SOURCE: Smiley, Pamela. “Incest, Roman Catholicism, and Joyce Carol Oates.” College Literature 18, no. 1 (February 1991): 38-49.

Common in the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates is what I call her “feminine” character: the young woman who wanders into new territory (gets on a bus, walks down a street, gets off a bus, takes a graduate class) where she meets a man who victimizes her (he beats, rapes, exploits, deserts, forgets her). The terms of her victimization are most often violent and sexual, her control minimal, and her chances of repeating the pattern good. In fact, the woman seems almost to invite victimization through her very passivity and vulnerability.

The Goddess and Other Women (1974), for example, is a collection of stories about individual women pitted against patriarchies. The collective moral of the stories is that it does not matter whether one is beautiful (“The Girl”), intellectually powerful (“Magna Mater”), objective and scientific (“Psychiatric Services”), or artistic (“A Premature Autobiography”), whether one seduces her father (“Ruth”) or battles with her mother (“The Daughter”). If one is a woman, one is doomed to victimization.

Powerless in a sexually violent world, the women of The Goddess and Other Women tirelessly repeat a tripartite Oatesian pattern of enmeshment. First, the small, pretty, young, and aimless feminine character drifts into a dangerous situation that leaves her vulnerable; second, a manly man (associated with masculinity through boxing, cars, machinery, or patriarchal power and knowledge), as if sensing her powerlessness and disorientation, finds her and initiates her into violent sexuality; third, instead of being repelled by the initiation, the feminine character is drawn back to the man or his substitute in a repetition compulsion. Again and again Oates's couples meet—he violent and sexual, she passive, dependent, and seemingly separated from her body—until she, in Oates's terms, absorbs his violence and “wins.”

Critics have noted this oddity of the Oatsian feminine character. Those who are sympathetic, Elaine Showalter, Cara Chell, and Charlotte Goodman, for example, claim Oates as a feminist writer portraying the condition of women in America. While Oates disclaims the feminist label (Sjoberg 273), she agrees that her work is a realistic portrait of American life whose project is to deepen her readers' understanding of the sanctity of human life (Oates, “American Tragedy” 2).

But to accept the Oatsian feminine character as realistic and representative seems to me problematic. Oates's feminine characters are often better understood by looking at their specificity rather than their representative realism. Any generalization about Oates's work is challenged by the sheer volume of her writing. Therefore I will argue that in “The Virgin in the Rose-Bower; Or, The Tragedy of Glen Mawr Manor” from Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984) and With Shuddering Fall (1964), one can see how far she deviates from the representative in that her feminine characters are products of their incestuous and Roman Catholic contexts. So extensive is Oates's use of incest and Roman Catholicism that they are virtually tropes in these works for the daughter's position within the Law of the Father.

To accept Oates's project as spiritual enlightenment is also problematic. While no critic finds easy solutions to the modern condition in Oates, some critics, such as Frank R. Cunningham and Walter Sullivan, note that any solution is impossible in her fictional world: the ideal, “sanctity,” implies enlightened choices leading to liberated self-definition, and in Oates there is no struggle for self-definition because there are no choices; there is only violence and spiritual disintegration. By positing the incestuous profile and the Roman Catholic context as usual, she makes the exceptional representative, normalizes the passive and aimless feminine character, and renders invisible the differences among women that might make choice, struggle, self-definition, and sanctity possible.

To claim that Oates uses incest as a trope presumes a feminist and political reading (as opposed to, for example, Freud's traditional reading that makes incest invisible by identifying it as the daughter's fantasy of desire, and ahistorical by placing it within an inevitable narrative of human development). Seeing incest depends upon a feminist position outside of the patriarchal norm, a position furnished in this paper by such feminist theorists as Louise DeSalvo, Judith Lewis Herman and Lisa Hirschman, Jean Renvoize, and Linda Gordon. Likewise, responding to it (beyond accepting victimization as inevitable) presumes an arena of political action in which change is possible. As an extension of patriarchal power and the presumption that women are property, the incestuous family—in which the mother is absent or powerless, the father and his needs are central, and there is no alternative to capitulating to male desire—is often invisible because it differs from the “normal” patriarchal family in degree rather than in kind. Because the incestuous relationship is predicated on power expressed through sexuality, it includes bullying, physical violence, temper tantrums, and isolation, as well as sexual intercourse. It differs from other forms of abuse in that incest creates in its victim a highly sexualized self-image.

