Joyce Carol Oates Cover Image

Joyce Carol Oates

Start Free Trial

A Barbarous Eden: Joyce Carol Oates's First Collection

Download PDF PDF Page Citation Cite Share Link Share

In the following essay, Johnson contends that Oates's first collection of short fiction, By the North Gate, "not only investigates virtually all the important themes that characterize her dozens of subsequent books, but also contains several stories that remain among her finest."
SOURCE: Johnson, Greg. “A Barbarous Eden: Joyce Carol Oates's First Collection.” Studies in Short Fiction 30, no. 1 (winter 1993): 1-14.

The sheer abundance of Joyce Carol Oates's fiction has tended to forestall careful critical analysis of individual works, especially of her books published before her 1969 novel, them, which won the National Book Award in 1970 and remains her most-discussed longer work. In particular, her earliest short-story volumes have received little scrutiny, since most analysis has focused on The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (1970), which contains such familiar anthology staples as “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.” Yet her first collection, By the North Gate (1963), not only investigates virtually all the important themes that characterize her dozens of subsequent books, but also contains several stories that remain among her finest. Even its weaker pieces repay close study, for they show with special clarity the philosophical and literary influences that were shaping Oates's thought and aesthetics as a very young writer, and that she would assimilate with greater skill and subtlety in her later work.

By the North Gate may be viewed as a microcosm of Joyce Carol Oates's entire career in fiction. Though at first glance it seems relatively narrow in scope—dealing mostly with dispossessed characters living in “Eden County,” a setting that mythologizes the rural area in upstate New York where Oates grew up—the collection scrutinizes with dogged thoroughness the moral conditions of an unstable American reality. By the North Gate provides a carefully detailed portrait of the post-Depression rural poor; it investigates women's experience in a patriarchal mid-twentieth-century culture that conformed to long-standing social, religious, and family models; and it suggests the moral vacuum at the heart of such “sacred” American institutions as the law and academe. Although the stories are not technically adventurous, since Oates was not yet experimenting with form and technique in the bold manner of her later volumes and of American writing generally in the later 1960s and early 1970s, they exhibit aesthetic predilections that would remain constant in her later career and that suggest certain major writers—especially Nietzsche, Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor—as significant influences on her early career.

Perhaps most immediately striking is the Faulknerian mythmaking, for Eden County is clearly intended as a Northern analogue to Yoknapatawpha;1 Oates is here staking out her own postage stamp of earth, its ironic name suggesting an allegorical microcosm of humanity in general and, in particular, of an American paradise lost, its bewildered inhabitants spilled out into a ruthless, barren world where mere survival is a kind of triumph. A major characteristic of this modern world—and here O'Connor's influence becomes patent—is its random violence, symbolic of its loss of social cohesion or philosophical meaning. For O'Connor, however, such loss is only in the minds of her prideful, hard-headed characters, who must be moved by violent means into collisions with divine grace; in Oates's case, this dark reality becomes a potentially overwhelming convergence of forces—natural, social, psychological—against which her characters pit their human will to endure. Oates, who repudiated her inherited Catholicism as fervently as O'Connor embraced hers, has observed that “the world has no meaning; I am sadly resigned to this fact. But the world has meanings, many individual and alarming and graspable meanings, and the adventure of human beings consists in seeking out these meanings” (“The Nature of Short Fiction” xii). This suggests the basic humanistic goal (as distinct from O'Connor's theological one) of Oates's fiction; and her focus upon a multiplicity of “meanings,” rather than an orthodox system of belief, helps explain why the shorter forms of fiction are particularly suited to her (at this writing, she has published more than 500 stories) and why they are the most appropriate vehicle for her fragmented but powerful vision.

Examining twentieth-century America in the contexts of gender, race, and economic and social institutions, By the North Gate exhibits the influence of Nietzsche—whose philosophy was likewise expressed in fragmentary nuggets of truth—not only in its ironic vision of Christian civilization.2 The stories also controvert other Romantic pieties—especially our received visions of nature and of human love—to which the modern world, in both Nietzsche's and Oates's views, has remained in thrall, worshiping them as false idols. The unstable, seething network of social and personal relationships dramatized in Oates's stories suggests both Nietzsche's amoral will to power and Freud's view of civilization as based upon the suppression of brutal instincts; her interviews and essays are studded with quotations from both writers.3 Not surprisingly, Oates chose a sentence from Nietzsche as the epigraph to her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, published a year after By the North Gate: “What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil” (vii).

