SOURCE: Dessommes, Nancy Bishop. “O'Connor's Mrs. May and Oates's Connie: An Unlikely Pair of Religious Initiates.” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 3 (summer 1994): 433-40.

[In the following essay, Dessommes finds parallels between the character of Connie from “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and Mrs. May, the protagonist from Flannery O'Connor's “Greenleaf.”]

When Joyce Carol Oates was asked in a 1969 interview whether she was like Flannery O'Connor, she responded,

I don't know. I used to think that I was influenced by O'Connor. I don't know that I am really. She is so religious, and her works have to be seen as religious works with this other rather creepy dimension in the background, whereas in my writing there is only the natural world.

(Kuehl 307)

A few weeks later, Oates was to publish collection of stories (eventually titled The Wheel of Love and Other Stories) on the theme of love, including the much-debated, often anthologized “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Perhaps this story stands out from the others in the collection because of its uncharacteristic “other rather creepy dimension in the background.” Critics cannot seem to decide whether Connie, the 15-year-old protagonist of the story, has had a dream, seen the devil, or simply been seduced and possibly murdered by a psychotic intruder. But one thing is certain. The story is fraught with religious overtones and nightmarish imagery, and it is doubtful that “only the natural world” is presented. Joyce Carol Oates's respect for Flannery O'Connor's work is well known, and despite Oates's claim to the contrary, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is very much like O'Connor's short stories, most notably “Greenleaf.” Readers of O'Connor will recognize in Connie the shortcomings of such popular O'Connor figures as Mrs. Turpin, Hulga, and Julian. As in most of O'Connor's stories, the central character is self-centered, complacent, haughty, and essentially, though unwittingly, devoid of true moral conscience. But Connie and her story have the most in common with Mrs. May, the selfish widow of “Greenleaf.” Both women are forced, in a moment of self-realization, to recognize the divine presence in the world; they must, if only for an instant, come to terms with moral responsibility and concern for affairs other than those of the self.

The plots of the two stories seem to have little in common; however, both are initiations of a woman who, in response to an intruder—a male sexual figure—is forced to see herself and the world as she never has before. Whereas O'Connor emphasizes the exposition of her story, concentrating on the events that lead up to Mrs. May's being gored by the Greenleafs' bull, Oates sustains the suspense of Connie's meeting with her abductor, suggesting that Arnold Friend's violation of Connie's mind and body, while seductively gradual, is nonetheless as violent as Mrs. May's death.

In Oates's story, Connie has chosen to stay home alone, having declined the offer to accompany her parents and older sister, June, on a family barbecue at her aunt's house. While she is drying her freshly washed hair in the sun, tuned in to a popular teen music station, a stranger, accompanied by a companion, drives into her driveway, claiming he has come to pick her up for a date. Connie has a vague recollection of having seen the stranger peripherally—and having snubbed him—the night before at the local drive-in hamburger joint. As the stranger, who identifies himself as Arnold Friend and his silent companion as Ellie Oscar, continues to pressure Connie into getting into his car, an old jalopy painted gold, Connie gradually realizes to her horror that the visitor is actually much older than he wants to appear. Connie becomes more and more frightened as Arnold Friend makes sexual suggestions and intimations that he is about to seize control of her mind. He has an uncanny knowledge of Connie's family and personal life and suggests that he may have murdered one of Connie's neighbors. After making a veiled threat to hurt Connie's family upon their return, Arnold manages to convince her to come out of the house and join him. She then crosses over into the other world of adulthood: into “the vast sunlit reaches of the land … so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it” (Oates 54). What actually happens to Connie from that point is not shown, but to most readers there is little doubt that she will be raped and possibly killed by this gentleman caller who has come to show her what “love” is: “Yes, I'm your lover. You don't know what that is, but you will” (47).

“Greenleaf” is a similar story. Mrs. May, a widow and dairy farmer by necessity, is forced to deal with an intruder on her property, the scrub bull of her tenant family, the Greenleafs. Mrs. May, who struggles to keep her business in order, becomes unhinged at the threatening presence of a Greenleaf bull on her property, one that she feels is sure to breed with her superior dairy cows and “ruin the breeding schedule” (O'Connor 28). After unsuccessful attempts to get Mr. Greenleaf to retrieve the bull, Mrs. May drives him to the pasture and orders him to shoot the animal. During the quarter of an hour or so that Mr. Greenleaf pursues the bull through the woods, Mrs. May becomes impatient and blows the horn, apparently exciting the bull, who then emerges from the trees, charges her, and finally “burie[s] his head in her lap, like a wild tormented lover” (52). Mr. Greenleaf arrives, running for the first time in the story, and executes the beast with four shots from the rifle. “She did not hear the shots but she felt the quake in the huge body as it sank, pulling her forward on its head, so that she seemed, when Mr. Greenleaf reached her, to be bent over whispering some last discovery into the animal's ear” (53).

