What Is the Connection Between Men and Women? (Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition)
At a glance:
- Author: Joyce Carol Oates
- First Published: 1970
- Type of Plot: Psychological
- Time of Work: The 1960's
- Setting: The United States
- Principal Characters: Sharon, Her husband, A man
- Genres: Psychological fiction, Short fiction
- Subjects: Sex or sexuality, Guilt, Women, Widows or widowers, Men, Neuroses
- Locales: United States
The Story
Joyce Carol Oates's story is an experimental rendering of guilt and sexual repression. Through an alternation between a series of questions (in italics) and answers (in roman), she exposes the rawness of a very vulnerable personality: a woman unable to understand her own desires and fears. The reader's burdensome task is to understand this neurosis, even if the central character never will. The rather curt, at times clinical, questions seem to come from a male universe; the irrational, at times utterly disjointed answers seem to emanate from the female narrator's...
[The entire page is 1399 words long]
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