Like the work of her literary and philosophical mentors, Oates's earliest stories view love as a violent force through which individuals strive for power and ironically reinforce their own isolation. Moreover, their struggles are set against the backdrop of a voracious and indifferent nature that, Oates has remarked,

eludes us even as it prepares to swallow us up, books and all. … Nature has no instructions for mankind except that our poor beleaguered humanist-democratic way of life, our fantasies of the individual's high worth, our sense that the weak, no less than the strong, have a right to survive, are absurd.

[(Woman) Writer 67, 70]

This vision of nature has surely inspired what Harold Bloom has called Oates's “immense empathy with the insulted and injured” (2); the frequently noted compassion in her stories arises from an identification with her people and her view of their painful struggles—again in contradistinction to O'Connor—as a contention with environmental or emotional forces they cannot possibly control, and at times cannot even perceive. In a 1972 interview, Oates remarked on “our constant battle with nature (Nature), trying to subdue chaos outside and inside ourselves, occasionally winning small victories, then being swept along by some cataclysmic event of our own making. I feel an enormous sympathy with people who've gone under, who haven't won even the small victories” (Bellamy 21). Sanford Pinsker has pointed to this quality of “empathy which is Miss Oates's special magic. [Her characters'] inner lives have a way of being unsettling, not because we are so different from her protagonists but, rather, because we are so close” (“Some Versions of Gothic” 899). Thus even the darkest stories, in Oates's view, represent an artistic testament—even an “homage”—to her characters' bitter but dignified personal defeats.4

As David Madden points out, however, in an excellent early discussion of By the North Gate, Oates's “compassion does not dim the harsh glare she casts upon the violence in human nature” (29).5 In conveying her turbulent vision Oates is essentially an American allegorist whose “power of blackness” can be traced back from O'Connor to Melville and Hawthorne. Oates, who has defined her own aesthetic as a conjunction of the realistic and symbolic modes,6 creates in her Eden County both a naturalistic portrayal of a particular social reality and an intuitive, poetic vision of all human striving against inimical natural and social forces, of which human phenomena (including short stories) are merely the temporary expressions. Most early commentators remarked upon the breadth of vision and the technical authority of this debut volume:

In this collection, an ability to conceptualize is in control, and a vision begins to take shape. … The universal family and society of man is projected with an almost pure radiance in the violent light of a dismal rural landscape, devoid of the pastoral, observed in extremes of summer heat, autumnal decay, and winter snow.

(Madden 28)

Thus the appropriateness of the epigraph from which Oates derives her title, an Ezra Pound translation of the eighth-century poet, Rihaku:

By the North Gate, the wind blows full of sand,
Lonely from the beginning of time until now!
Trees fall, the grass goes yellow with autumn.
I climb the towers and towers to watch out the barbarous land.

(vi)

Eden County's barbarity is notable particularly in economic terms: by far the majority of characters in By the North Gate lead grim, impoverished lives. As chronicler and mythmaker, Oates begins several stories with the same phrase—“Some time ago in Eden County …”—and creates protagonists whose clash with the land suggests a mythic struggle for survival. Recurrent character types include the titanic, larger-than-life old men—the grandfather in “Swamps,” Rockland in “Ceremonies”—who recall Old Testament patriarchs in their fist-shaking arguments with the world and God. In “Swamps,” the grandfather has cleared his land with his own hands and now lives alone in an isolated shack, while his son, representing capitulation to an exploitative industrial economy, works at a gypsum mill in town and has declared himself “sick of life” (13). The old man, battling his son's cynicism, assures his young grandson that “This-here is a damn good world, a goddam good world,” yet shortly thereafter the grandfather is robbed both of his manhood and his optimistic vision by a mysterious young pregnant woman who has appeared on his property. Representing the mindless breeding of nature in a way that recalls a demented version of Faulkner's Lena Grove in Light in August, the woman is an early example of the Oatesian earth mother who has internalized the earth's inherent savagery: after the grandfather aids her in childbirth, she drowns her baby and brutally attacks the old man, who is left at the story's end simply moaning, “They robbed me. They robbed me” (27).

