There is little question that Joyce Carol Oates is one of America's greatest writers of short fiction, but as Greg Johnson comments in “A Barbarous Eden,” the nature of her contribution to the genre has yet to be fully explored. Furthermore, critical attention to a few frequently anthologized stories tends to obscure the fact that Oates carefully arranges almost all of her short stories in collections. As she explains in “Stories That Define Me,” at the age of 14 she discovered the technique of arranging stories into books when she read Hemingway's In Our Time “and saw how chapters in an ongoing narrative might be self-contained units, both in the service of the larger structure and detachable, in a manner of speaking, from it” (15). Between 1963 and 1993 she has published nineteen short story collections, each of which explores a single theme in a variety of short story forms. She says, “My story collections are not at all mere collections; they are meant to be books, consciously organized” (Schumacher 145). Perhaps one reason Oates is such an effective writer of shorts stories is that she sees them, like individuals, as self-contained but also part of larger socio-political structures. She told Walter Clemons in 1972, “We are interconnected—it seems we are individual and separate, whereas in fact we're not” (73-74).

Consequently, these stories are better understood not only in relationship to each other but also to the social context in which they were published. That social context includes the feminist movement, which has exerted a powerful influence on Oates's fiction. Yet as Jane Gallop notes in Around 1981, Oates occupies a controversial position in the history of feminist criticism. For example, Elaine Showalter views Oates as a feminist who “has never had the acknowledgment from feminist readers and critics that she deserves” (“My Friend” 44), but Gayle Greene declares bluntly that Oates, who is “not feminist,” did not participate in the revolution that took place both in women's lives and women's writing between the years 1963 and 1977. Of those writers she considers feminist, Greene says, “So close was this fiction to the pulse of the times that it is possible to use it as documentary of and commentary on the social and political scene” (33). Yet few writers have taken the pulse of the past three decades better than Oates. As Henry Louis Gates says, “A future archeologist equipped only with her oeuvre could easily piece together the whole of postwar America” (27); nevertheless, he adds, Oates has had a “troubled relationship” with what he calls “normative feminism” because she “insists on exploring the nature of female masochism” and because she refuses “to add to our supply of positive role models” (28).

However, not all feminists refuse to analyze female masochism—Jessica Benjamin's The Bonds of Love confronts the problem directly—and not all feminists require positive role models in fiction. Showalter says, for example, “No one can argue with the writer's need to grow, to experiment, to take all of human experience for her province” (“Women Who Write” 31). Ironically, since Greene's definition of feminist fiction does not necessarily require positive role models, I am using it to argue that, despite Greene's objections, Oates is a feminist writer. Greene requires that a novel or, one assumes, a short story, may be defined as “feminist” if it analyzes “gender as socially constructed,” has a “sense that what has been constructed may be reconstructed,” and an “understanding that change is possible and that narrative can play a part in it” (2). Even Oates's first collection of short fiction portrays women “in ways that anticipate the feminist concerns of her later work” (10), as Johnson has noted, but he adds, “for all the book's compassion for its women, By the North Gate is hardly a doctrinaire feminist work. One of its most remarkable features is its ambitious inclusiveness toward experience as suffered by both women and men, the poor and the affluent” (Understanding 13). Greene's definition of a feminist novel is certainly not “doctrinaire” in this sense, for it does not require exclusive compassion for women.

Furthermore, Greene would probably agree that far from being hostile to men, feminist attention to gender generally requires both sexes to change destructive behaviors. In short, Greene's definition of feminist fiction requires only that the writer recognize that gender roles can be transformed by narrative. In this sense, Oates has been writing feminist fiction since the women's movement began. For example, during the sixties, as Greene says, the sense of social change “was sufficient to disturb categories that are fixed in more stable times (including gender definitions), but not so cataclysmic as to render the aesthetic response irrelevant, so that art can be envisioned as the means of ‘making it new’” (35). Such disturbances of fixed categories has been and remains a frequent theme in Oates's fiction, often influencing the experimental shape of individual stories and also providing organizational frameworks for entire collections. Categories or divisions, walls or borders—all are fluid in Oates's fiction, whether they divide individuals, short stories, or countries. Gender is often such a wall, but it intersects with hierarchies of race, class, and ethnicity, as illustrated in The Wheel of Love [The Wheel of Love and Other Stories] (1970) and in the more recent collection, Last Days (1984). A comparison of these two collections should establish the fact that throughout her career, though with increasing effectiveness in the eighties, Oates has been a feminist writer whose fiction has been attentive to the potential of narrative to transform gender roles.

