“Halfway through the decade, something went terribly wrong. The most useful image I have today is of a man in a quagmire, looking into a tear in the sky.”

—John Cheever¹

Joyce Carol Oates was in her late teenage years in upper New York State in the mid-fifties when John Cheever sensed the onset of the postwar dissolution of value and coherence since noted by so many men and women writing in America. Perhaps it was this sense of almost overwhelming social and international forces that seemed to minimize our human stature, to displace and diminish us in relation to the vast organizational structures brought about by the war effort and the postwar institutionalization of the corporate way of living, that contributed to Oates's fascination over nearly the last three decades with the encirclement and twisting of human identity that is so prevalent in her fiction. Many critical observers have commented upon the almost pervasive pessimism and bleakness throughout her stories and novels,² a vision sometimes approaching morbidity. From the psychotic who consumes broiled female human sexual organs in Wonderland (1971) to the suicidal violence in You Must Remember This (1987), from the emotionally dead brother smoking out the remains of his life in “A Legacy” (1961; collected in By the North Gate, 1963)³ to the raped suburban housewife of “The Double-edged Knife” (1987),⁴ Oates's characters are unique in contemporary American fiction in the frequency and severity of their destructive behavior, as Oates has created—and continues prolifically to create—a panoramic vision of an America in which, indeed, something has gone “terribly wrong.” Particularly in her realistic stories and novels, Oates seems intent to show us that forces both societal and natural have led to the crippling of a sense of willed, formed identity, a constructed selfhood, among large numbers of people of the middle and working classes in America who can (sometimes, we like to think) deal effectively with the pressures and even the horrors of contemporary life. Perhaps the greatest terror in confronting Oates's work lies in the critic's admission that, unlike most writers in the great humanistic European and American traditions, we are faced with a contemporary woman writing in America with formidable dedication who seems seldom to believe in human capacities for learning and for emotional growth and awareness, in the ego's connection to anything beyond its temporary sensory gratifications. Oates is engaged in writing a circumscribed moral history of what she appears to observe as a failed, decadent time in our national history.

Not all critics agree, despite Oates's considerable national reputation as a writer, teacher, and essayist, that she has so far been consistently successful aesthetically in her representation of retrenched contemporary life on native grounds. The scope of her attempt to portray the diminishment of self across a wide sweep of representative Americans is an impressive one. Oates has, as of autumn 1987, published nineteen novels and thirteen volumes of collected stories since 1963, many highly acclaimed, including a National Book Award for them in 1969 and several O. Henry citations for outstanding achievement in the short story.⁵ Indeed, some previous commentators on her work have judged her finest artistic achievement to have come in the short story. Despite considerable critical examination of such frequently anthologized stories as “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” little scholarly attention has been devoted to Oates's considerable achievement in some of the predominantly realistic stories comprising roughly the first half of her short fictional career—including those to which I will devote focal attention in this essay—from By the North Gate in 1963 to The Goddess and Other Women in 1974, prior to Oates's shifts both in subject and in technique, in her next two collections of the mid-seventies, The Hungry Ghosts: Seven Allusive Comedies and The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese. And given Oates's return to realism in her most recent novel and in Marya: A Life (1986), it may be valuable at this point in her career to examine more closely her ideas and concerns in the first five collections of stories.

Oates's career-long preoccupation with the self-enclosure and externally induced stifling of the development of mature and independent identity in men and women is a prominent concern in these five volumes of short stories.⁶ While her strong reputation as a psychological explorer of the stories of women of all ages is evident in these ninety-five fictions, Oates also writes with penetration and insight of men's situations; twenty-five of the stories are concerned either centrally or significantly with explorations of male personality and identity. Oates is less concerned in these stories with the formative stages of personality than with the full-fledged dilemmas of young and middle-aged men. Just two stories, “Wild Saturday” and “Boy and Girl,” trace the numbing of normal personality in children and young boys. In the former the boredom and purposelessness of a father and his current girlfriend, who take out a ten-year-old boy each week for a supposedly memorable celebration, begin to close down the boy's identity. By the story's end, he can only sit in the middle of a small, white room where “watchful and suspicious” he stares about him, beginning to be aware “how blank and open everything is, how much empty space surrounds him” (WL [The Wheel of Love and Other Stories], 169). “Boy and Girl” tells the story of two early adolescents, trapped by ritualized suburban lives and boring teenage parties, who take a wild drive in a borrowed car. The girl, Doris, also “borrows” her brother's baby and halfway through the ride suggests to Alex that they kill it for a thrill. As will often happen to Oates's older characters, these teenagers, stunted by a lifeless culture that allows limited opportunities for the expression of sane, organic emotions, must fill in their desert spaces with crazed ventures to try to make something happen.