Placed first in the collection, “Swamps” is an appropriate introduction to Eden County and establishes a vision that leads with seeming inevitability to the title story, placed last. In “By the North Gate,” another formidable old man, living alone on his desiccated farm, discovers that his only companion, a hound named Nell, has been tortured and killed by a pack of local boys. But unlike the grandfather in “Swamps,” old Revere refuses to be robbed of his optimistic vision of life. Telling himself that the boys' act of senseless cruelty doesn't represent a “judgment upon the world” (251), he recalls his friendship with a schoolteacher who had introduced him to the world of books, which Revere intuitively understood as a possible means of transcendence. Yet Revere has “forgotten everything” (240) he learned from the schoolteacher—who was eventually driven away from the area after being attacked by a student—and is left “waiting for death” (253) in a state of willful ignorance.

These two characters suggest the opposing philosophical positions available in Oates's world: miserable capitulation to a brutal, chaotic environment, or a deliberate self-serving blindness to its darker manifestations. In “Ceremonies,” the allegorically named Rockland is yet another formidable patriarch, a wealthy farmer who intimidates other Eden County residents. Like Faulkner's “A Rose for Emily,” the story is narrated in a first-person plural suggesting the typical viewpoint of the local citizenry, and likewise recalls both Faulkner and O'Connor in its allegorical method: the setting is simply called “The Town” (43); the road through Eden County is a “snake trail” (43); and Rockland embodies not only the brutality of the land his name evokes but also the devil himself, for he wears red boots, a black hat, and seems to the townspeople “as if he were an apparition out of the stories our mothers and older sisters told to frighten us into behaving” (44). The story is framed as a reminiscence, told after Rockland's death, which explains to the younger generation that Rockland almost single-handedly transformed Eden County from a farming community into an industrial area, after Rockland's farm had been destroyed by fire, an “exorcism” caused by a lightning strike (57). As the serpent in Eden, Rockland represents both natural and economic destructive powers, which are socially validated through such human “ceremonies” as weddings, funerals, and various communal gatherings. Rockland is particularly sinister in that, like the devil of Christian mythology, he assumes a pleasing guise as a force for economic and social development; yet this is attained by instituting social ceremonies that replace “human love altogether” (65). As in “By the North Gate,” the townspeople seem unaware that the one compensation for their barren version of pastoral life—the presence of human love and genuine communal ties—has been eliminated for the sake of a spurious progress toward “civilization.”

Thus Eden County embodies a clash between two worlds—an agrarian “old world” whose citizens battle the land and hold fast to moral absolutes; and a frightening modern world of an industrialized economy, random violence, and an absence of moral guideposts. Ironically, the protagonist of “In the Old World” recognizes that European settlers had hoped to establish an innocent new world in America, but “When they came they made it old” because they brought their human natures with them (192); yet there had been the illusion, at least, of an Adamic, pastoral way of life, an illusion that has been shattered by the encroachments of technology and urban development. For Oates, as for O'Connor, the mid-twentieth century is the historical moment in which this mythic old world (as opposed to the corrupt, European old world that spawned it) seems to be giving way to the new.

In O'Connor's “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” for instance, the grandmother and Red Sammy commiserate over the decline of moral values, a reality that O'Connor dramatizes forcefully when the grandmother and her family are murdered by the Misfit. “Boys at a Picnic” is Oates's earliest variation on this theme, and is far more pessimistic: here the killers are teenage boys rather than a middle-aged, self-styled “intellectual” who has, at least, thought out a motive for his violence; and for Oates's victim, a young girl whom the teenagers murder brutally inside a church, there is no moment of redemptive grace such as that which visits the grandmother. By contrast, Oates stresses the inefficacy of religious institutions: her church, with its tilted and tarnished steeple, clearly provides no sanctuary against violent secular invasions. Yet the motives for violence in both stories are essentially similar. Just as the Misfit cannot locate himself inside a redemptive vision of grace and salvation, and thus finds his own perverse salvation in “doing meanness” to others, so does Oates's teenaged protagonist seem to be striking out against an Eliotic wasteland that refuses to make sense. After the murder, “He wagged his fist at the rushing countryside, the dark, anonymous hills, the wasteland, and cried in wonder: ‘I'm goin' to die! I'm goin' to die!’ He shouted at the jumbled, empty land, at the rushing shapes and forms, all shadows, black against the lighter sky, ‘I'm goin' to die too—’ until the wind tore his words away” (91).