Though on the surface the carefree teenaged Connie and the frustrated middle-aged Mrs. May seem to have little in common, they are strikingly similar in character and share many of the same problems. Both live in an egoistic world psychologically separated from family and spiritually isolated from religion. Typically teenaged, Connie thinks of little beyond maintaining her own good looks, impressing boys, and living for the excitement of the moment. Her greatest challenge in life is to escape parental supervision long enough to sneak across the highway from the mall, where she is supposed to be seeing a movie with a friend, to the forbidden zone: “Sometimes they went across the highway, ducking fast across the busy road, to a drive-in restaurant where older kids hung out” (36). Unlike her dull and obedient sister June, Connie thrives on risk. On her trips across the highway, she is so “breathless with daring” (36) it is no wonder that she dismisses her family as tedious; like most teens, she prefers peer approval to parental and depends on it for her identity: “She had a quick nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors, or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right” (34). Understandably, Connie prefers the hangout to her homelife, which is characterized by antagonism and indifference. Her mother is a source of aggravation, nagging at Connie to “Stop gawking at yourself, who are you? You think you're so pretty?” (34). Her father and June barely exist to Connie. As Joyce M. Wegs points out, “Connie's parents, who seem quite typical, have disqualified themselves as moral guides for her.” Wegs continues, “Because [Connie's father] does not ‘bother talking much’ (30) to his family, he can hardly ask the crucial parental questions, ‘Where are you going?’ or ‘Where have you been?’” (Wegs 88).

Though Connie's self-absorption can be excused as normal, her lack of religious training nonetheless creates a serious deficiency in her ability to be aware of the potential for evil in the world. In Connie's family “none of them bothered with church” (38) and the only reference Connie makes to a deity occurs during her panic over being caught without enough warning to prepare her face and hair for company: “Her heart began to pound and her fingers snatched at her hair, checking it, and she whispered ‘Christ. Christ,’ wondering how bad she looked” (40). It is clear from Oates's use of imagery that Connie has replaced traditional religion with the false religion of secularism. The drive-in restaurant, steepled with “a revolving figure of a grinning boy who held a hamburger aloft,” (36) stands in grotesque tribute to a belief in the superficial world of self-indulgence that “give[s] … [Connie and her friends] what haven and what blessing they yearned for” (36). It is little wonder that Connie, unprepared for dealing with evil realities of the adult world, succumbs to the pressure of the satanic Arnold Friend. A young woman whose thoughts about sexual love are “of the boy she had been with the night before and about how nice he had been, how sweet it always was … sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs” (39) is set up for a fall. As Connie is soon to learn, she only thinks she is in control of the boys, of her love life; a few moments with Arnold Friend, however, and Connie is under his control: “She watched herself push the door slowly open as if she were safe back somewhere in the other doorway, watching this body and this head of long hair moving out into the sunlight where Arnold Friend waited” (54).

Similarly, Mrs. May thinks she is in control of her domain; her family and farm, however, are in decay. Mrs. May is really controlled by Mr. Greenleaf, who takes advantage of her from the first, when he responds to her notice for a farmhand: “I seen your ad and I will come have 2 boys” (34). As Mr. Greenleaf soon reveals, he has cleverly failed to mention his wife and five daughters, who are apparently part of the package. Soon the farm is populated with three generations of Greenleafs.

Just as Connie cannot look to her parents for protection from the likes of Arnold Friend, Mrs. May cannot depend on her family to help ward off the invasion of the Greenleafs. Her relationship to her sons is at least as antagonistic as Connie's is with her parents. Mrs. May's two older, still unmarried sons—Scofield, an insurance “policy man,” and Wesley, an “intellectual”—offer their mother no help on the farm, only ridicule. Aware of her airs of superiority and fear of a Greenleaf takeover, they tease her without mercy: “Scofield would yodel and say, ‘Why Mamma, I'm not going to marry until you're dead and gone and then I'm going to marry me some nice fat girl that can take over this place … some nice lady like Mrs. Greenleaf’” (29). Mrs. May's greatest fear is that her farm will degenerate to Greenleaf level, though her family structure is already in the same state as her semicollapsed farmhouse.