In her earlier stories centering upon youths and young men, Oates reveals, particularly in By the North Gate and Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories, the enclosing influence an unforgiving, culturally sterile background can exercise upon the postadolescent personality. In “Boys at a Picnic,” three youths go on a Gothic spree of robbery and murder, until late at night as their car speeds across the countryside, the leader hallucinates the only death image he can comprehend, the biblical white horse, galloping along beside the car, and then begins to scream out the coming of his own inevitable death “at the jumbled, empty land … until the wind tore his words away” (NG [By the North Gate], 91). As Vale and Mae, in “What Death with Love Should Have to Do,” deepen their hopeless cycle of life through the image of their ceaseless and unrewarding motorcycle rides, Oates's narrator makes wise observations on the ignorance and indifference of the working-class poor. “Once begun, all races were alike: they were perhaps the same race: their noises dispelled all mornings, all previous nights, fused them into a sameness that seemed a broad, thick, muddy stream to which everyone had to return” (SF [Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories], 211). When Mae dies as a result of their mindless racing, Vale can only cry out at the end, “There's so much of it I don't know” (SF, 229), hurling his half-finished can of beer against the side of a house, yet another violent act of whose cause the youth possesses the dimmest understanding. And in “Archways,” the college instructor, Klein, is condemned by a working-class background that, despite his acquisition of a doctorate in literature, allows only for the technical assimilation of intellectual facts. He ends as lifeless as his doomed students in remedial composition, themselves from remote parts of the state, whose failure reminds Klein of the wild look of endangered animals as they find the university forbidden ground despite their high school diplomas, “its great machinery even now working, perhaps, to process cards, grades, symbols that would send them back to their families and the lives they supposed they had escaped” (SF, 168). Stunned out of lifelessness himself by an intelligent female student whose personal sufferings reflect his own, Klein enters and then withdraws from an affair with her, fearing, like Sister Irene of Oates's famous story “In the Region of Ice,” to risk an ultimate human commitment with another person who dares to need him. In the most cruel and impersonal way, he ends the affair, his mind already on his next essay on medieval poetry as he writes her a final note she will find taped to the door. Klein has used her to aggrandize his own faltering self-image; as he fails her in the class, he realizes only that her love for him has made him seem to himself more grand, more endowed with prestige. Buoyed by this illusion, Klein settles into another death-in-life upon completing his doctorate, leaving graduate school for a comfortable little college, marrying a wife of whom he is proud “for her chic competent womanly look,” accepting the values of his cultural group without examination, to the end of his days “grateful for and humble to the great academic tradition in which he would live out his life” (SF, 185).

The narrator's insistent irony in the story's final passage reminds us that Klein begins to die psychologically when he is still a very young man, never allowing for the completion of his being. As so often happens in Oates's group of stories about young men, an abdication of willed choice, combined with unfortunate external circumstances, manages to circumscribe very early on the individual's capacity for giving to others, for making future choices that could potentially enrich his life. Perhaps of all the stories concerning the development of identity in young men, Oates's “Edge of the World” is the most artistically and thematically convincing. Shell, the eighteen-year-old whose impoverished rural life is, again, defined by machines, is taught by an older farmer, Jan, the universality of bitterness, disappointment, and boredom. The youth has developed no identity except his fascination with his motorcycle, with the competition it allows him with his peers. Even earlier in his youth he has enjoyed the mechanical impression he makes on his boyhood friends. “His eyes were hidden by the merciless gleam of sunglasses, so that he looked impersonal, secret, and vaguely threatening” (NG, 148). Throughout the story the narrator ascribes to his friends two phrases, “you drew blood” or “he's got blood,” to characterize Shell's self-estimate of his strength and power. As with many of Oates's men, Shell's cultural values center on competitiveness and aggression and define his identity in ways he pathetically cannot begin to understand. On his way to the older farmer's junkyard, however, the boy begins to feel a sensation that he is falling; as he gets closer to the junkyard, the parts of machines seem to assume human shape, and Jan himself appears to Shell like a machine, his body and clothes matted together, stiff with grease. As he arrives at the farm and begins the “ritual” by combing his hair in a manner that will enhance his self-image and contempt for the older man, he feels a momentary anxiousness. “Shell shivered with excitement; he did not know why” (NG, 151). Among the primal feelings the youth cannot comprehend is his antipathy for the older man, his wish to set fire to his yard and all its machines. As he brags to Jan and his own motorcycle gang about his wish to escape the deserted farmland and get out to the world's edge, he senses with trepidation Jan's “ponderous, indifferent strength” as the narrator reminds us of the older man's “edge of humor that threatened them more surely than his anger” (NG, 150). Shell taunts the older man about the enclosure of his life and its rural sameness; Jan gradually goads the boy into a motorcycle exercise that is not really to be a race but an exhibition designed to reveal to Shell the old man's vision of the essential changelessness of things, that Shell's identity is fixed forever, just as Jan's is, and can never develop out to the edge of their world. He forces a dim recognition in Shell that he is nothing more than his machine. “It might be you just don't know enough about the world and what it does to you,” the old man says early in the story, and in one of Oates's most pessimistic passages, he adds: “But anywhere you go ain't no different than here. Don't you know that? … That's how this-here world was put together. It ain't no different, one side or another; an' there ain't no edge to it, neither, but only one side that keeps on goin' around. … Yet it's all the same, it never changes, it keeps the same in spite of you” (NG, 158). Inevitably, Shell succumbs to Jan's “lesson in drivin'” (NG, 159) and to his veiled suggestion of some harm to Shell, even though the youth is even stronger and, of course, decades younger than Jan. Suddenly, Shell senses dimly the real threat, in Jan's very existence, “a man who had always looked as he did … a man who had waited for Shell, standing just so, for years” (NG, 161-62). Shell is correct that the old man poses no physical danger to him, yet in the bloodstain he imagines on the track as the two prepare their slow cycle around it, Shell senses again that in thirty years he himself will occupy the center of this world, ready to impart the same mythic message of closure and defeat to another younger shell of a man.