The title of the final story in The Wheel of Love, “What Is the Connection Between Men and Women?” poses a question that opens itself to readers, just as the woman in this story opens her door to a man. The last sentence reads: “She reaches up to slide the little bolt back and everything comes open, comes apart” (389). Opening one's self is always a risk, the story implies, but such risks are necessary. Certainly the question, “What is the connection between men and women?” was in the air; in 1970 Kate Millett published Sexual Politics, and the women's movement had already created a market for fiction that claimed such new subjects as “female sexuality and physiology, female socialization and objectification, women's relations with mothers, daughters, and other women” (Greene 54). Female sexuality and physiology, as well as female socialization and objectification are portrayed in a number of stories, but nowhere more powerfully than in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again,” both of which depict teenage girls who, having been conditioned to behave submissively, are vulnerable to male attack when they try to leave home. Neither of these young women has the capacity to define herself, and while waiting to be defined, each encounters violence. The collection also explores mother and daughter relationships in “Matter and Energy” and “You,” both interior monologues. The daughter/narrator of “Matter and Energy” thinks, “I don't want love from this man! I want love from her” (307). She realizes that her lover “does not love me, but he loves his reflection in me, as if I were a screen in which he can view himself endlessly, admire himself, his words, his language, the magic of his manliness, his immortality” (312). Similarly obsessed with her mother, the daughter in “You” understands that beauty has been a burden to her mother: “Years ago, when you were hardly a woman, you were driven crazy by the activity that centered around your body” (320), but “Really,” observes the daughter, “you despise men” (316).

Sexual politics, the pervasive theme of The Wheel of Love, is also the theme of “Lovers Relentlessly,” the Stanley Kunitz poem that prefaces the title story: “Some must break / Upon the wheel of love, but not the strange, / The secret lords, whom only death can change.” Nadia in “The Wheel of Love” is not a secret lord, but a secret lady who has committed suicide, leaving her husband, David, feeling “eclipsed” and “obliterated.” He thinks of himself as a minor character in his wife's story, someone who “would always be pointed out as the man whose wife killed herself” (174). Nadia had cried out: “Everyone is like me! They want to have other lives, be other people. Don't tell me. If I have to be just another person I'll kill myself—” (176). Lacking any creative outlet—with no opportunity to “have other lives, be other people”—Nadia had left home more than once, but her husband had always taken her back. Yet he is part of the problem, part of what she wants to escape. When her imagination had moved away from him, “he was bitter with jealousy” (176), for he thought of her as “a kind of possession” (177). In her role as this man's “wife,” Nadia's imagination is an obvious liability. David's jealousy condemns Nadia to act out the frustration she feels at the confinement of her marriage; her imagination, hobbled by her husband's jealousy, does not become an alternative avenue of escape, a way of leaving home. David is nevertheless bitter at the loss of his prized possession.

A wife in “Accomplished Desires” also commits suicide, this time motivated by her husband's infidelities. Probably because it has been eclipsed by more famous stories from The Wheel of Love, this story has received almost no critical attention even though it is an important precursor to Oates's feminist fiction of the seventies. “Accomplished Desires” transforms into fiction certain details of the marriage of Shirley Jackson and Stanley Hyman, which ended in Jackson's suicide in 1965. Jackson's biographer, Judy Oppenheimer, does not hold Stanley Hyman fully responsible for his wife's death, but “Accomplished Desires” establishes a direct causal relationship between the husband's infidelities and his wife's suicide. It is the husband's jealousy of his wife's accomplishments—both are writers but only she has won the Pulitzer—that motivates him to replace her with a younger woman who is less threatening to his male ego. If the transformation of such a marriage plot is a necessary feature of feminist fiction, this story falls somewhat short; however, since it comments ironically on the younger woman's “accomplishment” in marrying an older man, at least the tone of “Accomplished Desires” makes it a precursor to the feminist fiction of the next decade.

