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Joyce Carol Oates

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Joyce Carol Oates Long Fiction Analysis

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There have been few writers to match Joyce Carol Oates for sheer numbers—her novels, plays, short stories, and poems appear to multiply by themselves on library shelves. Even though the curse of quantity is normally mediocrity, Oates consistently supplies a product of the highest quality, dense with meaning and filled with beautiful words and full-blown characters.

Oates’s poor, unimaginative characters typically ply their swords through a fogged-in existence inflicted on them by a fatalistic creator. They cannot escape from the miasma they must breathe, and so they are poisoned by it, confused by muddled thoughts in an unkind world. The characters finally become enraged by their situation and so do bloody battle to extricate themselves from it. Sometimes as a result they resign themselves to the human condition of conflict; at other times, they experience a tragic lack of resolution.

With Shuddering Fall

In her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, Oates introduces a theme that has pervaded almost all the rest of her fiction works: the awful responsibility of freedom. Her characters struggle to divest themselves of their little lives in order to achieve personal freedom, but they are unable to cope with the consequences of their release from their former lives. They learn that they have abandoned not only their pasts but also their identities. Then they must struggle either to reclaim their selves or to forge new ones.

With Shuddering Fall is one character’s reconciliation with her life, and this treaty gains for her a new appreciation of her history and that of her family. Karen must endure a sort of familiar ritual under the hands of her father, Hert, and her lover, Shar. At first Karen rejects her father’s values. He is a legendary figure who wields great power and enjoys a close relationship with Karen; however, this is destroyed by the arrival of the violent, virile Shar, who deposes Hert. Shar is not a new ruler, however, but an anarchist who wishes only to topple kings, not replace them. He leaves, and Karen follows, not because she believes in him but because she seeks to escape Hert and “a life dominated by fathers.” Once free from her father, Karen begins to feel uprooted, aimless and nameless. Without Hert, she has “nothing of herself but a face, a body, a set of emotions.” She discovers that she needs her familial history to add meaning to her identity and so finally refuses the historyless Shar and his attempts at nihilism.

One of these trials is Shar’s proclivity for race-car driving in the lowland town of Cherry River. Cherry River is a place that seems to exist for the edification of the summer tourists and little else. It offers appreciation of self-gratification but not of history. The high point of the summer seems to be when Shar commits suicide on the racetrack. Oates shows that in a community with no shared history, the only communal ties that exist are with shared acts of violence.

The spokesman for the novel is Max, a self-centered businessman, who is the only one intelligent enough to share Oates’s philosophy with the reader. He appears in many other novels as the maniacal oracle who tries to make Fate subservient to his will. He tries to cheat Karen of her birthright by confounding her with questions, but she eludes him and is, thus, saved. She returns to herself, her family.

Expensive People

Expensive People opens with the fictional narrator explaining to the reader that he is telling the truth. Richard Everett begins by setting up a paradox because nothing he “tells” can ever be...

(This entire section contains 5232 words.)

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the truth since everything in the book is imagined. He goes on to explain that he is—or was—a child murderer in the sense that when he was young, he killed someone.Expensive People is written as a memoir, a memoir of someone who does not exist. In fact, Everett confesses that “it’s possible that I’m lying without knowing it.”

If Expensive People appears to be a parody of comic nihilism, of the nothingness of suburban life, it is. From Ernest Hemingway to John Barth, Oates pokes fun at those serious authors who proclaim the world to be formless and empty. Everett’s mother, ironically nicknamed Nada, writes in her journal: “In any first-person narration there can be a lot of freedom. Certain central events—what the hell can they be?—leading up to the death.” This is certainly a self-criticism of the very novel she is in as well as of those she despises for their negativism.

If Nada consoles herself with her own writing, poor Richard has little with which to comfort himself, unless it is the thought of his mother’s death. He is convinced that she hates him, despite his near genius IQ, and wishes to stave off his affections with a series of unwanted puppies. Finally, Richard’s fantasies of matricide become confused with reality. In the end, the newspapers show nothing of Nada, only of their house. Richard fades into closure of the book.