Mrs. May, like Connie, doesn't bother much with religion, but her substitute for faith is her attachment to her good name and the defense of her property. God comes last. In Mrs. May's world God is a cliche: “I thank God for that!” she exclaims in response to Mr. Greenleaf's observation that “all boys ain't alike.” But Mr. Greenleaf offers a penetrating and sincere reply: “‘I thank gawd for ever thang,’ he drawled” (41). Mrs. May tolerates the Greenleaf variety of religion, but she herself has put religion away, compartmentalizing it into its proper place: in a building to serve as a warehouse of nice girls for her boys to meet and a place to contain Jesus' name. “She thought the word, Jesus, should be kept inside the church building like other words inside the bedroom. She was a good Christian woman with a large respect for religion, though she did not, of course, believe any of it was true” (31). David Eggenschwiler, in The Christian Humanism of Flannery O'Connor, classifies Mrs. May as a Kierkegaardian Philistine figure: “Mrs. May is one of those characters who exalt intellectuality or common sense and deny their passions, their animality, and the power of the irrational” (52). No one better embodies the power of the irrational than Mrs. Greenleaf, whose rites of healing include rolling in the dirt and swaying on all fours over the news clippings of movie stars' divorces. Mrs. May, who finds Mrs. Greenleaf's behavior abhorrent, considers herself an expert on what Jesus would want: “‘Jesus,’ she said, drawing herself back, ‘would be ashamed of you’” (31). But it is the Greenleaf spirit of surrender to the religious realm of existence that is embodied in the powerful yet humble scrub bull that visits Mrs. May at night “like some patient god come down to woo her” (24). And it is, of course, the bull that is victorious and helps Mrs. May discover, too late, her error.

The most intriguing similarity between the stories is the authors' use of the nightmarish, sexually alarming, male intruder who appears unexpectedly to disturb the comfortable universe the female character has built. Both females are threatened by the grotesque embodiment of spiritual reality and are conquered by that force in a cataclysmic vision at the end of the story. Interestingly, both intruders are anticipated, if not experienced, in a dream. Although the question of whether Arnold Friend is a vision, a “daymare,” or a literal abductor has been thoroughly argued, a close reading does reveal that Connie's experience has all the earmarks of a nightmare, one that has been triggered by the shaggy-haired boy in the gold car whom she had seen at the drive-in.¹ Critics who have argued that Arnold Friend is real (and those who have argued the dream theory) have overlooked one detail from the drive-in scene: the car itself, “a convertible jalopy painted gold” (37). Oates makes no mention of the dented bumper, strange slogans, or cartoonish pictures that Connie notices right away when the car is parked in her driveway. The reader would think that such an unusual sight at the local teen hangout would be sure to draw a comment, if not a crowd. But only Connie—not even the group she is walking with—notices the boy who speaks only to her: “Gonna get you, baby” (37). During Connie's imaginary encounter with Friend, the details about the car—especially the sexist comment “DONE BY CRAZY WOMAN DRIVER” written around the smashed fender—take on psychological significance, as does the character of Friend himself.

Connie's vision expresses the anxiety typical of dreams: the search for self-identity, fear of the future, and suppressed sexual desire. Larry Rubin concludes that “the episode with Arnold Friend, then, may be viewed as the vehicle for fulfillment of Connie's deep-rooted desire for ultimate sexual gratification, a fearsome business which, for the uninitiated female, may involve destruction of the person” (59). Greg Johnson sees the dream strictly as feminist allegory: “The story describes the beginning of a young and sexually attractive girl's enslavement within a conventional, male-dominated sexual relationship. … [It] is a cautionary tale, suggesting that young women are ‘going’ exactly where their mothers and grandmothers have already ‘been’: into sexual bondage at the hands of a male ‘Friend’” (102-03). Connie cannot help but feel an attraction to this composite of all the boys she has met, the embodiment of all the urges her parents would have her resist. Still, Connie fears that Friend will enter the house where she stands just inside the screen door and take her on his own terms, for she knows instinctively that he is evil. As Joyce Wegs points out, “Although Arnold has come to take Connie away, in his traditional role as evil spirit, he may not cross a threshold uninvited; he repeatedly mentions that he is not going to come in after Connie, and he never does. Instead, he lures Connie out to him” (90). Connie, like Mrs. May, has not thought much about her own vulnerability and what lies past her immediate concerns of daily living, nor does she expect to meet up with an exaggerated picture of the spiritual dimension of life that she has heretofore not recognized. Just as Arnold Friend appears as a representation of all Connie's desires and fears, the menacing scrub bull that has been stalking Mrs. May has also entered her dreams, wherein its presence suggests the same moral and sexual uncertainties that Connie feels. In the blur between sleep and wake, Mrs. May imagines the bull dominating her space the way Arnold Friend invades Connie's house: “[It] had eaten everything from the beginning of the fence line up to the house and now was eating the house and calmly with the same steady rhythm would continue through the house, eating her and the boys, and then on, eating everything but the Greenleafs” (25). Awakened by the steady chewing sound, she peeks through the blinds and spies the bull “chewing calmly like an uncouth country suitor” (25). Like Arnold Friend, the bull is in no hurry to possess her; he waits like a “patient god” to make his move. He has his territory marked from outside her bedroom window just as Arnold Friend marks Connie with an “X” in the air soon after his arrival. In both stories, with the first appearance of the intruder, the conflict is defined as a struggle for power over the female's body as well as her property. Suzanne Paulson points to Mr. Greenleaf as the real threat to Mrs. May's security—even her sexual security: “Mr. Greenleaf appears to represent male potency: his phallic nature is emphasized in the figure of his sons' bull, which he allows to run loose in Mrs. May's herd—his way of asserting power over his female employer and of establishing his own territory” (40). The bull is an obvious symbol of male sexual aggression, and Mrs. May, who believes that certain “other words [should be kept] inside the bedroom,” has likely denied her own sexuality since becoming a widow and assuming the traditional male role of caretaker. It is little wonder that such sexual repression would surface in a dream as an image of fear.