The wife in “Accomplished Desires” is a writer, but she seems not to understand that her own narrative skill might save her life. When her husband moves his young mistress into their home, introducing her as the new “housekeeper,” his writer-wife accepts the situation, finally killing herself rather than supervising the younger woman's abortion. The story begins with the point of view of a student named Dorie who is having an affair with her English professor (a fictionalized Stanley Hyman, who taught at Bennington) at a small New England women's college. Although the story ends with Dorie's “accomplished desires”—her marriage to her professor—she is undone by her achievement. In order to become as accomplished as the “formidable” wife, Dorie literally replaces her even though she knows that her desire “was not just for the man but somehow for the woman as well, a desire for her accomplishments, her fame, her children, her ugly house, her ugly body, her very life” (113). Not until she is herself a wife does Dorie finally understand, while seated at the attic desk of her now dead predecessor, that marriage has actually deprived her of what her husband's former wife possessed: the accomplishment of writing. Looking out of the same window from which Barbara Scott (a fictionalized Shirley Jackson) once observed the town and wrote poetry, Dorie “felt strangely cheated, a part of her murdered, as if the abortion had taken place that day after all and something had been cut permanently out of her” (129). In fact, it is only the man who has accomplished his desires: he has replaced his “formidable” wife, winner of a Pulitzer he desires for himself, with a younger woman whose only accomplishment will be to care for his house and his children.

In the fiction of the eighties, Oates continues to bear witness—on a global scale—to social injustice that often leads to violence. “I'm more or less of the school of the writer as witness. Witness to history and society” (177), she told David Germain in 1988. An example of such witnessing occurs in the story, “Our Wall,” which was published in 1982 in German as “Unsere Mauer” in Die Zeit. Just two years earlier, Oates had traveled to Europe, an experience transformed into the stories in Last Days (1984). The stories in the collection, which is divided into two parts, “Last Days” and “Our Wall,” are arranged to mirror each other in a variety of ways. They also move us, literally and figuratively, from the United States to Europe. This motion is not linear, but spiraling so that the final story, at once “real” and metaphorical, expands the definition of communal consciousness. Erica Jong says of “Our Wall” that “Oates reaches beyond realism to create, in metaphorical terms, the philosophical underpinnings of all walls” (7). Like the image of the north gate in her first collection, the image of the wall undergoes a transformation in Last Days so that readers see, not either reality or metaphor, but both at once. Moreover, though the literal wall is located in Berlin, the figurative wall is within the psyche, a point made in “Last Days,” “Ich Bin Ein Berliner,” and “Our Wall.” These stories, depicting the “last days” of doomed romantics, explore the geography of consciousness, as well as nations, at the end of the twentieth century.

Since the Berlin wall finally came down in 1989, Last Days might be described as predicting the “last days” of the wall itself. As Johnson points out, the title of this collection sounds apocalyptic, but Oates's vision remains optimistic. “Last Days should be read,” Johnson argues, “not as fatalistic but as hopeful, in the sense that a breaking down, even though involving the emotional violence and terror endured by so many of these characters, is the necessary prelude to the ‘communal consciousness’ Oates has envisioned as replacing the divisive, ego-centered philosophies of the past” (Understanding 199). As in all of Oates's collections, the arrangement of individual stories in Last Days establishes connections, often feminist connections, between the personal and the political. In “Détente” the relationship between art and politics is the focus of a conversation between an American woman writer and a Russian male writer Vassily. When Vassily says, “My books are political … as all art,” Antonia responds that “in essence art isn't political, it's above politics, it refers only to itself” (Last Days 123). However, Vassily argues through a translator that “art seeks to alter consciousness, hence it is a political act. A mere glass of water is an occasion for politics,” he asserts, explaining that “he is referring to an article about the poisons that have drained into the mountain lakes in this area” (124-25).