Oates widens her focus beyond the mechanism and stasis of the rural scene in her group of stories concerning atrophied identity among middle-aged and aging men. Included in this contingent are such previously explored fictions as “The Census Taker,” “Swamps,” and “By the North Gate.”⁷ From old men like Walt Turner's dying father in “Stigmata” to men still in their physical prime, such as Norman in “Norman and the Killer” and Helen's father in “By the River,” Oates's older men are marked by a sense of lost opportunities, careers and families blunted and stifled by dimly perceived earlier choices in their lives. Norman's life, which “had attached itself” (SF, 126) to his family, is an ordinary one as manager of a clothing store. Essentially passive, Norman is wracked with guilt—as are so many men in Oates's stories. For he has not died when a nameless killer murdered his brother years ago during their boyhood. Suddenly and accidentally discovering a man upon whom he probably projects all of the frustrations of his life and the emptiness of his marriage, Norman decides that he is his brother's killer and sets out at least to destroy the man's peace of mind by confronting him with his past “crime.” Helpless like so many men drifting upon Oates's sweeping flood, Norman's game gets beyond his control, and he kills the man, as the narrator meditates upon the flaccid “airless routine” of the remainder of his life, “the numbed, beatific emptiness of one who no longer doubts that he possesses the truth, and for whom life will have forever lost its joy” (SF, 150). An overzealous certitude in possessing the “truth” frequently traps Oates's male characters; in her ironic “Stigmata,” both Walt Turner and his father foreclose their human development by a rigid adherence to faith or to an opposing cynicism. As Walt decides that his father's alleged miraculous hand markings are in reality a punishment and vengefully reviles with his bitter doctrines the dying man, his family, and the Catholic adherents at the hospital, Walt acts out his hatred of his father's rejection of the family in favor of what Walt considers his sanctimonious life. He does not realize that his own identity has become as static as his father's, his cruelty as hardened as his father's hypocrisy. “Walt understood what had happened to his father. Safe in his old age, before that safe in his tranquility, he had refined himself out of life—he had had, so easily, six children; he had given them nothing, not his own identity, not identities of their own, he had not distinguished one from the other … and, now, and old man, he had never been a man” (SF, 33). Walt fails to recognize that his father's emotional legacy has been well effected and will have far-reaching, never-ending consequences in the sterility of Walt's future life. Similarly, the young priest in “Shame,” Father Rollins, is so caught up in what he considers the “magical name” (WL, 103) conferred upon him by his church that he dissolves his personality in a word and cannot respond to the organic charity offered him by the young widow of his dead boyhood friend. As she gives him a symbolic robin's egg at the end of their meeting, he can only stereotype it within the ironclad canons of his faith as a “miracle achieved by some forlorn, enslaved robin” (WL, 126), exclaiming, “What the hell is this?” as he crushes it in his hand. In more secular worlds, the fathers in “Ruth,” “By the River,” “Extraordinary Popular Delusions,” “Upon the Sweeping Flood,” and “Wednesday's Child” all lack the flexibility to extend their full identities to their children, really to love them. Instead they foreclose their lives, stunting them either physically or spiritually and, in the case of Brenda's father in “Wednesday's Child,” serving as a symbolic correlative of the child's autism, “disliking silence because of its emptiness … he distrusted shapelessness” (MI [Marriages and Infidelities], 260). Such fathers, like those in “Delusions” and “Stray Children,” sometimes estranged from their own fathers, frequently seal off development of their personalities in professional specialisms of the sort the poet Snodgrass warns against in “April Inventory,” either never knowing who they are and what they feel or else never allowing themselves to feel what it is they truly feel.

Among the most thematically and aesthetically compelling in this group of stories is “An Encounter with the Blind.” Bethlehem Arnold Hollis, aged 42,—“whom folks would turn to look at” (NG, 114)—is one of Snodgrass's pathetic men defined only by his professional certainties, possessing little sense of personal identity beyond his position of power as a farmer and town “senator.” He is secure in his skills and even in his charity as he assures the blind boy who he meets in the town saloon, Robin, that he will help him on his way by giving him a ride in the same boastful tones that he conceives of his “thousand-acre spread that gave to the world potatoes and wheat and beans” (NG, 115). Driving out into the country, the senator hears the boy play one song on his harmonica, over and over again like Mr. Olaf Helton in Katherine Anne Porter's Noon Wine. As they talk, the senator's blustering bonhomie begins to fade as the boy talks of the man who seduced him at age fourteen because of his soft voice and delicate features and of his determination since to kill with his sharp-bladed knife all such men and, indeed, all sinners he encounters on his travels. Fearing for his life, Hollis promises the boy money, but Robin says that although he desires money for his mission, “that ain't half of what I want” (NG, 123). His knife pressed to Hollis's throat, seemingly crazed by his quasi-religious “duty,” Robin echoes the obsessiveness of many of Oates's characters of all ages and from all classes in contemporary America as he comments on his peculiarly enjoyable specialization. “Listen, mister … I ain't partial to this life myself. I ain't. A blind boy with no pillow for his head, no home to live in, no fambly to love. Just my duty an' the road an' the different men trapped. … But I got to be true to myself. I got to be true to my duty. There's all of us men trapped in ourselves, in our duty, an' can't quit till we die. My life all strung out on roads an' in cars an' in them men's faces I never get to see” (NG, 124). Against the senator's protest that he is without evil, Robin ironically assures him that “You're goin' to have the privilege of sharin' the world's sin, then, since you got none of your own” (NG, 125). Suddenly, the boy's symbolic purpose is achieved as Hollis strikes out, both physically and verbally, knocking the knife from his attacker's hand, and the town's supposedly most prestigious citizen hears “his own mad voice” confessing his past sins of exploitation of the town's Negro boys and other citizens. “Let me alone! You know too much! You found out too much—somebody tole you” (NG, 125). As Hollis lets the boy out for his next ride, the omniscient narrator observes that while the boy is serene the senator's heart is still pounding. Hollis stuffs money into Robin's pocket and returns the boy's ostensive authority, the knife, to him, but the act is needless, for the knife but reflects the facade the town leader has attempted to erect all his life. Robin's slow smile makes him gradually realize this as Hollis continues down the dirt road of his life. “When he tried to forget it he could not. His heart was cold and tight within him, like the part of him that had died” (NG, 127). Like so many “mature” men in Oates's stories, however, this man ironically has died long before he is made to realize it by circumstance, by a boy who, like Porter's Mr. Olaf Helton, seems more obsessive than he really is. In “An Encounter with the Blind,” the boy is the father of the man, leading him at last to areas of identity previously unrealized and unexplored.