Wonderland

It is not chance that Lewis Carroll’s child adventure and Oates’s novel Wonderland bear the same word in the title. Oates considers the work of this nineteenth century English mathematician to ask the pertinent questions of life: Can all of life be just a game, and am I the only one who is not cheating? The protagonists of both novels—Alice and Jesse Harte—run and jump from square to square on a large, mostly unseen chessboard. Along the way they are both transmogrified into oddly sized versions of their original selves. Finally, in order to survive, Jesse and Alice regain their normal proportions and become resolved with their communities.

In the beginning of Wonderland, the newly orphaned Jesse travels from his grandfather’s farm to an orphanage and finally to the home of Dr. Pedersen, a brilliant but unbalanced surrogate father. He is the first of a triumvirate of adoptive fathers whom Jesse must survive. His biological father’s initial attack has given Jesse the strength to deal with these surrogates. His father has slaughtered his wife and their unborn child and wounded Jesse before killing himself. Jesse escapes to his grandfather’s farm, where he recuperates until he must start his strange odyssey. Living with the Pedersen family, Jesse learns of things small and fantastic. He studies cell life and becomes involved in Dr. Pedersen’s cancer research. The more he learns, the more he is confused by his father’s view of life, which is overshadowed by death. At last, Pedersen grows impatient with Jesse and dismisses him from the family, saying, “You have no existence. You are nothing.” Jesse must seek another, more receptive, lifestyle.

Jesse enters medical school, graduates, marries, and tries to forge a new family, a home, for himself. He keeps returning, however, to the site of his father’s tragic demise in his dreams. His own children gradually start to shrink away like Carroll’s Cheshire Cat. Michelle becomes Shelley and ultimately Shell, until Jesse can no longer grasp her—or the rest of his family—with any degree of certitude. Even Jesse’s two father figures, Cady and Perrault, become in turn distant and disdainful. Dr. Cady will not acknowledge anything but the ethereal, and Dr. Perrault will not admit that the mind is anything but actual. These two opposing views further succeed in alienating Jesse from a “real” life. To offset these unrealistic real people, Jesse creates an unreal friend, or series of friends, but she only promises disharmony and death, so he eventually rejects her, too.

In the end of the novel, the action quickens, racing toward the now of the narrative, 1971. Jesse returns to his father’s psyche and discovers the final, perfect answer: “A clean, pure, empty being, a void.” It is only through the total destruction of the universe that a peaceful existence (or nonexistence) can be enjoyed.

Childwold

The setting of Childwold is again Eden Valley, scene of the action in With Shuddering Fall and Wonderland. The novel is peopled by a variety of characters and is narrated by several of them in turn, as each becomes the lover of the central figure’s mother, Arlene Bartlett. Arlene’s daughter, Laney Bartlett, is the unconscious catalyst for much of the violence in the novel.

The primary reaction between Laney and another character occurs between her and Fitz John Kasch, a fiftyish hermit who lives among the debris of his large but deceased family. In Laney, Kasch sees not only his failed marriage but also his repressed desires. She becomes for him both an icon and a Tantalus, love and passion. Unable to avail himself of her, Kasch woos and wins Arlene and becomes another in a lengthy retinue of lovers.

Arlene is a figure of the sex goddess, but, unlike so many untouchable figures, she is the small statue in the back of the church, worn down by the grasp of many hands. This, however, does not dismay her; indeed, it invigorates her. Where many single women would not welcome pregnancy, Arlene revels in it; her children reaffirm her existence in a world of many people. Kasch, on the other hand, is unable to enjoy the company of others. He secrets himself in a small part of what was once the family manse, now a museum. He blames his self-imposed isolation on his divorce, brought on by his former wife’s infidelity. By retiring into his hermitage, however, he only amplifies his feelings of detachment from life. Although he seeks to redefine himself in various ways (as a voyeur, among others), he remains at one, in harmony with only himself. When he finally becomes reconciled to the Bartletts’ violent way of life, he remains unfulfilled. He can satiate himself neither with the daughter nor with the mother.

Instead of an object of violence, of rape or murder, Laney becomes an object of Kasch’s creation. It is at this point that Childwold most neatly resembles Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita (1955)—the story of a middle-aged man’s obsession with a nubile teenage girl. As does Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Kasch casts a spell about Laney, using art as a medium, but she eventually escapes, moving though the two-dimensional world of Kasch’s photographs to the world of nature outside his museum/prison. She frees herself from the world he is doomed to inhabit.