On the spiritual level, the bull is more closely associated with Mrs. Greenleaf, whom Mrs. May describes as “large and loose,” yet for all her dirtiness and uncouthness, she is Mrs. May's moral superior. Since Mrs. May is unpracticed at praying for suffering souls and screaming out to Jesus, she feels threatened by these ritual performances she happens upon in the woods, and she attaches to them the same fear she feels toward the bull: “She felt as if some violent unleashed force had broken out of the ground and was charging toward her” (30-31). What Mrs. May senses in this scene is, of course, a foreshadowing of the disaster to come, one that will prove to be her “moment of grace.” According to Suzanne Paulson,

Depicting the worst in human nature is for O'Connor an act of faith, a repetition of God's intention to shock us into ‘grace.’ What some readers see as cynical and distorted views of human life, O'Connor sees as honest representations—however exaggerated and symbolic—of human suffering and sin repressed by the community in order to assuage the guilt of individual members.

(86)

Connie's bizarre experience with Arnold Friend could likewise be interpreted as a “cynical and distorted view of human life.” But in a more significant reading of the story, Connie's grueling Sunday afternoon appointment with evil symbolizes her coming to terms with the internal and external struggles evident in her life, as well as those of countless young women like her. Like Mrs. May, Connie has been blindsided by a force buried in the mundane that was too obvious for her to recognize. And this force bears the face of evil. David Eggenschwiler speaks of O'Connor's use of the bull as a symbol of evil in “Greenleaf”:

[Mrs. May] even experiences revelation through a demonic form: she becomes aware of God through a symbolic, Dionysian immolation of her self, which is not to say that such immolation is a Christian ideal any more than being pierced by a bull is an ideal form of sexual behavior. Such patterns of reaction also help to explain why Miss O'Connor so often uses satanic instruments to enlighten her characters: she is not only showing that God moves in mysterious ways and brings good out of evil; she is also exploring the psychological and religious view that demonic characters experience God's mercy through demonic structures that oppose or caricature their own forms of idolatry.

(64)

The same could be said of Oates and her story. While it is difficult to view Mrs. May or Connie as demonic characters, they are both idolaters of sorts, and both are in need of God's mercy and grace.

At the outcome of each character's ordeal is a moral insight, or revelation, one that elevates the ordinary woman to the state of religious hero. Mrs. May dies getting only a glimpse of the “last discovery” that has come too late for her to act on, but Connie actually becomes a savior to her family. Connie, who has only resented her parents and sister before, cries out for her mother in the end; and in a final act of heroism, surrenders herself to Arnold Friend, who has just reminded her that he plans to harm her family upon their return should she refuse to come out to him. “You don't want them to get hurt” (53), he says, and immediately she stands up to leave with him. She receives her “moment of grace” in classic O'Connor style: by having it violently thrust upon her. Unlike other O'Connor protagonists, she is not hit in the head with a book, forced to watch her mother collapse and die on the sidewalk, or even taken in and mentally raped by a deranged Bible salesman. Instead, like the lonely widow, she endures sexual intimidation by a stranger and is at once destroyed and, ironically, saved by the force that conquers her.

Note

1. Larry Rubin argues convincingly that Connie has fallen asleep in the sun and has had a dream about a composite figure that symbolizes her fear of the adult world. He discusses the references to sleep that frame the Arnold Friend episode and the nightmare quality of her inability to control the situation.

Works Cited

Eggenschwiler, David. The Christian Humanism of Flannery O'Connor. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1972.

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

Kuehl, Linda. “An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates.” Commonweal 91 (1969): 307-10.

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” The Wheel of Love. New York: Vanguard, 1970. 34-54.

O'Connor, Flannery. “Greenleaf.” Everything That Rises Must Converge. New York: Farrar, 1965. 24-53.

Paulson, Suzanne Morrow. Flannery O'Connor: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1988.

Rubin, Larry. “Oates's ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’” Explicator 42.4 (1984): 57-59.

Wegs, Joyce M. “‘Don't You Know Who I Am?’: The Grotesque in Oates's ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’” Journal of Narrative Technique 5 (1975): 66-72. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Ed. Linda W. Wagner. Boston: Hall, 1979. 87-92.