As Johnson points out, Last Days has the “dual focus” of all of Oates's fiction: “the detailed, compelling presentation of individuals plunged into various kinds of emotional and psychological upheaval, combined with the larger social, political, and philosophical crises for which these individual narratives serve as nightmarish emblems” (Understanding 180). The collection itself may narrate the “last days,” as Johnson says, “of a few doomed individuals” (181), but these individuals share a romantic conception of the self which Oates sees as in its “death throes.” Of one of these doomed romantics, the suicidal young man in “Last Days,” Johnson rightly says, “The Berlin Wall becomes the objective symbol of the tragically divided psyche suffered by someone like Saul Morgenstern, impelling him toward self-destruction” (Understanding 191). A knowledge of the historical context of such stories as “Last Days” is critical to a full appreciation of this collection. Not only did the Berlin Wall come down during the “last days” of the eighties, but the feminist movement, which had made considerable progress in the seventies, suffered a “backlash” that Greene sees reflected in women's fiction of the decade. The “backlash,” Greene argues, came not only from outside the feminist movement—in the shift to reactionary politics and negative media coverage—but also from within the movement itself.

Both in feminist fiction and academic criticism, Greene sees a return to the separation of the personal and the political. She says that works such as Jean Bethke Elshtain's Public Man, Private Woman (1981) “valorize the family and urge a separation of private from public life” (195), while fiction by writers from Anne Tyler to Marianne Wiggins is engaged in “the privatization and depoliticization of their concerns, the sentimentalization of the family, the resignation to things as they are” (201). Greene argues forcefully that “women's fiction in the eighties denies or forgets the syntheses of the seventies and, losing sight of the connections between individual and collective, participates in the dismembering and disremembering of the decade” (201). If Greene's generalization is accurate, then we have even more cause to appreciate the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates, for during this period she is definitely not retreating from the world, but rather expanding her depiction of it; moreover, she is not engaged in privatizing the suffering of individuals, but rather, has become even more effective in establishing the symbiotic relationship between psyche and culture.

Many of the stories in Last Days emphasize how unjust hierarchies of class, gender, and ethnicity shape the most personal relationships. For example, in “My Warszawa: 1980,” after a few days in Eastern Europe a writer named Judith Horne experiences herself as “Jewish at last. And womanly—in the very worst sense of the word. A Jew, a woman, a victim—can it be?” (148). Erica Jong says of “My Warszawa” that “Oates is beginning to chronicle experiences only a mature writer can have” (7). At the same time, the mature (woman) writer's vision often includes memories like those depicted in the collection's opening story, “The Witness.” In “The Witness” a young girl, age 11, escapes from her oppressive home by daringly stealing ＄3.87 from her mother's purse and taking a bus to Waterman Park, a place she associates with pleasure and freedom. There she learns what Judith Horne learns—or learns again—in Warsaw: the limits of a woman's freedom. When she tries to tell about witnessing a murder, she also learns that a child's testimony is not necessarily credible to others. Her sister says, “You tell such lies” (4), and her mother is ambivalent about whether her daughter is telling the truth. “You never saw anybody” (18), she says; “‘You just tell them you don't remember,’ my mother says. ‘Tell them you don't know. Anyway you made it up—didn't you?’”

However, the story itself supports the child's point of view. The narrator, now an adult woman, resists denial—her mother's, her own, and society's—in order to bear witness against male violence. Told in fragments, as a gradual revelation of repressed memories, the child recalls not only what she witnessed in the park, but also the sense of danger she felt within her family. The child remembers that her father, injured in a foundry accident for which he receives no financial compensation, lay in bed, smoking heavily until, finally, he had burned their apartment down. The narrator's mother, when asked, “Isn't he dangerous? If he was arrested for trying to kill that guy,” had said, “That won't happen again” (11). Yet her denial is set against the already established fact that the home did burn down, information imparted with dramatic brevity in an opening line: “It is the last summer we will be living above Harders Shoes on Main Street, Main Street at the corner of Mohigan, a few weeks before the fire, before everything is changed” (4). Although the father's voice betrays no anger, the child, feeling the weight of his suppressed rage, responds by imagining herself an invisible winged horse: “I am running across the roof of our building. Running, flying, my arms outstretched. No one can catch me. No one can see me” (5). Because no one knows her at the park, the child imagines herself free there, but what she sees one day—as she witnesses a man murder a woman—takes away her freedom. However, by finally bearing witness against violence, the narrator achieves another kind of freedom—the freedom and power of telling her story.