It is a world that is of his own design. After Arlene has joined Kasch, her former lover, Earl Tuller, returns to threaten and bully her. In a rage, Kasch kills him and seals his fate as a prisoner. He has dreamed of being a murderer, but now that his fantasy has been accidentally made real, he is unable to bear the results. He has been defeated by his own desires mixed with the mindless tide of the universe. The novel ends with Arlene musing over the turn their lives have taken. Laney returns to Kasch’s mansion, but he will not answer the door. Imagining that she sees him behind a curtained window, she calls out. She feels she is strong enough, has changed enough from the girl she was, to save him, and so in a flush of anticipation she waits for “a sign, a sign,” but it never comes. Oates demonstrates in Childwold the tragic consequences of the conflict between humanity’s ambitions and the machinations of the world.

Bellefleur

In Bellefleur, Oates combines the gothic grotesque and a sense of realism to create a novel that, incredibly, has believable unhuman creatures. If this type of book seems out of character for her, it may be that she wishes to warn her audience that what seems extraordinary may, upon examination, be simply ordinary. In one episode, a huge rodent runs screaming into the house; the next morning, it is nothing but a cat. On the other hand, normality might suddenly become monstrous.

Bellefleur traces the history of the Bellefleur family through several generations and as many psychological aberrations. There are psychics in the family, a gnome who serves Leah Bellefleur, and several ghosts. Jedediah Bellefleur is the manifestation in this novel of the character who forces himself to exist against the will of nature. He is a recurring character in Oates’s novels, and in Bellefleur, Jedediah is delightfully crazy. In the end, he is persuaded to continue the Bellefleur line despite his (and the reader’s) misgivings.

The novel can be difficult for readers because it jumps back and forth from past to present. Another difficulty stems from the fact that the main character of interest, the telepathic Germaine Bellefleur, ages only four years from her birth during the entire action of the novel, while her father ages two or three decades. The setting of the novel itself—the Adirondack mountain range—ages thousands of years. In addition, the mountains and the people shrink or grow spasmodically. The final chapters contain spiritual references that, at first, seem disjointed. After Gideon’s transformation into the skeletal Angel of Death, however, a Native American appears to the ancestral Jedediah and tells him to embrace the world that he has abandoned. This is Oates’s final message to the reader, that only in a full and relished life is there union with God’s body. Thus, as in her first novel, Oates’s characters do battle with their own existences, their own beings. They struggle, escape, and wander only to return to their initial resting places within themselves and within the confines of their destinies.

Mysteries of Winterthurn

The characters in Mysteries of Winterthurn, however, appear to have relinquished their resting places for ghostly—and ghastly—forays among the living. This gothic mystery novel has been hailed as a feminist dissertation, a charge that Oates has not refuted. Although the main character is male and the action in the novel is seen through his eyes, most of the victims are women and children, and it is to their plight that the narrator and the reader grow sympathetic. In Mysteries of Winterthurn, Oates discusses the existence of women in a male-dominated society, and a pitiable existence it is.

Even though Oates owes much of her presentation of the situation of nineteenth century women and children to several other popular authors, her interpretation is uniquely her own. Her victims are disposable pawns in a society that is more than willing to sacrifice them for its own (male) devices. Oates inserts the supernatural into the novel to allow her women a modicum of revenge on these perpetrators. If this seems to be impossible (the unreal attacking the real), Oates insists that once something is thought to be real, it becomes so whether it should be real or not. Thus the view of women as passive, thoughtless beings is true for the males in her novel, even though it is a false concept. The women victims in the novel are freed by this misconception to react violently to those who misuse them because they (the women) cannot have acted in such a manner within the male scheme of things.

To drive this point home, Oates repeats it three times during the novel. The first story, “The Virgin in the Rose-Bower,” deals with a sadistic husband and father, Erasmus Kilgarven, who has a hand in the brutal deaths of his two wives and commits incest for several years with his daughter, Georgina, causing her to become pregnant several times. Georgina kills her infants but claims that they have been destroyed by angels painted on the ceiling of her bedroom. The narrator, young Xavier Kilgarven, sees one painted angel bleed, and this leads to the discovery of several other infant corpses, silent witnesses to Erasmus Kilgarven’s hideous habit. By claiming supernatural murder (and rape), Georgina is able to evade guilt and exact a small amount of revenge on her father.