Markers of the incest victim's profile are described by all of the feminist critics above. For my purposes here, I am consolidating these markers into four traits important to reading Oates (for simplicity collapsing subtle distinctions among the different incests, perpetrators, and victims): the female incest victim is angry with and isolated from women while being dependent upon and sympathetic to men; she has an impaired sense of self-esteem (believing that she “deserves” abuse and reacting passively to it, having the sense that she is hollow); she is vulnerable to repeated victimizations (in the form of repetition compulsions that mimic the original incestuous relationship and self-destructive impulses such as eating disorders, drug abuse, alcoholism, suicide attempts); and she is highly sexualized yet sexually dysfunctional (sexualizing all relationships with men at the same time as she experiences sexual anesthesia or feelings of separation from her own body).

To identify the Roman Catholic in Oates's work also requires some elaboration. Oates claims to have laid to rest her Roman Catholic background with the writing of With Shuddering Fall. Yet Roman Catholic symbols (priests, nuns, sacraments, and saints) and orthodox presumptions (a postlapsarian world, violence, the mind-body split, the goal of sanctification, the repulsiveness of female sexuality) still permeate her work. While Roman Catholicism shares with other patriarchal hegemonies a definition of human as male, a repression of the feminine, and a mind-body split, it is unique in grounding these divinely revealed Truths in a male God and an all-male hierarchy without allowing for direct access to spiritual enlightenment. It is also unique in its particularly virulent misogyny, inherited from the monastic tracts and canonized by the Church Fathers. When this Roman Catholic context is combined with Oates's particular incestuous twist, it becomes an especially insidious trap for female characters. Oates's presumptions of sadistic sexuality, passive and victimized women, a mind-body split, and inevitable female entanglement in a web of male sexual violence can better be understood when seen as effects of specific cultural conditions—Roman Catholicism and incest—than as a realistic inevitability of contemporary America.

The most obvious reason for identifying Oates with an incest trope is her fondness for using incest as an example of the violence of modern society. While I do not claim it as comprehensive, the following sampling reveals just how prone she is to treat incest as a norm of cultural violence and misogyny. For example, in Bellefleur (1980) the child Little Goldie is raped first by Ewan, “grinding himself into her, one big hand covering her mouth and nose so that she was unable to cry out,” and then by Gideon: “Eyes shut, head ringing out with an urgency that was more anger than lust, Gideon groped to silence the screams, pressing the palm of his hand hard over a mouth and part of a nose. Be quiet. Be quiet or I'll hold your head underwater” (163). In another example, from You Must Remember This (1987), Felix “liked being just a little angry with Enid [his 12-year-old niece], it made him feel less guilty fucking her: what he might do as her punishment” (317). And Enid responds as though his hatred is just: “He didn't always take care not to hurt her, and Enid scarcely cared—whatever happened she deserved. She knew she deserved it because it happened” (347). In these examples, sexual violence, mind-body split, and incest are taken as representative rather than as evidence of Roman Catholic revulsion for female sexuality and of exceptional, dysfunctional family patterns.

These examples are not uncharacteristic. Many an Oatsian feminine character is the victim of incest; many others exhibit the incest survivor's profile. Of the 25 stories in The Goddess and Other Women, three contain literal incestuous relationships (“Blindfold,” “The Daughter,” and “Ruth”). Incestuous relationships are also central to Bellefleur (Gideon and Ewan's rape of Little Goldie), to Marya: A Life (1986; Marya and her cousin, Lee), to You Must Remember This (12-year-old Enid and her uncle Felix), to “The Virgin in the Rose-Bower” (Georgina and her father, Justice Kilgarven), and to With Shuddering Fall (Karen and Hertz).

Consider “The Virgin in the Rose-Bower” as an example of Oates's use of literal incest in a Roman Catholic context. Oates deems this work “uniquely American,” its characters “both our ancestors and ourselves,” and its purpose an exposé of the “historically authentic crimes against women, children, and the poor” (Oates, (Woman) Writer 372-73). In other words, she asserts the representative nature of these characters across time, material conditions, and culture. Any site of resistance to such “historically authentic crimes” therefore lies in the Romantic promethean individual, since political contexts matter so little. However, the universality of Oates's feminine character is negated by the specificity of traits that define her: incest and Roman Catholicism.