While Oates's skill in depicting the diminishment of identity among her male characters is well exemplified in the stories just considered, her central fictional energies have, of course, been directed to the situations of female characters. In her first five short fiction collections, Oates focuses her main attention upon four groups of female characters: children or girls just on the edge of discovery of adulthood and sexuality; young women, generally in their twenties, as yet insecure of their position in career or marriage; and ostensibly more “mature,” middle-aged women, usually married or more professionally established in the world, some of whom—rather a small group—are somewhat personally and emotionally independent, having established, however tenuously, some measure of freedom and identity. Included in the first group of stories about women are some, such as “How I Contemplated the World …,” “At the Seminary,” “In the Warehouse,” and “Four Summers,” which have received explicatory treatment by previous scholars.⁸ Among the less well known and well studied stories in this group are some that deserve wider recognition, both because of their powerful treatment of the theme of confined and foreclosed identity during a crucial stage in women's development and because of their fine execution. In “The Daughter,” Thalia resents the burden her mother has imposed upon her via an unusual, foreign-sounding name, given, she senses, more to fulfill perceived lacks in her mother's sexual identity than to endow Thalia with an individual identity of her own. Oates is seldom better on mother-daughter rivalry, real and imagined, for the attentions of the all-dominating male image by which so many Oatesian women judge themselves throughout their lives and on girl children's sharp sense of betrayal that may close off their developing potential at this stage more than any other source. Thalia thinks, as her mother strokes her daughter's hair and attempts to compliment her nascent beauty, “of weakness, of the ignobility of being weak, delicate, vulnerable to betrayal, loving rather than everlastingly loved” (G [The Goddess and Other Women], 62). In “Images” Oates represents the development of a child's self-image based on memories from thirteen years ago to one year before the story opens; we are present at the formation of a frightened, insecure identity that fears to become anything definite, fears not conforming to expected social standards for a little girl of her class. In adolescence she is dominated by the roles and the images others have made for her, as she sees—and probably forever will see—“a little girl, a pale, thin-faced little girl with astonished, ashamed eyes.” And she also sees her parents and grandfather staring at her, trying to claim her, crying, “This is not you! You are someone else!” (NG, 146). Thirteen-year-old Gretchen, in “Stalking,” loosed by a pleasure-saturated society into the sterility of “Radio Wonderful” land and shopping malls as the sole source of support, aside from network TV, for her developing sense of self, must invent an “Invisible Adversary” to give her life any meaning, any identity at all. She can define herself only through a fiction upon which she can impose alternately masochistic and sadistic roles that will influence her life, one imagines, for many years to come.

One of the most evocative—and grisly—stories in this grouping is “Happy Onion.” Teenager Maryliz is a slightly older, somewhat prettier version of Gretchen in “Stalking,” whom Oates presents as deadened by the insulated, numbed world of the rock music in which she obsessively immerses herself, having already dropped out of high school to follow her lover, singer Ly Cooper, on his concert tour. Oates depicts well the insecurity underlying the exhibitionism of much in the rock world, its frequent preoccupation with external images rather than freely chosen values, the sense that Ly and Maryliz substitute showmanship for reality, while fearing the silences, self-restraint, and self-control, beneath which a deeper, though less showy, emotional range and fervor can often be found in people free enough to have gained personal maturity. Oates also sees the ironically close, parasitic relationship between free-enterprise culture, in this instance represented by Ly's doctor father, and the glitz and superficiality of rock culture that reflects it, as Ly sings at the “Megadome,” his face suffused with the drug overdose that will kill him before he has reached even his legal maturity. Ironically, Ly's group has won fame for the song that has given them their name, “The Happy Onion,” a lyric about the progressive peeling away of superficiality that must take place before authentic identity and personhood can be reached. But as they sing this, Maryliz primps and preens before the crowd, drawing her identity solely from her status as Ly's future wife. A showpiece, dressed all in white, enjoying the adulation of the less renowned members of her high school group, Maryliz is the conventional antithesis of the very values Ly preaches about on the stage each night. “Maryliz Tone, dressed in a white buckskin skirt … a violet shirt of the flimsiest see-through material … waving at him, hurrying down to the stage with her birdlike little walk. … So many little girls staring at her, at her, so many boys … her false eyelashes like tiny whisk brooms, maybe a little overdone when someone stares right into her face, but the hell with it. She knows she looks good” (MI, 204, 206). But even sad little Maryliz has some sense that all concerts finally end, and then there is the time that must somehow be filled up until the next series of electronic thrills begin again. In an Oatesian plot device that is too quick to gain verisimilitude, Ly dies very quickly of intestinal cancer caused by his habitual drug use; while this circumstance strains belief, particularly for such a young man, it is the results accruing to the adolescent girl's identity that seem to interest the author here. Worried as much that he recover from his illness in time to make the June wedding she stereotypically yearns for as about the severity of the illness, Maryliz becomes grotesquely sentimental after her lover's sudden death. Convinced that “it's my duty to be with you” (MI, 215), she requests to be admitted to Ly's autopsy, dressed now in yet another conventional outfit, that of the black, officially sanctioned widow's weeds. Oates now spares the reader no detail in the full presentation of Ly's autopsy, even to the drawing down of the scalp to obscure the face for removal of parts of the brain as Maryliz sees the once happy onion peeled back to reveal whatever reality their relationship seemed to possess during Ly's life. While the girl's motives are sincere insofar as she understands them, to be somehow closer to her lover, so sentimentally sensational are her ideas of attachment that the only way she can do this is through a procedure that leaves even the experienced pathologists and nurses shocked and speechless. Oates's satire is rich as she blends both the seeming unconventionality of this rock child's response to tragedy with the mundanity of her thoughts about the wedding gifts she might have enjoyed had the wedding taken place. The perhaps overly omnisicent narrator concludes the story with an indictment of the girl's absent identity, her complete absorption in her image of wedded bliss. “She walked in her rapid birdlike way, Ly's bride in black, his beautiful permanent darling” (MI, 219). As in “Stalking” and “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates's revolting narrative in “Happy Onion” serves, if too broadly, her frequent thesis that the death of the spirit begins very young in contemporary America.