In the persona of Iphigenia, her pen name, Georgina is also able to free her female family members by publishing her poetry. The money she receives from this enterprise, until her father forbids it as unseemly, is later used to finance even more unfeminine exploits by the young Perdita. Perdita needs no spectral avenger; she takes matters into her own hands, although she is never seen as a murderer by anyone but the reader. The only people who are capable of violent acts in Mysteries of Winterthurn are male; the females are those upon whom these acts are perpetrated. An invisible shield is thus created around Perdita, enabling her to murder several people in order to achieve her goal, union with young Xavier.

The third sister, Thérèse, is able to profit from her sisters’ cloaked deeds, and, indeed, there are indications that she may be involved in Perdita’s violent crimes in a peripheral manner. This is only hinted at, however; outwardly, Thérèse appears to be a happy, modern woman. It is here that Oates’s use of paradox—the woman who is both angel and demon, visible and invisible—culminates. All the women in the novel have been so seduced by the theory of their own guilt that they must violently oppose it in order to free themselves.

Foxfire

Another brilliantly innovative work encompassing Oates’s feminist vision is Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang. This novel, set in upstate New York in the 1950’s, centers on five high school girls who seek and get revenge on the men who exploit them. By chronicling the exploits of the Foxfire gang, which comprises Legs Sadovsky, Goldie, Lana, Rita, and Maddy Wirtz, Oates reveals how class conflict and the exploitation of girls and women by men and boys consistently reinforce each other. Unlike the female characters in Mysteries of Winterhurn, the girl gang members are not paralyzed by fear, guilt, or insecurity. Finding strength in solidarity, the girls, all from low-income families who daily feel the sting of poverty and the humiliation of male chauvinism, resolve not to suffer at the hands of their exploiters, villains they cast as upper-class white men.

The girls, in a wild experiment of role reversal, aggressively seek out their own victims, men who have hurt one or all of them. They subsequently put these men “on trial,” and all their victims are “sentenced” to some punishment. By inflicting physical pain or by causing irreversible damage to the men’s reputations, the girls see to it that the guilty suffer for the psychic wounds they have caused. While Oates’s sympathies clearly lie with the girls, she mitigates the gang’s actions by providing the girls with an important insight. All the girls come to realize that evil is not strictly the province of men or the upper class; their own acts of violence clearly reveal to them that, tragically, the propensity for harming others exists in all human beings.

What I Lived For

In What I Lived For, Jerome “Corky” Corcoran, the main character, makes a discovery similar to that of the Foxfire gang. As Corky bounces from one volatile situation to another throughout the dense, highly intricate plot of the novel, he becomes the principal figure in a modern tragedy. The narrative, an account of the three most intense days of Corky’s life, related by the protagonist himself, reveals his participation in situations and relationships that, as they disintegrate before his eyes, challenge all of Corky’s beliefs in the innate goodness of humanity. They also force him to revise his opinion of others as well as his opinion of himself.

Finding himself entangled in these events, which are charged with class conflict, racial tension, political strife, and economic distress, Corky learns that the myths of success, the very myths that he has internalized and employed to sustain his dreams, are false and corrupt. This realization compels him to examine himself, body and soul. He concludes that he too is false and corrupt. He has worshiped the false gods of money and power and has neglected family, religion, and anything else that could have given real meaning and substance to his life. As the narrative proceeds to its tragic conclusion, Oates helps the reader perceive that Corky’s flaws are particularly tragic because they are so universal.

My Heart Laid Bare

Like Nabokov’s Lolita, My Heart Laid Bare presents a panorama of a vast, gullible America, a jigsaw puzzle of independent states where people can change identities just by crossing boundary lines. The novel is a parodistic epic about a family of confidence artists in nineteenth and early twentieth century America whose careers are largely shaped by the political, financial, and sociological changes of that turbulent period. Oates’s catchy (and somewhat misleading) title refers to a memoir that the protagonist, Abraham Licht, intends to write someday but leaves unfinished at his death. Readers who expect the novel to present a famous woman author’s personal confession may feel confused when they find themselves involved with a complicated semihistorical, semigothic, partially tongue-in-cheek story reminiscent of Oates’s Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance, and Mysteries of Winterthurn. Oates has called those popular books “parodistic,” explaining that “they are not exactly parodies, because they take the forms they imitate quite seriously.”