“The Virgin in the Rose-Bower” is a Gothic about the haunting of a room painted with the image of the Virgin Mary holding her child, surrounded by angels, seated in a rose bower. On a visit to the late Justice Kilgarven's daughters, cousin Abigail and her babe in arms sleep in the bower room, where, late at night, the angels come alive, hungrily nip at the woman's breast, and jealously eat the head of their flesh-and-blood rival, her son.

Reading “The Virgin in the Rose-Bower” as though it were a mystery story encourages the naming of the unnamed crime behind the haunting as the father-daughter incest of Georgina and Chief Justice Erasmus Kilgarven. Details about the Kilgarven family mark it as incestuous. Outside his home, Kilgarven is a patriarch, lawgiver, and pillar of his community. Inside his home, he kills two wives through the violence of his demands, calls Georgina home from school to run the house, and shuts her in a dungeon during her pregnancies. Tongues wag at the Justice's behavior, but no one opposes his will; his family is his family, after all.

But all these clues are red herrings. The crime in the rose-bower room cannot be father-daughter incest, since the image of that crime (a provocative example of Oates's theory that oppression fosters art by ensuring a woman's privacy) is written on the walls of the dungeon in Georgina's own Emily Dickinsonesque verse. It is not the dungeon but the rose-bower room that is haunted, and haunted not by the voice of the repressed woman but by the voices and the nips of Georgina's murdered babies. Lying overhead in the attic (with copper wires at their throats, milky eyes, mummified bodies) and inhabiting the painted angels surrounding the cold icon of the Virgin, these lost souls chant, “Impatient with waiting. With longing. So lonely. So hungry. These many years. O cruel beloved Mother: our time now approaches” (144). While Chell argues that these angels avenge Georgina and are therefore a manifestation of feminist resistance, their initial attack is on a mother, and their cries protest their mother's desertion, not their grandfather/father's crimes. The ghosts haunt the rose-bower room to redress the crime committed against them, a crime having less to do with incest than with the betrayal of a mother who fails to love enough to intercede against the power of the father.

It is only fitting that Oates places the haunting at the center of her Gothic, the rose-bower room at the center of the haunting, and the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary at the center of the room. The Mother replaces the Father as key player. This positioning is appropriate to the Gothic, since as Claire Kahane claims, fear of the Mother's body haunts that genre. It is appropriate to the incest narrative, which feminist theorists argue is only superficially about the father, and is more deeply a narrative of longing for the absent mother. And it is also appropriate to Roman Catholicism. At the center of the rose bower is not just any mother, but the Blessed Virgin Mary, the icon of the Mother's power appropriated by Roman Catholic patriarchy and rendered impotent against the power of the Father. The placid and benign image of the Virgin (she who, when given the choice between obedience and self-definition, replied, “Thy will be done”) domesticates the feared Mother powerful enough to create, castrate, and kill. Mary is, as Marina Warner notes, “alone of all her sex,” and as Mary Gordon adds, a stick to beat smart girls with.

The power of Georgina's particular narrative draws on the entangled emotions, the longing for and hatred of the absent mother, felt by the abandoned child. Outside the Roman Catholic or the incestuous pattern—where strong women are not by definition absent—it might be possible to find a substitute for the absent mother or to recognize alternatives to orthodox definitions of femininity. But in this Oatsian universe there are no choices, and as Oates adds, once “something has gone wrong inside this small universe [the family], then nothing can ever be made right” (Bellamy 29). In normalizing both incest and the Roman Catholic appropriation of the Mother's power, Oates eliminates choice and its potential sites of feminine resistance.

Deprived of a site of resistance, those Oates characters who exhibit the incest victim's personality profile—though in works differing in details, techniques, and generic conventions—are affected by changes in context only as superficially as they would be by changes of costume, as Oates's use of nonliteral incest in With Shuddering Fall demonstrates. Oates claims this novel as her retelling of the Abraham and Isaac story, thereby neatly collapsing time, material conditions, culture, and gender. While the novel is certainly about revenge and sacrifice, it is the specificity of the sacrifice—the feminine woman as a consequence of Roman Catholicism and the incestuous American version of the Law of the Father—that sets the protagonist, Karen, apart. Karen is an illustration of Oates's use of the incest-victim profile as a paradigm for femininity, not a representative of the modern condition.