The notion that walls are illusory, whether between inside and outside the family, between violence and security, is also a point made in the last story in the collection, “Our Wall.” Written in a surrealistic mode, the story depicts the wall as a state of consciousness no less “real” than an actual, material wall. It begins, “long before many of us were born, The Wall was” (233). The “once upon a time” voice of the story immediately recalls the story-within-a-story at the close of “Ich Bin Ein Berliner.” The story begins,

Once upon a time, in the remote days of the Holy Roman Empire, there was a cruel landowner, a nobleman of immense wealth, who built a great castle in the Bavarian Alps, and instituted so terrifying a means of punishing wrong doers amongst his peasants that, for many centuries, his name was associated with a certain species of tyranny: dreaded, and yet respected. And known throughout the land.

(“Ich Bin Ein Berliner” 111)

This story-within-a-story is a highly economical way of explaining why, when surrounded by the walls of a prison, even a comfortable and well-fed prisoner desires to escape. This desire often becomes overwhelming, despite the fact that escape may mean death. The story intimates that any empire that erects walls must, eventually, come to an end, as did the Holy Roman Empire. In the meantime, of course, many will die in their attempts at escape. Both “Ich Bin Ein Berliner” and “Our Wall” are narrated by brothers who, having lost brothers at the wall, are seeking to understand why. In the process, they too become obsessed with the riddle of the wall. As in the story-within-a-story, “Without exception, prisoners became obsessed with the aperture in the wall, and spent all their waking hours (and, doubtless, their sleeping hours as well) in contemplation of it” (“Ich Bin Ein Berliner” 111-12). One of the mysteries, as stated in “Our Wall,” is, “If there was no Forbidden Zone then, why was The Wall constructed?” (233).

The collection as a whole, like earlier collections, attempts to transform readers, moving them beyond the social and literary conventions that establish walls between races, genders, or generations. “Literatur is eine Form der Sympathie,” reads the headline in Die Zeit (1980), quoting from Oates's public address in Hamburg, Germany. Her stories, individual or in collections, are designed for just this purpose: to stimulate our sympathy for others. It is a quality usually absent in the world of diplomacy. Stories of international diplomacy in part two of the collection, such as “Détente,” “My Warszawa: 1980,” and “Old Budapest” mirror domestic stories in part one, such as “Funland,” “The Man Who Adored Women,” and “Night. Sleep. Death. The Stars.,” all of which depict the lack of imagination that makes it possible for one human being to victimize another. In domestic stories—“domestic” in both senses: set in the US and in the home—it is most often men who are the egoists and victimizers, driving their wives, their children and lovers to madness and death.

The misogyny in these stories is as appalling as it is commonplace. For example, “The Man Who Adored Women” portrays a man who uses and abuses women until finally he becomes the victim of his own ego: imagining himself desired by a woman young enough to be his daughter, he finds himself the butt of a cruel joke. He also finds that he has lost yet another wife, along with his youth and his privilege. The story itself shows the power of narration, for the narrator, a writer who was one of William's victims, does tell his story, but not with the adoration he anticipated. The story opens when the woman writer spots her former lover on the street: “Was this derelict William?” (54), she wonders, recalling that he had once said, “Suppose you were to write about me someday” (59). The story ends as the derelict asks again, “Will you write about me, do you think?—someday—?” (76). The mirror image of this story, “Old Budapest,” is also a tale of betrayal, this time by a woman accustomed to adoration. Marianne Beecher, a beautiful, blonde American travels in diplomatic circles, enjoying her power to attract men. When Marianne meets with a Hungarian man named Otto, who is part Jewish, he disappoints her with his lack of sexual interest; instead, on the assumption that she is a “good” person, he asks her to smuggle a manuscript out of Hungary. Unfortunately, Marianne carelessly betrays the Hungarian's trust in her; she sleeps with a series of men from different countries—the US, Britain (or is it Russia?), Japan, and possibly Germany—one of whom steals the document. Although Otto entitled his manuscript, “The Bringer of the End,” hoping to bring an end to the corruption in his country, the title is diminished by Marianne's betrayal of him and, in the final analysis, alludes only to Otto's own certain death. For after Marianne sleeps with a man whose “rather mechanical English,” suggests that he might be “K. G. B.” (215), the manuscript disappears.

