Oates, Joyce Carol (1938 -) - Introduction
Introduction
(Also wrote under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith) American novelist, short story writer, essayist, critic, playwright, author of children's books, nonfiction writer, and poet.
Considered one of the most prolific and versatile contemporary American 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. Writing in a dense, elliptical style that ranges from realistic and naturalistic to surrealistic, Oates concentrates on the spiritual, sexual, and intellectual malaise of modern American culture in her fiction, exposing the dark aspects of the human condition. Her tragic and violent plots abound with depictions 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. Among the dominant motifs in Oates's collected fiction is her evocation of a profoundly
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Born June 16, 1938, in Lockport, New York, the daughter of a tool-and-die designer and a homemaker, Oates was raised on her grandparents' farm in Erie County—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 accepted a teaching position at the University of Windsor, Ontario, staying until 1978, when she was named a writer-in-residence at Princeton University; she joined the faculty there as a professor in 1987. Despite the responsibilities of an academic career, Oates has actively pursued writing, publishing an average of two books a year in various genres since the publication of her first book, the short story collection By the North Gate (1963). Her early novels consistently earned nominations for the National Book Award, while her short fiction won several individual O. Henry Awards and the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement in both 1971 and 1986. A poet of some merit, and a regular contributor of essays and stories to scholarly journals, periodicals, and anthologies, Oates also is a respected literary critic whose work presents logical, sensitive analyses of a variety of topics. During the 1990s Oates gained additional recognition as a playwright for authoring many plays produced off-Broadway and at regional theaters, including The Perfectionist (1993), which was nominated by the American Theatre Critics Association for best new play in 1994. In subsequent years, Oates has continued her prolific output of novels, short stories, dramas, and criticism.
MAJOR WORKS
With her first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), Oates 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 innercity 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," among these, 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. Two additional collections of short fiction from this period, The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975) and Night Side, reflect Oates's developing interest in Gothic themes. Set in the late nineteenth century, the title piece of the latter collection takes the form of a Victorian ghost story and features a clash between the skeptical materialism of its narrator and the inexplicable qualities of the spirit.
During the early 1980s, Oates published several novels that 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 in shaping destiny. Bellefleur follows the prescribed formula of a Gothic multigenerational saga by depicting supernatural occurrences while tracing the lineage of an exploitative American family. A Bloodsmoor Romance displays such elements of Gothic romance as mysterious kidnappings and psychic phenomena as it details the lives of five maiden sisters in rural Pennsylvania during the late 1880s. In Mysteries of Winterthurn Oates explores the conventions of the nineteenth-century mystery novel. The protagonist of this work, Xavier Kilgarvan, is a brilliant young detective who models his career after that of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's fictional sleuth, Sherlock Holmes. In the episodes that make up the novel, Kilgarvan investigates bizarre cases of murder and incest shrouded in supernatural mystery. Like these lengthier works, many of her subsequent shorter fiction, such as the stories of Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, also rely on elements of Gothic horror, in many cases drawing inspiration from the writings of Edgar Allan Poe and Henry James. Other short stories by Oates, including "Demons" and "Family," probe the terrifying details of alienated and homicidal families.
Most of Oates's remaining fiction of the 1980s features more explicit violence than does her earlier fiction, which tends toward the depiction of psychological afflictions and obsessions. In Marya (1986) 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 dur-ing the McCarthyist 1950s. Oates's subsequent works 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), incest (First Love: A Gothic Tale, 1996), and familial implosion (We Were the Mulvaneys, 1996). In My Heart Laid Bare (1998) Oates returns to the Gothic family saga structure of Bellefleur, recounting the decline of an American family over two centuries in a story deeply concerned with the ongoing history of racial tensions in the United States. Additionally, Oates's 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 and are noted for their use of Gothic motifs.
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 (see Further Reading) 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." Considering the often extreme content of her work, the mention of Oates's writing in conjunction with Gothic conventions has become a commonplace among contemporary critics. Several of her early novels, including realistic works such as With Shuddering Fall and Wonderland have been regarded for their grotesque depictions of both physical and psychological violence, and studied within Gothic literary contexts. Oates herself has suggested that Gothic concerns with the bizarre dimensions of human experience and extremes of brutality and psychological duress are essential components of contemporary life. She has also remarked that the term itself (when left uncapitalized) merely signifies "a work in which extremes of emotion are unleashed." According to this definition, Oates's entire oeuvre could be considered in terms of its generically "gothic" qualities. In particular, Oates's use and adaptation of the supernatural and psychological themes formally associated with the Gothic literary tradition have been most frequently discussed in conjunction with her novels Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance, and Mysteries of Winterthurn. These works draw heavily upon the preternatural atmosphere of dread and a collection of tropes and conventions evoked in the nineteenth-century Gothic novel. Other works discussed in Gothic contexts include the short story collection Night Side, which Greg Johnson has studied in terms of the link between the psychological and the unseen spiritual realm these stories draw upon in rendering the dark and inscrutable mysteries of the human psyche. Additionally, her novels penned under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith have been said to prominently feature the Gothic trope of the doppelgänger, or double, while her stories and novels set in Eden County are thought to strongly echo the "Southern Gothic" atmosphere found in the novels of William Faulkner and thus likewise explore a haunting landscape crafted in a peculiarly American idiom. While some critics have dismissed her Gothic fiction as whimsical, others have suggested that it invigorates this literary tradition, particularly feminist critics who often have likened Oates's ghosts to the cultural status of "invisible woman," as Cara Chell (see Further Reading) has pointed out. Overall, critical consensus has tended to characterize much of Oates's work as a powerful reinterpretation of a centuries-old literary tradition, one that adapts the Gothic sensibility into a contemporary mode by plunging readers into the often terrifying and hidden emotional recesses of modern American society.
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