This passage suggests another debt to O'Connor, in that Oates's Eden County has symbolic features resembling those of O'Connor's rural Georgia. Throughout By the North Gate, references to the “great colorless sky” (180, “In the Old World”), “the clear empty sunshine of the day” (253, “By the North Gate”), and the “jumbled, empty land” (91, “Boys at a Picnic”) recall the stark tonality that pervades O'Connor's work. In both writers, the natural world is an allegorical landscape—vacuous, colorless, morally neutral—which provides a ruthless battleground for human vs. supra-human forces. Oates's view of O'Connor's fiction, in fact, might well serve as a description of her own: “Her world is that surreal primitive landscape in which the unconscious is a determining quantity that the conscious cannot defeat, because it cannot recognize. In fact, there is nothing to be recognized … there is only an experience to be suffered” (New Heaven, New Earth 176). Yet that last phrase is not really applicable to O'Connor, for whom painful experience is redemptive; rather it reflects Oates's own vision of unmediated and unrewarded human suffering.

Oates's earliest stories likewise resemble O'Connor's in their use of allegorical proper names—Rockland, Grace, Bethlehem, and Jason, to list only the most obvious—and in documenting the “manners” of the social world while dramatizing the “mystery” of spiritual dislocation. But a telling difference is that Oates lacks not only O'Connor's theological perspective but, for the most part, her outrageous humor. O'Connor intends her grotesque characters and violent situations as highly colored allegorical lessons, and views her characters as stubbornly but amusingly hardheaded; in Mystery and Manners, she wrote that “to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you draw large and startling figures” (34). Yet Oates conceives her artistic role far more modestly. Hers is that “deadpan” humor, as she herself has called it (Phillips 72), of the artist who acknowledges that her own condition is one with that of her characters.

Thus at the beginning of her career Oates viewed herself not as a didactic writer but as one who felt compelled simply to dramatize the nightmarish conditions of her time; unlike O'Connor, who seems abstracted from her stories in the manner of an impersonal puppet-master, the young Oates saw herself and her readers as part of the “jumbled, empty world” reflected in her fiction, a world that has no central meaning but, rather, a bewildering multiplicity of small yet “graspable” truths. In a 1969 interview, Oates suggested that her disavowal of the supernatural in her work represents less of a rebellion than a capitulation to “the problem of living in the world. It seems to me a sufficiently intricate hopeless problem itself without bringing in another world, bringing in an extra dimension.” Oates further remarks that in her early stories she is interested in ethical or “religious” problems—especially the issue of free will—as formulated by such writers as Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Kafka, but that her concern with human fate within the ceaselessly turbulent visible world engages the full range of her artistic energies (Kuehl 11).

“In the Old World” and “The Fine White Mist of Winter” dramatize with particular clarity such issues as free will, human justice, and personal identity against the forbidding backdrop of a monolithic old world crumbling into a fragmented new one. Not surprisingly, for a book published in 1963, both stories focus on race. In “In the Old World,” as in “Boys at a Picnic,” a pastoral gathering of rural folk has been the scene of horrific violence: several white teenagers have attacked a black boy, cutting out his eye with a knife. One of the boys, Swan, has come into town to visit the sheriff's office—where the black boy works, a patch over his eye—and to learn whether a justified retribution (“an eye for an eye”) will be forthcoming. But the sheriff's badge, which was “a little tarnished and in the poor light did not even seem metallic,” represents a spurious moral authority, and Swan is told that “it don't matter about [the black boy], it don't matter one bit” (197).