At its simplest, the story of With Shuddering Fall is as follows. It begins in Eden, as Oates names her American farm country, from which the patriarch of the Hertz family sends his daughter Karen to avenge him against Shar, a one-time neighbor who is at present a race-car driver. Karen follows Shar and has a violent sexual affair with him, carried on against the backdrop of the demimonde of car racing. The violence of their relationship builds until it erupts: Karen miscarries her child, Shar kills himself in a race, and the city explodes in racial violence. After Karen is hospitalized for an emotional breakdown, she returns to Eden, where she tries to make sense of her experience. She concludes that her father is not God, she is not Christ, and there is no meaning to her suffering.

The first section of the novel is dominated by Mr. Hertz, who, having outlasted (and by implication sexually exhausted) his two wives, runs the family farm without mature, strong women who could serve as models for Karen. The only other woman is Karen's older sister, for whom she feels nothing but pity. As is common with incest victims, the absence of a strong maternal figure makes inevitable Karen's premature identification with and responsibility for her father. She measures her legs against his and is pleased when others speak their shared last name in respectful tones (28). On the surface, the relationship between Hertz and his daughter Karen is that between the patriarch and his favorite child (“In his company she was never more than eight or nine years old: she sensed rather than knew this and it pleased her. She was his littlest girl” [28]). But the intensity of the bond between them and its sexual translation in Karen's relationship with Shar betrays its incestuous pattern.

Their bond is more passionate than that of parent and child. Karen's father's needs are central to the decisions she makes. She quits school early and “surrender[s] most of her life outside the home” in order to care for him (44). She is “jealous of the drain of energy the routines of life demanded—drawing out her father, for instance, into different roles, different masks, so that she could never hope to know him entirely” (44). Karen is responsible for her father because she replaces the absent woman, her mother. Hertz justifies this transference of responsibility by noting that Karen, small and blonde and fragile, “looks just like her mother—a queer thing to see, at breakfast and such. Gives me a start” (21), and occupies the same dependent (female) position in his household. He insists that Karen, as her womanly duty, take his wife's place on an errand to Mr. Rule, Shar's dying father. That this relationship is premature and inappropriate does not occur to Hertz or Karen. Others, however, recognize its unusual intimacy. When Karen appears uninterested in a young suitor, he suspects Hertz of forcing her self-sacrifice: “He's got you to promise something. … To take care of him in his old age—something like that. Sure. And you want to do it” (51).

Karen cannot resist her father, though her obedience is not really tested until Hertz tangles with Shar Rule, the son of his neighbor. Lying on the ground after a fight with Shar, Hertz looks at Karen and whispers, “Don't come to me until you get him. Kill him. Kill him.” Though Karen is “blinded by terror” and cries, “Not me! Not me! … Let me alone!” (76), she goes after Shar.

Not only is Karen unable to disobey her father's command, but, consistent with her incest-victim profile, she feels culpable. Her sin, as she understands it, is that she has left her “child's bed” too early:

Perhaps she had even understood the price of forcing herself up from sleep and, in going down to the men, the price of violating her role … the rejection of her child's bed would lead, after a series of insane, vivid scenes, to the picture of her father lying in the cold mud, bleeding, staring up at her—how right he was to judge her, to find her guilty!

(78)

Claiming inordinate power for herself, Karen thinks her sexuality has caused the violence between Shar and her father, not recognizing that if her sexuality is an issue, it is one only insofar as it is a token of male power. As the cause of the violence, she feels responsible for restoring peace. Her guilt, therefore, is entangled with her sexuality—relative to her father, Shar, and by extension all men.

The emphasis on Karen's “child's bed” and on Hertz's thinking of her as always eight or nine years old indicates that their relationship is not overtly sexual, but not that it is not incestuous. Incest is a relationship in which an older caretaker (for whom I have used “father” as a convenient categorical term throughout) prematurely initiates a child into sexuality, unmasking the oedipal moment as being not the girl child's desire for the father, but the father's desire for the daughter—the perfectly dependent and obedient object of desire. Karen is not only pressed into her mother's role as her father's mate, but is also coerced into her first sexual relationship in obedience to her father's command, with a man who might have been his double.

Karen's relationship with Shar is predicated on her relationship with her father. The two men are the same type. Shar is “masculine” as Hertz is “masculine” (large, powerful, in control of his masculine microcosm—for Shar the world of race cars and machinery, for Hertz land management and leadership of men). Both men position Karen in isolation from community and other women. Shar's demimonde of car racing is as protected from conventional standards as is Hertz's farm. Most obvious, however, is the neatly parallel gesture of their exchange of Karen. Shar returns the lost child Karen to her father (22), as Hertz gives Karen to Shar in his command for revenge.