Abraham Licht is the quintessential laissez-faire social Darwinist of the late nineteenth century. He teaches his children that life is an endless struggle for survival, with every individual pitted against every other. Their only allegiance should be to the family, particularly to himself. Every outsider should be regarded as an enemy and potential victim.

Abraham’s two oldest sons are temperamentally as different as Cain and Abel. Thurston is tall, handsome, and refined; Harwood is stocky, ugly, and vulgar. Harwood is the only member of the family who is vicious. When Thurston is scheming to make his fortune by marrying a wealthy society matron, the volatile Harwood creates a scene that exposes Thurston as a bounder and an impostor. When the deluded woman interposes between the quarreling brothers, Harwood inadvertently breaks her neck and flees. Thurston has no choice but to flee also—but in a different direction. Only Thurston is captured, and, true to his family’s code of honor, he chooses to be hanged rather than point the finger at his brother. Ultimately, the wily Abraham saves his son by giving him a drug that makes the young man appear dead and spiriting him out of prison in a coffin.

Characters in the novel have a way of disappearing for years and reappearing under different names. Harwood comes back into the saga as Harmon Liges when he befriends Roland Shrikesdale III, a wealthy young tenderfoot vacationing in the Wild West. Harwood conceives a daring scheme based on the fact that he resembles his new friend so closely that they might be taken for twins. He lures his victim into the wilderness, commits a cold-blooded murder, then stumbles back into civilization wearing the dead man’s clothing and pretending to be suffering from amnesia. The victim’s mother unquestioningly accepts Harwood as her adored child. She has not long to live, and Harwood stands to inherit a large fortune; however, he overplays his hand by inviting Abraham to visit him so that he can show off his affluence and cleverness. The old woman’s nephews, who will inherit the fortune if they can prove, as they suspect, that Harwood is an impostor and probably a murderer, investigate and discover the truth about the Lichts. Abraham finds it expedient to disappear when his son’s dismembered body is delivered to him in a number of gift-wrapped containers.

In his old age, Abraham finally enters into his first legal marriage. His young bride, Rosamund, as might be expected, belongs to a socially prominent family and inherits a fortune. They have a daughter and lead a peaceful life at Muirkirk. Abraham no longer needs to obtain money illegally. He invests all of his own and his wife’s capital in corporate stocks. His whole career has been affected by the invisible hand of history, and it ends in disaster with the great Wall Street crash of 1929. During the subsequent Great Depression, he becomes dependent on his son Darian, who ekes out a living as a music teacher and part-time musician. Then Abraham discovers that Darian and Rosamund have fallen in love. This new blow to his inflated ego changes him into a violent psychopath, but he turns his rage against himself, committing suicide in the treacherous marsh after setting the family home afire in a grand gothic finale.

Missing Mom

Nikki Eaton, who finds her mother murdered and learns about herself as well as her mother during the grief process, is the protagonist of Missing Mom, a novel that takes the reader through Nikki’s life, from her sibling rivalry and personality conflicts with her suburban perfectionist sister, Claire, to her affair with Wally Szalla, a married man.

In her thirties, Nikki is known as the rebel of the family. Single, with no children, and working as a reporter for the Chautauqua Valley Beacon, she lives what some might consider an alternative lifestyle, dying her spiked hair maroon and wearing miniskirts and thigh-high boots rather than the more conservative pantsuits that her sister, a mother and housewife, wears. Nikki’s family disapproves of her affair with Wally. Her mother, Gwen, wishes that Nikki would “settle down” and regularly introduces her to “eligible bachelors.”

Beginning with a Mother’s Day party, the novel introduces Gwen, her family, and her friends. Readers learn that Gwen is popular in the neighborhood, appreciated for her skill and creativity in bread baking as well as her willingness to sacrifice herself for others. She is the shoulder that her friends and family lean on in times of trouble and has a hard time resisting “strays” of any type. This quality contributes to her murder, as it leads her to give a ride to a methamphetamine addict, Ward Lynch, who had formerly done odd jobs at Gwen’s house in Mt. Ephraim, New York, as part of a prison rehabilitation program. After forcing her to drive to her house and burglarizing it, Lynch stabs Gwen and leaves her in the basement for dead.