Despite Michael Holland's British passport and his protest that he knows little of the Hungarian language, he translates the manuscript's title and, when Marianne asks the meaning of “The Bringer of the End,” takes her to a museum “to show her a crude statue of the hooded dwarf Telesphorus. He was a mythological creature of Roman origin whose mission it was to escort the dead to the underworld” (219). Marianne does not, of course, see herself in this ugly creature, but she is certainly the “bringer of the end” for Otto. Were Otto a “real” rather than a fictional character, he is one of those who probably would not have lived to see the Berlin Wall, “our wall,” come down. Read superficially, this story might be construed as anti-feminist because of its negative depiction of a woman; however, the story actually criticizes Marianne's failure to recognize the relationship between the personal and the political. Though Marianne might have chosen to join the collective feminist effort to fight abusive men, she has chosen an individualistic, and ultimately destructive, strategy of revenge. Tragically, since her anger is repressed, it ends up harming the very man who, despite great risk to himself, treats her with respect. As this story illustrates, psychic walls between those of different genders remain firmly in place, but Oates continues to bear witness against them.

Although Oates does not always write stories that end happily or that feature women as good role models—such a feminist strategy would make good propaganda but poor art—these stories illustrate that the power of narration is, itself, a method for liberating women (and men) from destructive gender roles and plots. In short, as Greene requires, Oates clearly views “gender as socially constructed,” and these stories illustrate her belief “that change is possible and that narrative can play a part in it” (2). Oates depicts women who bear witness against violence and, in the act of narration, acquire power as agents of change. She herself is a powerful example of a woman who, despite many attacks on the violence in her fiction, has consistently refused to write as a “lady.” As a result, she is frequently asked, “Why is your writing so violent?” as if, simply by depicting violence, she were transgressing an invisible boundary, claiming territory that rightfully belongs to men. Weary of this question, Oates finally answered it in “Why Is Your Writing So Violent?” The question, she says, is always “insulting,” always “ignorant,” always “sexist” (35).

Works Cited

Benjamin, Jessica. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon, 1988.

Clemons, Walter. “Joyce Carol Oates: Love and Violence.” Newsweek 11 Dec. 1972: 72-74, 77.

Gallop, Jane. Around 1981: Academic Feminist Literary Theory. New York: Routledge, 1992.

Gates, Henry Louis. “Murder She Wrote.” Rev. of Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart.” The Nation 2 Jul. 1990: 27-29.

Germain, David. “Author Oates Tells Where She's Been, Where She's Going.” Milazzo 173-80.

Greene, Gayle. Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1991.

Johnson, Greg. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia, SC: U of South Carolina P, 1987.

———. “A Barbarous Eden: Joyce Carol Oates's First Collection.” Studies in Short Fiction 30 (1991): 1-14.

Jong, Erica. “Uncanny States of East and West.” Rev. of Last Days. The New York Times Book Review 5 Aug. 1984: 7.

“Literatur ist eine Form der Sympathie.” Die Zeit 27, 4 Jul. 1980: 15.

Michaelis, Rolf. “Lautlose Schreie.” Die Zeit Nr. 10, 9 Mar. 1979: 19.

Milazzo, Lee, ed. Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: UP of Mississippi, 1989.

Oates, Joyce Carol. By the North Gate. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1963.

———. Last Days: Stories. New York: Dutton, 1984.

———. “Stories That Define Me: The Making of a Writer.” The New York Times Book Review 11 July 1982: 3, 15-16.

———. The Wheel of Love. Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1970.

———. “Why Is Your Writing So Violent?” New York Times Book Review 29 March 1981: 15, 35.

Oppenheimer, Judy. Private Lives: The Life of Shirley Jackson. New York: Fawcett Columbine, 1988.

Showalter, Elaine. “My Friend, Joyce Carol Oates: An Intimate Portrait.” Ms. Mar. 1986: 44-50.

———. “Women Who Write Are Women.” The New York Times Book Review 16 December 1984: 1, 31, 33.

Schumacher, Michael. “Joyce Carol Oates and the Hardest Part of Writing.” Milazzo 135-46.