Similarly, “The Fine White Mist of Winter” features a sheriff's deputy caught in a snowstorm while transporting a black criminal to jail. A proud, self-satisfied man, Rafe has never questioned his moral values (which include a sense of racial superiority and authoritarian privilege), but he is badly shaken when the snowstorm forces him and the criminal, “Bethl'em Aire,” into a mechanic's garage for shelter. In this garage, occupied by several black men, Rafe is abruptly removed from the familiar world of his upbringing. As one of the blacks tells him, “there's no law here—not here, not tonight. Where is there any law? Where is it? Or any one of us better'n another? All of us caught here in a storm, a blizzard, who's to say if there's anything left but us? Any laws? Any ol' sheriff?” (213). The “white mist” of the storm, expressing the larger world's moral neutrality and mocking Rafe's own whiteness, forces him to see the arbitrary nature of his long-held assumptions about race, the law, and himself. Ironically, the black men affirm Rafe's values by taunting Bethl'em Aire (whose name suggests Rafe's opportunity for moral rebirth; in fact, he will later claim that “he was born on that day” [100]) and giving Rafe a mocking reassurance of his own superiority: “Why, there ain't a one of us ain't had it done to him,” Rafe is told, “an ain't a white man here don't know it. … That's how it is. An' him too, him too, he is got to have it done to him too …” (215). Though the storm abates and Rafe returns to his ordered world, he tells everyone that he has entered “his second period—his new period” (198); but when spring arrives Rafe forgets everything, the mud-strewn moral landscape of Eden County returning in full force. Thus the narrative events, unlike those of a typical O'Connor story, offer no genuine moral change: like the teenage killer whose words are “torn away” by the wind, the words of the story seem torn away from any possible vision of transcendence. We are offered, again, merely the nightmarish conditions of the present.

This inefficacy of language is an important theme in By the North Gate, and adumbrates a quality in Oates's oeuvre generally that many critics have found troublesome. In a 1969 essay, Benjamin DeMott complained that Oates's work to that date betrayed “an inability to perceive or create meaning” (89); similarly, in 1970, Elizabeth Dalton remarked that events in Oates's fiction “seem simply to happen in the random and insignificant way of real life” (76); and in 1983, James C. Robison argued that “her stories often erupt into violence and dissolve into chaos. Her fiction raises problems that it seldom probes or clarifies” (86). But Oates's work as a whole makes clear that her stories are deliberately mimetic transcriptions of experience as felt by her characters, rather than a “created meaning” imposed by an omniscient narrator; only by cutting to the heart of an experience, in all its unmediated rawness and violence, can Oates suggest its allegorical significance for the culture.

One of Oates's major themes, in fact, is that writers, intellectuals, record-keepers—all those who attempt to describe and calibrate the contours of experience—are themselves summarily defeated by the swirling chaos of natural and social forces in Eden County. Representatives of literature and culture—the schoolteacher in “By the North Gate,” for instance—are ineffectual and ultimately expelled from this barbarous world. Similarly, in “Pastoral Blood,” a young woman named Grace had been praised for her writing, but now feels that her education had been “worth nothing”; her only memory from college is a short passage from an ancient ballad that she had found in a “dusty, disintegrating” volume and that, like the passage from Rihaku, could serve as an epigraph to By the North Gate: “The hawk had nae lure, and the horse had nae master, / And the faithless hounds thro the woods ran faster” (105).7 In “Sweet Love Remembered,” the despairing lover of the protagonist, Amie, is dismissed as “a teacher of some sort … he wrote things” (76). “The Expense of Spirit” is Oates's earliest example of what would later become a virtual subgenre in her career: the academic satire. Like the stories in The Hungry Ghosts (1974) and the novel Unholy Loves (1979), “The Expense of Spirit” portrays writers and academics as irresponsible, mean-spirited drunkards; the one man in their group who takes literature seriously is the butt of their cruelest jokes.8 But the story most centrally concerned with writing is “The Census Taker.” Here the protagonist, a rather officious and foolish Eden County bureaucrat, visits a rural family in an attempt to complete his census records; but a young girl in the house says scornfully that the world of Eden County is constantly being “washed away,” and can't be tracked or calibrated: “it all up an' left, all washed away! An' them people in the book, all washed away, that he thought he caught an' could keep still, by writin' down” (39). Like the schoolteacher in “By the North Gate,” the census taker beats a hasty retreat.