In Oates's grim vision of the inevitable results for adult lives that are too early truncated, there is little happiness for the slightly older sisters of the girls we have just considered. The married young woman of “Four Summers,” for example, is now more practiced than in her childhood at self-denial, in barring herself from her real feelings, at accepting the ceaseless struggle to inure herself to the forms that men expect of young women in her lower-class surroundings. In Oates's great early story, “Pastoral Blood,”⁹ Grace, thwarted by the mold of success, marriage, family so neatly laid out for her by her fatherless family and her society, plans suicide both as a means of escape from conventional boredom and as a way of asserting an attempt at identity somehow separate from their plans for her. Trying in every conceivable way to destroy the image her environment provides for her, she degrades herself with drugs, petty theft, and itinerant men. Failing on her first suicide attempt, significantly on the anniversary of her father's death, Grace sits in bed at the end of the story, watching her mirror image, planning her next attempt at death after the passing of an appropriate interval. “The girl in bed will resume her role, Grace knows, give her but the words to do it with, the correct glances. Time can be nursed, there is all the time in the world; give her time to be freed, time to arrange for another escape, another flight” (NG, 112).

The young women in “Demons,” “Bodies,” and “I Was in Love” are almost as fragmented from any sense of integrated identity as Grace; the first-person narrator of the latter story begins her tale with the insane logic that “I was involved with a man I couldn't marry so one of us had to die” (WL, 388). Love is often seen by Oates's younger women as a containment; they seem little more than physical space that requires filling, little more than abortive identities capable only of possessing or being possessed. The girl in “The Maniac” frequently finds herself thinking, “I Want … I Want … Helplessly, she would have to think herself back into nothing: a droplet of fluid, a single tear-sized drop of fluid in which a universe swam” (G, 114). Paula, the girl who has nearly died of a drug overdose, confesses to the orderly who has helped to revive her, in “The Narcotic.” “Jesus, I'm such a natural addict, it's in my blood … to need things … and I always needed people. … I can't control it” (G, 314-15). Paula has attempted suicide simply because her life is so vacant that “there was no reason not to.” Like Grace in “Pastoral Blood,” she is so cut off from her feelings, from any sense of a possibly integrated ego, that she was “curious to see what my hands would do; to see if I was serious or just bluffing” (G, 315).

Paula's instability will probably cause a more successful suicide attempt; so uncertain is she of her personal worth that, after sleeping with the orderly on an impulse, she immediately and again impulsively exiles him from her apartment. Such extreme manifestations of Adlerian insecurity and lack of personal integration abound among Oates's women who have managed to establish neither a satisfying work or professional commitment nor a sharing of somewhat developed personal identity with another relatively mature human being. A particularly horrifying example of this failure occurs in “Did You Ever Slip on Red Blood?” in which a stewardess, saved from a war-protesting airline hijacker by an FBI sharpshooter's two rifle shots that have made the hijacker's head explode, covering her with blood on the tarmac, begins an affair with the FBI agent that obsessively focuses upon the violent act that brought them together. In a rented room with blinds always closed, he reminds her, “Nobody knows what we know” (MI, 284). Their very words during lovemaking are filled with images of the violence that was the occasion for two personally incomplete people to establish contact. “When they were together in the room she was brought up close to him, as if centered in the telescopic sight of a rifle” (MI, 284). The energy that gives them life does not “belong to either of them” (MI, 291); it stems from a destructive fantasyland suggested by her lover's name—Oberon, who tells her in response to her obsessive questions that he has never killed an American before. His death force was, however, immediately recognized by her when, one day after the incident, he appeared at her apartment saying, as from the grave: “You know who I am. … You know why I'm here” (MI, 302).