In obedience to this command, Karen follows Shar across the barren landscape, her behavior becoming more and more schizophrenic. Karen shows the same odd combination of mindless wandering and indecision that marks the women from many Oates stories. She resists her father's order as she obeys it. She is the aggressor as she is the victim. She is in her body as she is separated from it, “able to think clearly and sanely” (82), yet unaware that she is bleeding. This self-division climaxes in a mind-body split, characteristic of the incest victim's defensive response to trauma: “Karen began to experience a strange sensation then—that of being eased suddenly away from herself and able to watch from a distance her slow progress. A frail girl with blond hair blown ragged by the wind, and a blank exhausted face, pale blue eyes that probably reflect madness” (82). When she catches up to Shar at a rat-infested barn, Karen is at first drawn back into her body, only to distance herself in recognition of the sexuality of his touch: “His touch seemed to awaken her: she felt the reality of the moment, the strength of the strange man who held her. She turned aside and put her hands to her face, shielding it, and looked back to the field and the empty road” (91). Karen's passivity, her obedience, her guilt, her feelings of separation from her body: all are traits she has in common with the incest victim.

After Shar rapes Karen in the barn, the narrative breaks. When it picks up again, Karen and Shar are an established couple, although the exact nature of their relationship is unclear. The narrative voice sometimes labels it “love,” sometimes “hate.” (Such confusion is not uncommon; incest victims express both hatred and compassion for their abusers, and Roman Catholicism has traditionally portrayed women's love as a snare dooming men.) Closely related to the confusion between love and hate is the blurring of the boundaries between sexuality and violence, manifested in Shar's description of his relationship with Karen:

She resisted him at the same time she gave herself to him, he thought; she did not love him, she mocked him, she used his infatuation to degrade him. In the face of such mockery Karen's gentleness, her silence even to his deliberate coarseness irritated him until he felt like striking her, forcing her to cry out—as she sometimes did—in sharp surprised pain.

(119)

As is common in Oates, a characteristic (here, violence), once established, is pushed to its extreme. Karen and Shar's battle for power escalates: “Shar pushed her before him. His jaws had begun to clench convulsively; he could hardly speak. Karen did not back away but faced him calmly; his bitter rage seemed absorbed and defeated by her, mocked by her” (244). The intensity crescendos until Shar's “bitter rage” causes Karen to miscarry, and, within a few pages, Shar to kill himself and the city to erupt in a race riot.

His violence, her sexual anesthesia and impulse for self-destruction, sexuality as an issue of power rather than pleasure, victimization guaranteed by repetition compulsion: Oates would like us to believe that these comprise a realistic portrait of American culture. But Karen is less a study from modern life than she is the consequence of the ideological contradictions defining her, unique because Roman Catholic and incestuous. As a daughter, Karen must be obedient and asexual, as an incestuous daughter she must be obedient and sexual; as a woman she is “carnality” and therefore without soul, but as a saved Catholic woman she must be all soul. Together, incest and Roman Catholicism make a heady combination, defining women as sexual objects through which male agents work out their own empowerment and salvation.

Defining “femininity” so narrowly shrinks the field of possible actions until (as in Flannery O'Connor's “A Temple of the Holy Ghost”) death becomes an attractive choice: “A warning from Karen would have avoided this [her miscarriage], but Karen had not wanted it avoided. She had demanded it; probably it had been her own death she had wanted—she would have pulled Shar into death with her” (248). Karen's masochistic self-martyrdom both fits the incest victim's self-destructive pattern and gives her a resemblance to early Catholic martyrs whose deaths gave their lives meaning.

Given such a narrow definition of woman, it is inevitable that Karen should internalize her sexualized self-image. Her sexuality is not a part of her; it defines her. Consequently, Karen finds her “self” in the sexual violence of her relationship with Shar; she translates all her relationships with men into sexual terms, and she locates her power in her sexuality.

Karen's “self” is hewn in the violence of her sexual relationship with Shar. As he rapes her, she retreats into herself and finds a silent pebble from which her self-definition grows: “Karen closed her eyes and felt her soul contract itself into a tiny pebble-like thing, safe in her brain” (121). Safe in her brain, her “self” is protected from Shar's assault, even as it is discovered in his abuse. Safe in her brain, the pebble is disturbingly outside of history. Roman Catholic and incestuous definitions of her—though obviously cultural and historical—claim similar ahistoricity, in defiance of change and political intervention. As a result, the sexual violence Karen suffers seems inevitable—female sexuality is, after all, repulsive (as St. Jerome wrote, “a temple built over a sewer”), and woman the logical sacrificial victim in the incestuous American version of the Law of the Father.

