Foxfire | Foxfire

At a glance:

Author: Joyce Carol Oates
First Published: 1993
Type of Work: Novel
Type of Plot: Psychological realism
Time of Work: 1952-1956
Setting: Hammond, a fictitious small city in upstate New York near Lake Ontario
Principal Characters: Madeleine Faith “Maddy” Wirtz, Margaret Ann “Legs” Sadovsky, Elizabeth “Rita” O’Hagan, Betty “Goldie” Siefried, Loretta “Lana” Maguire, Violet “Snow White” Kahn, Whitney Kellogg, Jr.
Genres: Long fiction, Psychological fiction, Social realism
Subjects: 1950’s, Girls, United States or Americans, Sexism, Teenagers, Crime or criminals, Prostitution or prostitutes, Alienation, Gangs, youth, Poverty or poor people, Rape, Violence, Feminism, Revenge, Sexual harassment, Kidnapping, Women’s rights, Typewriters
Locales: Hammond, NY, Lake Ontario

Form and Content

Joyce Carol Oates’s Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang is a novel about young women lost in the violent male-dominated 1950’s who band together to work out a revenge for what has happened to women before and since. Foxfire is thus a novel about crimes against women in the United States and about what happens to the young women who unite to fight the people and the systems that perpetuate those crimes.

The novel begins when sixteen-year-old “Legs” Sadovsky escapes from her grandmother’s house in Plattsburgh, New York—where the...

Foxfire | Foxfire

At a glance:

Form and Content

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