A more profound and equally horrifying story is one of Oates's best, “By the River.” Here, Helen, an unconventional free spirit, returned home after the failure of yet another relationship with a man to visit her parents, is picked up at the bus depot by her father, driven home by a river they both have loved for many years, and then savagely murdered at the story's conclusion. While the story has gained admiration for its gothic evocations, its psychological realism, especially the understated need of the young woman to sacrifice all to feeling and perhaps to find a love more fulfilling than she has experienced from her kind and supportive parents, also deserves recognition. Through Helen's chaotic memories, Oates imparts her unbridled desire for continual zeniths of feeling at the cost of all-balancing insight—the quality that ultimately, despite her kindness and charity, dooms her. As her father questions her about why she has run away from her husband and then come back to her father's home, she can only answer, “I don't know why I did it” (MI, 121). Slightly uneasy, yet mainly surprised that her father has taken her by the river and has not told the rest of the family that she is coming home, she can only wonder—“she was not used to thinking” (MI, 126)—that the relentless flow of the river's time is somehow apart from her relentless need for giving, for emotional love and sensation. (In fact, at her first appearance, at the bus station waiting for her father, her first thought is, “Am I in love again, some new kind of love? Is that why I'm here?” [MI, 112].) So disorganized and poorly integrated are her responses to the world, so lost is she in her beloved movies' way of presenting reality (in the city she has gone to weekday movies at eleven in the morning), that she cannot consciously understand her beloved father's long-repressed desire for her, mixed with his hope for her material rise in the world to compensate for his lifelong feelings of humiliation concerning his neighbors who “got money.” Nor can she understand how her return has catalyzed his sense of doomed vulnerability, his need to lash out at a woman he can never possess, not even through materialistic fantasy. His needs are made clear by the narrator's graphic description of the murder. “He did not raise the knife but slammed it into her chest, up to the hilt, so that his whitened fist struck her body and her blood exploded out upon it” (MI, 128). His needs are also clarified by something he says to her just before his intimate touch on her shoulder before the thrust. “It wasn't never money I wanted” (MI, 127). But as she sees “in his hand a knife she had been seeing all her life,” Helen may sense that she has been approaching this moment for many years. She needs more than she is aware her father's “rough hands,” her childhood memory of giving her tired father the jug of water and watching him “lift it to his lips and it would seem to Helen, the sweet child standing in the dusty corn, that the water flowed into her magnificent father and enlivened him as if it were secret blood of her own she had given him” (MI, 123). Truly, she has come to her home to die.

A volume of Oates's poetry, published after the last volume of stories considered in this essay, features these closing lines to the title poem, “Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money.”¹⁰

it is raining out back
or not raining
the relief of emptiness rains
simple, terrible, routine
at peace.

There is a sense throughout most of Oates's work in various genres, and certainly in the earlier stories, that the perversion of identity in contemporary America is almost inescapable, that Cheever's quagmire and the tear in the sky—threatening always, but never ubiquitous throughout Cheever's work—is a constant in Oates's world. While some relief beyond emptiness occasionally occurs in Do with Me What You Will (1973) and Childwold (1976) and in some of the romances of the eighties, there is scarcely surcease from the sterility and the horror ascribed to all in contemporary America in the first half of her short fiction career. Indeed, Oates has confirmed this pessimism directly in an early essay on Katherine Anne Porter's Noon Wine (1937),¹¹ stating, as she has implied in interviews, that humankind cannot know itself. Yet her essay on Porter, another woman of rural background writing in America during difficult times, reveals a profound misunderstanding of Porter's great tragic novella, for though his sufferings would strain Job, Mr. Olaf Helton does understand himself. Though circumstances and Mr. Hatch bring him almost unendurable grief, Porter shows that the itinerant North Dakotan has not abdicated moral responsibility for his actions and that his pathetic life retains a hint of the tragic because he insists on a small portion of it remaining under his command. The one song he plays on his harmonica is expressive of his awareness of life's misery, and it is consciously played and replayed, just as the farmhand consciously works, earns his way in the world, and so brings some dignity and respect (and self-respect) into what has been a trying life.

If occasionally an Oatesian character in these stories does manage to gain, with considerable effort, a measure of self-respect and self-regard—as does Blind Boy Robin of “An Encounter with the Blind,” playing his harmonica and also bringing increased awareness into Hollis's heretofore spiritually mundane existence—in most of the stories there is little evidence to support Grant's assertion that Oates “is committed in her fiction to the raising of consciousness of those who are being destroyed”¹² or that Oates's characters very often “work at defining themselves.”¹³ Oates's own views, expressed in an essay on modern tragedy, that tragedy should “deepen our own sense of the mystery and sanctity of the human predicament”¹⁴ seem not to be reflected in the reality of human lives represented in these stories. Sanctity cannot be possible without awareness and self-realization, and there is precious little of either human quality in much of Oates's earlier fiction. Walter Sullivan reminds us: “Literature requires action that is morally significant, which means that the characters must be at least theoretically free to choose for themselves. … There can be no question that life as we live it, as Miss Oates describes it, is enough to drive us crazy, but does this mean that we must continue to write the same story over and over—a chronicle where violence is a prelude to total spiritual disintegration and the only freedom is the total loss of self?”¹⁵ Sullivan probingly expresses the insufficient moral spaciousness in Oates's vision of the world in those fictions where the crucially significant function of human struggle is absent. In her stories concerning more mature and middle-aged women in these volumes, such as “Magna Mater” and “Assault,” Oates can tentatively indicate the liberating struggle beyond self-confinement in family and memory that forecloses the development of identities in so many women and men in her fictions;¹⁶ but more frequently in this group of stories—“You,” “First Views of the Enemy,” “The Goddess,” “Blindfold”—there can be no psychological liberation because there is no struggle, no effort at self-definition or self-understanding. Oates has frequently indicated in interviews and essays¹⁷ her hopes for a wide cultural transcendence of the egotistic isolation she considers endemic since the European Renaissance, but she confuses, both in these statements and in much of her fiction, the distinction between the destructive aspects of rampant egotism and the development, through the struggle toward consciousness, of the more imaginative and empathic use of reason that has been one of the most elevating aspects of our culture since the Enlightenment. Her dismissal of Freud's contributions to modern culture is not surprising;¹⁸ she insistently ignores the possibility that self-recognition can help humankind to become more loving and more free and seems unaware of Trilling's remarks in “Freud and Literature” praising Freud's lack of cynicism, that his classic tragic realism “does not narrow and simplify the human world for the artist but on the contrary opens and complicates it.”¹⁹ In contrast, her statement in a 1972 interview is revealing as she speaks of the importance to a person's memory of a beloved close circle of parents and family. “And if something has gone wrong inside this small universe, then nothing can ever be made right.”²⁰ Oates's greatest failure as a writer of fiction is this frequent moral enclosure in her attitude toward her characters, her abdication of the necessity of struggle that alone can lift us from the unconsciously animalistic toward some measure of the human. Her completely circumscribed characters can be liberated only through accident or random violence, and that is no true liberation at all.

