous of them: from daughter and sister to friend and eventually an object of sexual desire. Apparently, Connie herself remained unsure of the role she represented in her ordinary
Connie’s parents, who choose to isolate themselves from their daughter, tremendously impact Connie's development. Throughout Connie’s journey she is often isolated. A large part of this is due to Connie's relationship with her mother. Whenever Connie
During the conversation between Connie and Arnold Friend, she experiences a dramatic moment so intense that it cannot be avoided or ignored. Her attempt was creating a sexy appearance and fascinating the boys in the local diner delivers as her experiment to analyze new fields as well as a new side of herself. However, until Arnold comes into the story, her expeditions have always been closed into security. She may go into an dark alley with a boy for a short period, but no matter what happens there,
Both the movie and the story emphasize the dramatic separation of understanding between Connie and her mother. The apparent lack of depth in Connie and her father’s relationship dims in comparison to the almost-tangible hatred Connie seems to feel toward her mother, her mother “who had been pretty once too, but now her looks were gone, and that was why she was always after Connie” (Oates 148). Despite the anger she feels, however, it is her mother that Connie cries out to for help in both versions as she sees herself forced to give into Friend’s wishes in an attempt to spare her family the evil he hints will come
A short story by Joyce Carol Oates called “Where are you going, where have you been?” reflects the writer’s point of view of the way society looked to women in the sixties. The story takes place in the 1960’s when almost everything reached a turning point at that time. It talks about a teenager who wanted boys’ attention, but she ended up leaving her family house with a stranger. Connie represented most teenage girls, and their destiny at that time. The story can be looked at from many different points of view such as feminist, social, psychological and historical (Purdue (OWL)). The time this story had taken place is what makes it important. The story was written when the feminist movement was established, and the American society