It's tempting to see the angry girl in “The Census Taker” as Oates's portrait of her younger self, especially since this character is described as “small, lifelessly thin, with … large eyes” (33). A similar character is the girl in “Images” who, like Oates, grows up Catholic, fears her rough-and-tumble environment, and escapes the area through a university scholarship. Such characters in By the North Gate recall what Oates has termed her “peasant” origins. In 1972, she told an interviewer that

I'm like certain people who are not really understood—Jung and Heidegger are good examples—people of peasant stock, from the country, who then come into a world of literature or philosophy. Part of us is very intellectual, wanting to read all the books in the library—or even wanting to write all the books in the library. Then there's the other side of us, which is sheer silence, inarticulate—the silence of nature, of the sky, of pure being.

(Clemons 34-35)

The occasional self-portraits seem present in By the North Gate as additional reminders that the author and her works are themselves vulnerable to the nature that is waiting to “swallow us up, books and all.” Oates seems intent upon providing correctives to her own intellectual temperament, countering the potential arrogance of a writer who might try to impose an arbitrary artistic shape upon the flux and turmoil of Eden County. Not surprisingly, a 1976 novel set in this same rural area begins with this epigraph from William James: “We are not the readers but the very personages of the world-drama” (Childwold v).

Though Oates's rural, post-Depression landscape is clearly a man's world, Oates uses autobiographical characters and portraits of women generally in ways that anticipate the feminist concerns of her later work (especially Marya: A Life [1986], which Oates has termed “the most ‘personal’ of my novels” [(Woman) Writer 376]). On the one hand, to be female in By the North Gate is often to be a victim, like the children murdered in “Boys at a Picnic” and “Swamps.” In “Pastoral Blood,” Grace is attacked by a man with a knife, and in “A Legacy” a girl named Laura, visiting her beloved brother in jail, receives the contemptuous gift of a cigarette butt as a remembrance. Yet these female characters—like Oates herself, mythologizing her childhood environment in her fiction—are also the repositories of memory, reflection, and a bleak form of nostalgia. “A Legacy,” for instance, ends not with Laura's painful last meeting with her brother Kess, but with a memory of “Kess's grinning face … laughing with her: her brother Kess, again no more than thirteen years old” (179).

One of the volume's finest stories, “Sweet Love Remembered,” dramatizes hauntingly this theme of memory, its structure counterpointing the heroine's remembered childhood love for her brother, Jarley, with her fleeting and rather tawdry affair with an older man. Amie now works as a waitress in a seaside town. Though she had grown up in the country, her adult experience has brought her “a sense of isolation and a knowledge that the world was false and painful” (70), forcing her to grab at this love affair even though “There was nothing personal in it, nothing lasting” (71). Again Oates contrasts the lost innocence of the old world, in which Amie had loved her brother deeply but had not been able to tell him, with the superficial clamor of her present life. Her lover tells Amie despairingly, “What we say has a meaning only for now, and for this place, and as soon as we go off somewhere else it all changes, it can't even be remembered correctly” (77). While Amie's own remembrance of things past contradicts his despair, Amie herself suffers, like Rafe in “The Fine White Mist of Winter,” an epiphany of loss: “she could feel a fine cold mist rise and subside within her as though some tension, some brink, had been passed, as though some part of her life was over” (79). The story dramatizes subtly the small moments in which Eden County natives feel their lives moving relentlessly forward into a fearsome, unknown future. Like the women in later Oates collections such as The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (1970) and The Goddess and Other Women (1974), Amie is clearly doomed—despite her sensitivity and the essentially loving, gentle nature her name suggests—to an adult female experience characterized by anxiety, fear and paranoia.