Among her stories dealing with somewhat more mature and middle-aged women, Oates can at times rise beyond her fascination with the inevitably circumscribed situation, the inevitably determined character, that sometimes become monochromatic case studies in Naturalism rather than rounded, multifaceted representations of the complex human condition.²¹ In “The Heavy Sorrow of the Body,” Nina develops a quiet strength through humor and a considered confrontation of the feelings engendered by her father's slow dying, as movingly demonstrated by her washing of her father's wasted body. Through suffering, admission of memory, and an ironic awareness rare in these stories, Nina builds an identity of her own, proud of the processes of her woman's body, but “at a distance from them, observing them as a man might observe them, without comment or shame” (WL, 332). In “Shame” the young widow reveals more awareness of human sympathies than the priest. Mrs. Taylor has struggled with the deaths of both her husband and her infant son. She refuses to sentimentalize her dead husband, frankly declaring that he was a drunk and a professional failure. Because she has not abdicated the personal responsibility to see feelingly her misfortunes, she gains a subtle, unspoken strength far more liberating than anything Father Rollins can conceive.

But it is perhaps in “Puzzle” that Oates succeeds best in representing uneducated working-class people capable of working toward some recognition, however dim, of the reasons why they suffer, why they are so frequently isolated from one another. Here life's truths are elusive and difficult to bear, but they are not evaded by the dead Jackie's parents, and so for them life is not a total trap, not a compulsive enclosure into hopelessness, because each parent shares some responsibility for all their failures that in part have contributed to the accidental death of their five-year-old son. Throughout the action the woman struggles against her enveloping sense of numbness, vacancy; she does not merely submit to the repeated refrain in her mind, “I am not really here” in her “boxlike house, a coop for people” (MI, 42, 46). When both husband and wife summon courage at the end to confess their belief to each other that each is responsible for the needless death, they gain a liberation that is rare in Oates, especially the woman, who thinks: “Now I will tell this man the things I must tell him. It is time. It is time for me to tell him of my hatred for him, and my love, and the terrible anger that has wanted to scream its way out of me for years, screaming into his face, into his body” (MI, 51). As both husband and wife begin to accept that their son's death was uncaused by anything but irrational accident, they press their bodies around each other, and she admits her lack of understanding of pain, of her marriage, of her suffering. If she does not grasp through to the heart's mystery, neither does she run from the attempt to grapple with it.

Alfred Kazin has written that Oates, more than most women writers in America, seems “entirely open to social turmoil, to the frighteningly undirected and misapplied force of the American powerhouse.”²² Perhaps her significant contribution thus far in her career is as a social fictionist, caught up, as Kazin says, in this avalanche of time, whatever the limits of her moral and psychological imagination and the reiterative style may be. Her exemplary energy and dedication, her successful attempts to move beyond her earlier Naturalistic realism in stories and novels after 1975 attest to the hope that she may one day achieve the national “struggle for consciousness” she spoke of with such apparent sincerity in her acceptance speech upon receiving the National Book Award.

Notes

1. Herbert Gold, ed., Fiction of the Fifties (Garden City: Doubleday & Co., 1959), 22.

2. Alfred Kazin, Bright Book of Life (New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1973), 198-205; Marvin Mudrick, “Fiction and Truth,” Hudson Review 25 (1972): 146; Mary Allen, The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1976), 133-59.

3. In this essay the five volumes of Joyce Carol Oates's stories are identified in the following way, and page numbers are given in parentheses in the text. By the North Gate (NG); Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories (SF); The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (WL); Marriages and Infidelities (MI); The Goddess and Other Women (G). Since I shall range across the volumes of stories, organizing my commentary by thematic groups and not by individual volumes, here follows a list of the ninety-five stories, by volume:

   By the North Gate: “Swamps,” “The Census Taker,” “Ceremonies,” “Sweet Love Remembered,” “Boys at a Picnic,” “Pastoral Blood,” “An Encounter with the Blind,” “Images,” “Edge of the World,” “A Legacy,” “In the Old World,” “The Fine White Mist of Winter,” “The Expense of Spirit,” “By the North Gate.”

   Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories: “Stigmata,” “The Survival of Childhood,” “The Death of Mrs. Sheer,” “First Views of the Enemy,” “At the Seminary,” “Norman and the Killer,” “‘The Man That Turned into a Statue,’” “Archways,” “Dying,” “What Death with Love Should Have to Do,” “Upon the Sweeping Flood.”

   The Wheel of Love and Other Stories: “In the Region of Ice,” “Where Are You Going, Where Have You been,” “Unmailed, Unwritten Letters,” “Convalescing,” “Shame,” “Accomplished Desires,” “Wild Saturday,” “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again,” “The Wheel of Love,” “Four Summers,” “Demons,” “Bodies,” “Boy and Girl,” “The Assailant,” “The Heavy Sorrow of the Body,” “Matter and Energy,” “You,” “I Was in Love,” “An Interior Monologue,” “What Is the Connection between Men and Women?”