After she finds her mother’s body, Nikki endures the trauma of notifying the authorities, including Detective Ross Strabane, and her sister. Throughout the process of grieving over their mother’s death, both Nikki and Claire make life changes. Nikki decides to stop seeing Wally after a meeting with his wife, Isabel, in which she learns that she is not the only “other woman.”

After Claire and her husband, Rob, agree to a trial separation, Claire moves to Philadelphia, where a wealthy friend of hers has connections that will help her get into graduate school—a step she has put on hold since she “settled” for marriage to Rob and raising a family. Nikki feels abandoned and sad, and her sister’s disapproval of Nikki’s moving into their mother’s home rather than selling it lingers. When Nikki learns that Ward Lynch has requested a trial, claiming innocence, she tries to manage her anger and prepare herself for the trauma of testifying; she then finds out from Detective Strabane that there will be no trial after all. In her profound relief and happiness when Strabane gives her the news, Nikki realizes her attraction to this man, who has been subtly pursuing her, repeatedly giving her his card and letting her know that she can call him any time of the day, for any reason; they become lovers. At the end of the first full year of her grief, Nikki finds that, although it has not ended, she does not have to go through it alone. From learning about the life of her mother, Nikki realizes that she can pay tribute to her mother’s memory by settling for no less than love for herself.

Black Girl/White Girl

Black Girl/White Girl centers on two roommates at Schuyler College: Genna Hewett-Meade, a young white woman whose relatives founded the all-women’s school, and Minette Swift, an African American scholarship student. During their time together in 1975, Genna develops a deep loyalty to Minette, an unpopular preacher’s daughter who holds herself apart from her fellow students and makes no attempts to befriend them. When Genna hears other students make fun of her roommate’s middle-aged style of dress, her thick glasses, and her forceful way of speaking, she defends Minette, for which Minette shows little appreciation. When Minette has difficulties keeping her scholarship because her grades are poor, Genna encourages her to seek academic help and assures her that she can raise her grades if she wants to.

Genna, the daughter of a 1960’s political radical and a mother with a history of drug and alcohol abuse and sexual promiscuity, with an investment banker brother from whom she is essentially estranged, feels like the most normal member of her family, but she is constantly on edge, waiting for news that her father has been arrested or her mother has had another emotional meltdown. As she tries to befriend Minette and earn her trust, she also finds herself in the role of confidant for her family members, classmates, and even a dean, who questions her when Minette becomes the target of a series of racially oriented incidents. Realizing that Minette herself has orchestrated the incidents (ranging from the defacement of her textbook to a racial slur scrawled on the door of their dorm room), possibly for attention, Genna recognizes Minette’s instability but decides to show her loyalty and try to win her trust by keeping the information to herself while Minette gains more attention for the perceived attacks against her.

Feeling betrayed and abandoned when Minette leaves the dorm to live by herself in Stone Cottage, a historical building on campus where only a few students are privileged to live, Genna visits her on her birthday in a final attempt to seal their friendship. She is troubled by the number of candles Minette has carelessly placed around her room and its state of disarray and dirtiness, as well as by Minette’s state of agitation. When Genna learns the next day that Minette has died in a fire caused by those candles, she blames herself for not having said anything to Minette about them for fear of incurring her wrath.

At about the same time, Genna finds out that her father has been arrested for aiding and abetting terrorists, and she starts to develop a new identity separate from her family, one in which she can insulate herself from her pain. She gains weight, darkens her hair, trims it short, and wears nondescript clothes. Having dropped out of Schuyler College, she earns a Ph.D. in later years and gains a faculty position. Secure professionally and financially, having inherited investments from her wealthy Meade grandparents, she gives away the interest (approximately $100,000 yearly) to causes and institutions she deems worthy, including Minette’s father’s church. Ending the novel with a visit to her father in prison, Genna shows how she has succeeded in spite of her dysfunctional family and friends but has sacrificed the vulnerability that might have allowed her to be loved herself.

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