Such attributes already belong to Grace in “Pastoral Blood,” the earliest Oates story to dramatize the specifically female terror that has become a hallmark of her work. As Mary Allen has pointed out in The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties, “Many of Oates's best scenes … reveal women's solitary, haunting fears,” adding that Oates “is at least as effective with her more affluent women as she is with her poor ones” (141). Along with “The Expense of Spirit,” “Pastoral Blood” is unusual in By the North Gate in that it deals with an affluent urban world. Grace is a beautiful young woman, engaged to a sophisticated man and sporting a large diamond; yet in the story's first sentence, as Grace sits at her vanity table, she has the sudden thought that “she no longer cared to live” (92). She leaves home, withdraws all her money from the bank, and drives aimlessly into the countryside on a half-conscious journey toward self-destruction. Although Sanford Pinsker remarks that the story's effects are achieved “without substructures of myth or irony” (55), both the story's title and its heroine's name are surely intended to suggest her flight from a false contemporary Eden of materialism and stultifying gender roles. Like the affluent but unhappy women of Oates's later collections, Grace has become dissociated from her false identity as a “golden girl” of the 1950s, and now grasps wildly at alternate forms of experience. She picks up a man and they have sex in a wooded area, an occasion that drives Grace into a further awareness of her own numbness and that inspires in Oates the kind of mordant, “deadpan” humor that Pinsker and other commentators have failed to recognize: “When the man's panting had subsided, Grace waited for a feeling of some sort to come to her. It had been no worse than, say, the Saturday she had had five teeth drilled, or the rabies shots after a stray dog had bitten her” (107).9 Grace's ultimate degradation—she is apparently gang-raped by a group of sailors in a riverfront saloon—is followed by recuperation in a hospital before she returns to “civilized” life. She stares without recognition at her own mirrored reflection, but even though her dissociation from her false identity seems complete, Grace has no choice but to resume her old life and her marriage plans (having decided against suicide), to try and nurture a “shy feigned germ of love” (113). Yet Oates makes clear that another, more determined attempt at self-destruction will soon follow.

Oates's women in By the North Gate can succumb to their sense of terror and vulnerability through the trance-like resignation assumed by Grace after her doomed bid for freedom; or they may, ironically, become one with the savage natural and social forces threatening to destroy them. Thus the homeless woman in “Swamps,” who drowns her baby and brutally attacks the old man who tries to help her, may be seen as enacting a fierce denial of her role as a subservient nurturer. At the other end of the social spectrum, Elizabeth Rockland in “Ceremonies” is the passionate but friendless daughter of the country's richest man. She angrily rejects her father's peculiar, symbolic gift of a rifle for her eighteenth birthday, but despite her bold spirit and her attempt, recalling Grace's in “Pastoral Blood,” to escape her fate, she finally becomes a figurehead in her society's ceremonial rituals of love and death, retaining only her identity as Rockland's daughter. By the time of his death, she has become a faceless veiled woman of forty, helping to stage his funeral “in a grand, solemn, and slightly self conscious manner” (41).

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. Oates has insisted throughout her career that she feels great compassion for her male characters and that she values male and female writers equally (Myers 182). For her, all personages in the world-drama are similarly vulnerable to the barbarous forces of violence and materialism in twentieth-century America. Published in 1963, By the North Gate can best be viewed as an allegorical transcription of the large-scale social and psychological unrest that would erupt violently through the remainder of that decade. The finest of the stories—“Sweet Love Remembered,” “Pastoral Blood,” “The Fine White Mist of Winter,” and “By the North Gate”—clearly heralded a young author equipped both to recognize and to dramatize forcefully the moral dilemmas of that turbulent new world.

Notes

  1. Reviewing By the North Gate, Stanley Kauffmann remarked that Oates “seems determined to prove that the ‘Southern’ story can be written in the North” (4).

  2. Oates has described her early, rapturous discovery of Nietzsche's work: “To have read Nietzsche at age eighteen, when one's senses are most keenly and nervously alert, the very envelope of the skin dangerously porous; to have heard, and been struck to the heart, by that astonishing voice—what ecstasy! what visceral unease!—as if the very floor were shifting beneath one's feet” [(Woman) Writer 59].

  3. In an early interview, Oates remarks that Freud and Nietzsche are “almost real personalities in my life” (Clemons 5).

  4. In a 1982 interview, Oates says that in her writing she hopes to achieve “a kind of homage or worship, very difficult to explain” (Sjoberg 102).

  5. See also Frank R. Cunningham's more recent essay on Oates's early stories, in which he remarks: “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. … Oates is engaged in writing a circumscribed moral history of what she appears to observe as a failed, decadent time in our national history” (10).

  6. In 1983, she remarked: “My method has always been to combine the ‘naturalistic’ world with the ‘symbolic’ method of expression, so that I am always—or usually—writing about real people in a real society, but the means of expression may be naturalistic, realistic, surreal, or parodistic” (Charters 1081-82).