   Marriages and Infidelities: “The Sacred Marriage,” “Puzzle,” “Love and Death,” “29 Inventions,” “Problems of Adjustment in Survivors of Natural/Unnatural Disasters,” “By the River,” “Extraordinary Popular Delusions,” “Stalking,” “Scenes of Passion and Despair,” “Plot,” “The Children,” “Happy Onion,” “Normal Love,” “Stray Children,” “Wednesday's Child,” “Loving/Losing/Loving a Man,” “Did you Ever Slip on Red Blood?” “The Metamorphosis,” “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For?” “The Lady with the Pet Dog,” “The Spiral,” “The Turn of the Screw,” “The Dead,” “Nightmusic.”

   The Goddess and Other Women: “The Girl,” “Concerning the Case of Bobby T.,” “Blindfold,” “The Daughter,” “In the Warehouse,” “Ruth,” “The Maniac,” “Free,” “… & Answers,” “I Must Have You,” “Magna Mater,” “Explorations,” “Small Avalanches,” “The Voyage to Rosewood,” “Waiting,” “The Dying Child,” “Narcotic,” “A Girl at the Edge of the Ocean,” “Unpublished Fragments,” “A Premature Autobiography,” “Psychiatric Services,” “The Goddess,” “Honeybit,” “Assault,” “The Wheel.”

4. Redbook, May 1987, 50-56, 66, 194-97.

5. Good discussions of the earlier novels are found in Joanne V. Creighton, Joyce Carol Oates (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979); Diane Tolomeo, “Joyce Carol Oates,” in American Writers, suppl. 2, pt. 2, ed. A. Walton Litz (New York: Scribner's, 1981), 503-27; Ellen Friedman, Joyce Carol Oates (New York: Ungar, 1980); G. F. Waller, Dreaming America: Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1979); and Mary Kathryn Grant, R.S.M., The Tragic Vision of Joyce Carol Oates (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1978). The most comprehensive study of Oates's novelistic career is Eileen T. Bender, Artist in Residence: The Phenomenon of Joyce Carol Oates (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1987). The stories are treated according to genre theory in Katherine Bastian, Joyce Carol Oates's Short Stories: Between Tradition and Innovation (New York: Peter Lang, 1983), and in relation to speech act theory by T. Norman, Isolation and Contact: A Study of Character Relationships in Joyce Carol Oates's Short Stories, (Sweden: Acta I Universitat, 1984); by far the most intelligent criticism of stories treated is in Creighton, Joyce Carol Oates, and Joseph Petite, “‘Out of the Machine’: Joyce Carol Oates and the Liberation of Women,” Kansas Quarterly 9 (Spring 1977): 75-79, and idem, “The Marriage Cycle of Joyce Carol Oates,” Journal of Evolutionary Psychology 5 (Aug. 1984): 223-36.

6. In my discussion I will set aside the approximately fifteen stories that may be classified as experimental or nonrealistic, such as “An Interior Monologue,” “29 Inventions,” and “Explorations,” as well as those stories clearly intended by their author as revisions of past masters' fictions, such as “The Turn of the Screw,” “The Metamorphosis,” and “The Dead.” A good interpretation of the important latter story appears in Creighton, Joyce Carol Oates, 134-36.

7. Ellen Friedman, Joyce Carol Oates (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1980), 17-20, interprets the former story; Creighton, Joyce Carol Oates, 27-29, explicates “Swamps” and “By the North Gate.”

8. See especially Keith Cushman, “A Reading of Joyce Carol Oates's ‘Four Summers,’” Studies in Short Fiction 18 (Spring 1981): 137-46; Doreen A. Fowler, “Oates's ‘At the Seminary.’” Explicator 41 (Fall 1982): 62-64; and Creighton, Joyce Carol Oates, especially 115, 122-23.

9. Creighton, Joyce Carol Oates, 31-32, offers a more detailed interpretation of this fine story.

10. Joyce Carol Oates, Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State Univ. Press, 1978), 4.

11. Renascence 17 (Spring 1965): 157-62.

12. Grant, Tragic Vision, 125.

13. Ibid., 119.

14. Joyce Carol Oates, “An American Tragedy,” New York Times Book Review, Jan. 24, 1971, 2.

15. Walter Sullivan, “The Artificial Demon: Joyce Carol Oates and the Dimensions of the Real,” in Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates, ed. L. W. Wagner (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979), 82, 86. For a perceptive discussion of the ironically detrimental cultural effects of Oates's position, see Benjamin De-Mott, “The Necessity in Art of a Reflective Intelligence,” in Wagner, Critical Essays, 22.

16. For perceptive discussions of the ambiguities present in such struggles, see Creighton, Joyce Carol Oates, 125-27; and Bastian, Oates's Short Stories, 82-84, 92-97.

17. “Interview with Oates,” in The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers, ed. Joe David Bellamy (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1974), 23; Creighton, Joyce Carol Oates, 19-23.

18. Joyce Carol Oates, New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature (New York: Vanguard, 1974), 72-73.

19. L. I. Lipking and A. W. Litz, eds., Modern Literary Criticism (New York: Atheneum, 1972), 298.

20. “Interview with Oates,” 29.

21. Grant, Tragic Vision, 140-41; Creighton, Joyce Carol Oates, 142, 150.

22. Kazin, Bright Book of Life, 199.