Oates, Joyce Carol (Vol. 108) | Introduction
Joyce Carol Oates 1938–
American novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic, essayist, nonfiction writer, and dramatist.
The following entry presents criticism on Oates's career through 1995. For further information on her life and works, see CLC, Volumes 1, 2, 3, 6, 9, 11, 15, 19, 33, and 52.
INTRODUCTION
One of the United States's most prolific and versatile contemporary writers, Oates has published, since the start of her award-winning literary career in 1963: more than twenty novels; hundreds of short stories in both collections and anthologies; nearly a dozen volumes of poetry; several books of nonfiction, literary criticism, and essays; and many theatrical dramas and screenplays. In the words of novelist John Barth, "she writes all over the aesthetical map." Writing in a dense, elliptical, almost neutral style that ranges from realistic to naturalistic to surrealistic, Oates concentrates on the spiritual, sexual, and intellectual malaise of modern American culture in her fiction, exposing darker aspects of the human condition. Her tragic and violent plots abound with incidents of rape, incest, murder, mutilation, child abuse, and suicide, and her protagonists often suffer as a result of the conditions of their social milieu or their emotional weaknesses. Although her works in other genres address similar issues, most critics concur that her short fiction best conveys the urgency and emotional power of her principal themes. Assessing her own fiction, Oates remarked, "I do not think my work is grim. It is more of a real picture, grim for some people, triumphant for others. The drama of our lives."
Biographical Information
Born June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York, the daughter of a tool-and-die designer and homemaker, Oates was raised on her grandparents's farm in Erie Country—later represented in much of her fiction as Eden County. A bookish, serious child, she first submitted a novel to a publisher at the age of fifteen. Oates attended Syracuse University on a scholarship and graduated Phi Beta Kappa in 1960; the following year she earned a master's degree at the University of Wisconsin and married Raymond Smith, a former English professor. From 1962 to 1968 the couple lived in Detroit, where Oates taught at the University of Detroit and published her first novels, short story collections, and poetry. She also witnessed the 1967 race riots, which inspired her National Book Award-winning novel them (1969). Shortly thereafter, Oates
Major Works
With Shuddering Fall (1964), Oates's first novel, foreshadows her preoccupation with violence and darkness, describing a destructive romance between a teenage girl and a thirty-year-old stock car driver that ends with his death by accident. Oates's best known and critically acclaimed early novels form an informal trilogy exploring three distinct segments of American society: A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) chronicles the life of a migrant worker's daughter in rural Eden County; Expensive People (1967) exposes the superficial world of suburbia; and them presents the violent, degrading milieu of an inner-city Detroit family. Oates's novels of the 1970s explore American people and cultural institutions, combining social analysis with vivid psychological portraits of frustrated characters ranging from a brilliant surgeon (Wonderland, 1971), a young attorney (Do with Me What You Will, 1973), and the widow of a murdered conservative politician (The Assassins, 1975), to religious zealots (Son of the Morning, 1978) and distinguished visiting poets and feminist scholars (Unholy Loves, 1979). Her short stories of this period, most notably in Marriages and Infidelities, (1972), and Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, (1974), considered by many to be her best work, concern themes of violence and abuse between the sexes. "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been," for instance, tells of the sexual awakening of a romantic girl by a mysterious man, Alfred Friend; this story is considered a masterpiece of the modern short form and was adapted for film. Her novels of the early 1980s—Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984)—exploit the conventions of nineteenth-century Gothic literature as they examine such sensitive issues as crimes against women, children, and the poor, and the influence of family history on shaping destiny; likewise, many of her short stories rely on gothic elements (Haunted, 1994; First Love, 1996). Most of Oates's fiction of the 1980s features more explicit violence than does her earlier fiction, which tends more toward psychological afflictions but psychological obsessions nevertheless persist. In Marya (1986), for example, a successful academic searches for her alcoholic mother who had abused her as a child, and in You Must Remember This (1987), a former boxer commits incest with his niece during the McCarthyist 1950s. Oates's works of the 1990s continue to address relations between violence and such cultural realities of American society as racism (Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, 1990), affluence (American Appetites, 1989), alienation (I Lock the Door upon Myself, 1990), poverty (The Rise of Life on Earth, 1991), classism (Heat, 1992), sexual-political power dynamics (Black Water, 1992), feminism (Foxfire, 1993), success (What I Lived For, 1994), serial killers (Zombie, 1995), and familial implosion (We Were the Mulvaneys, 1996). The series of mysteries published under the pseudonym of Rosamond Smith—Lives of the Twins (1988), Soul/Mate (1989), Nemesis (1990), Snake Eyes (1992), and You Can't Catch Me (1995)—concern the psychopathic exploits of aberrational academics.
Critical Reception
Critics hold diverse opinions about Oates's work, particularly about her repeated use of graphic violence, which some have called a "distorted" vision of American life. Eva Manske has summarized the general view: "Some of her novels and stories are rather shrill in depicting the human situation, remain melodramatic renderings of everyday life, highly charged with unrelenting scenes of shocking, random violence, or madness and emotional distress that Oates chronicles as dominant elements of experience in the lives of her characters." Many other scholars, however, have identified the naturalistic influence of American writers, William Faulkner, Theodore Dreiser, and James T. Farrell, to justify the violence of her narratives. Despite the general disregard of Oates as a feminist writer, a number have defended the feminist sensibility underlying much of her fiction; "her works actively challenge restrictive gender ideology," according to Marilyn C. Wesley. Janis P. Stout found that "by compelling the reader to experience the inadequacies and injustices of the past through a technique of heightened realism, [Oates] does become a voice of feminist awareness." Although some critics have dismissed her gothic fiction as whimsical, others have suggested that it invigorates the gothic literary tradition, particularly feminist critics who often have likened Oates's ghosts to the cultural status of "invisible woman," as Cara Chell has pointed out. Scholars also have observed the symbolic value of "place" in Oates's fiction, both literally and figuratively. Margaret Rozga has shown how the Midwestern settings of Oates's fiction "can be places of refuge or places of terror"; on the other hand, Sally Robinson has contended that her "voyeuristic technique has risks, for it can place the writer (and the reader) in a comfortable position above those whose sad lives seem to compel Oates's attention." Ironically, Oates's prolificity often has aroused more suspicion than praise; her response: "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."
Navigate