  7. Oates discusses this ballad, entitled “Sheath and Knife,” in her essay “‘In the Fifth Act’: The Art of the English and Scottish Traditional Ballads,” saying that these lines are “an evaluation of order and lawlessness” (Contraries 134). Elsewhere in this essay she remarks that “Human tragedy is a matter of particulars, and will vanish; but the chorus of nature, of the natural universe, will not vanish, and its slow, sure, deadly vision constitutes an ironic consciousness of the way the world is” (Contraries 133).

  8. For a book-length study of Oates's academic stories, see Severin.

  9. Of this passage, Pinsker remarks: “One does not have to insist that lovemaking be accompanied by the earth moving, etc., to be disturbed by Grace's clinical, coldly detached metaphors” (“Oates and the New Naturalism” 57). Samuel F. Pickering similarly comments that the early stories are “devoid of humor. … An inability to laugh is Miss Oates's greatest limitation” (222). Such remarks are puzzling not only in light of the absurdist passages in otherwise serious stories such as “Pastoral Blood,” but especially considering such hyperbolic tales as the O'Connor-inspired “An Encounter with the Blind” or the hilarious “The Death of Mrs. Sheer” (collected in Upon the Sweeping Flood [1966]), which narrates the adventures of a pair of bumbling hit men. The passionate, often violent world of Oates's fiction has never prevented her from highlighting its comically absurd manifestations.

Works Cited

Allen, Mary. The Necessary Blankness: Women in Major American Fiction of the Sixties. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1976.

Bellamy, Joe David. The New Fiction: Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1974.

Bloom, Harold. Introduction. Modern Critical Views: Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Chelsea, 1987. 1-6.

Clemons, Walter. “Joyce Carol Oates: Love and Violence.” Milazzo 32-41.

Cunningham, Frank R. “Joyce Carol Oates: The Enclosure of Identity in the Earlier Stories.” American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space. Ed. Mickey Pearlman. Lexington: UP of Kentucky, 1989. 9-26.

Dalton, Elizabeth. “Joyce Carol Oates: Violence in the Head.” Commentary 49 (1970): 75-77.

DeMott, Benjamin. “The Necessity in Art of a Reflective Intelligence.” Saturday Review 22 Nov. 1969: 71-73, 89.

Kuehl, Linda. “An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates.” Milazzo 7-13.

Madden, David. The Poetic Image in 6 Genres. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1969.

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

Myers, George, Jr. “Oates Writes out of ‘Fascination,’ Not Zeal.” Milazzo 181-86.

Oates, Joyce Carol. By the North Gate. New York: Vanguard, 1963.

———. Childwold. New York: Vanguard, 1976.

———. Contraries. New York: Oxford UP, 1981.

———. “The Nature of Short Fiction; or, The Nature of My Short Fiction.” Preface. Handbook of Short Story Writing. Eds. Frank A. Dickson and Sandra Smythe. Cincinnati: Writer's Digest Books, 1970. xi-xviii.

———. New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature. New York: Vanguard, 1974.

———. With Shuddering Fall. New York: Vanguard, 1963.

———. (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities. New York: Dutton, 1988.

Phillips, Robert. “Joyce Carol Oates: The Art of Fiction LXXII.” Milazzo 62-81.

Pickering, Samuel F., Jr. “The Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates.” The Georgia Review 28 (1974): 218-26.

Pinsker, Sanford. “Isaac Bashevis Singer and Joyce Carol Oates: Some Versions of Gothic.” The Southern Review 9 (1973): 895-909.

———. “Joyce Carol Oates and the New Naturalism.” The Southern Review 15 (1979): 52-63.

Robison, James C. “1969-1980: Experiment and Tradition.” The American Story, 1945-1980: A Critical History. Ed. Gordon Weaver. New York: G. K. Hall, 1983.

Severin, Hermann. The Image of the Intellectual in the Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 1986.

Sjoberg, Leif. “An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates.” Milazzo 101-18.

Get Ahead with eNotes

Start your 48-hour free trial to access everything you need to rise to the top of the class. Enjoy expert answers and study guides ad-free and take your learning to the next level.

Get 48 Hours Free Access
Previous

Literature and Composition Theory: Joyce Carol Oates' Journal Stories

Next

O'Connor's Mrs. May and Oates's Connie: An Unlikely Pair of Religious Initiates

Loading...