As horrible as is a self dependent upon sexual violation, even more horrible is its consequence: Karen translates all of her relationships with men into sexual terms. Hospitalized for a nervous breakdown, Karen cries in frustration at being blocked from making all of the men in the hospital happy through her sexual favors: “She had cried hysterically, ‘You don't want me! None of you want me! You won't let me make you happy!’” (297). After Shar's death, she approaches a group of men as she approached Shar at the barn—disoriented, bleeding, silent. Standing unflinchingly, Karen, like Christ, comes closest to being a cultural icon in her violation and physical suffering, dramatizing Oates's judgment that it is in her passivity that the heroine absorbs male violence and “wins.”

It is true that Karen's sexuality, however masochistic, affords her what little power she has. Just as early Roman Catholic tracts warn of a female sexuality so powerful that young monks could not be left alone with their infant sisters, just as incest victims ascribe supernatural powers to their sexuality (feeling that if they have seduced the father, their power must be almost limitless), so does Karen translate her father's command to kill Shar into sexual terms. When she returns home after her release, she fantasizes how she, like Eve, might destroy Eden with her sexuality, seducing her sister's husband, the hired men, and all the men of the community:

I can continue with what I have become … and begin this afternoon when the dishes are cleared away, with the closest man—that will be Albert. I can wear twenty pounds off him and make his eyes swim behind his glasses and I can make him and Celine tear each other apart if I want. Then after Albert one of the hired men. There are enough men for me to feed on until I lose my youth. … And I can hurry my father to death, who richly deserves it, for now I see that he is a cruel, ignorant old man who has disguised himself with his strength.

(312-13)

Unlike Eve, however, neither Karen's sexuality, her sacrifice, nor her deliberate exposure of patriarchal contradictions has any meaning. But while Oates claims this as the universal modern condition, she fails to see that its specific expression in Karen is the effect of cultural conditions that limit and define her.

Karen accedes to the conditions of life as her incestuous and Roman Catholic context has defined them and as her suffering has demonstrated them. Her self-image is highly sexual (her choice of sexuality as her means of destroying Shar, her sexualizing of relationships with men, her fantasy of destroying Eden). Yet she is sexually dysfunctional, splitting off from her body during sex. Sexual relationships—Karen and Shar's, and those Karen fantasizes in the hospital and at Eden—are battlegrounds for power. She tends, in repetition compulsion, toward victimization (her choice of Shar, her desire to die as a result of her miscarriage, and her impulse to “continue with what I have become”). In general, what Karen has learned is what the incest experience teaches all its victims, an early and indelible lesson in the woman's degraded condition in patriarchy (Herman 34). Incest does not introduce the child to sexuality so much as to the power structures (here Roman Catholic) that define her gender. She is a woman and therefore has no power over her body: “Thus did the victims of incest grow up to be archetypically feminine women: sexy without enjoying sex, repeatedly victimized yet repeatedly seeking to lose themselves in the love of an overpowering man, contemptuous of themselves and other women, hard-working, giving and self-sacrificing” (Herman 108).

Oates's use of incest as a trope for the position of the feminine woman within the Roman Catholic Law of the Father is particularly appropriate. In fact, feminist theorists have noted that incestuous families tend to be conservatively religious. Both incest and Roman Catholicism are dominated by fathers, God the Father, priests, and husbands being the chain of command through which Truth is disseminated, and by the father's needs—an early examination of conscience tract, for example, lists lesbian sexuality as a venial sin because it does not involve men and is therefore invisible. Both contexts are without strong mothers. Both have older male caretakers (fathers, priests, popes, and Fathers of the Church) who prematurely and negatively give a sexual identity to girl children in their care. Both are unable to integrate adult female sexuality without exposing their own inherent ideological contradictions. In her incestuous profile and Roman Catholicism Karen is doubly disempowered and different from the majority of American women.

Any quest Karen makes for an authority beyond ideology short-circuits back to Hertz, authority's representative. At her first communion she kneels next to him at the communion rail and feels herself altered, more than human. But her experience unites her not with God, but with her own father: “Her father had understood. He had said little but his eyes on her were fierce, bright, proud” (41). In her final reverie, again at the communion rail, Karen hears in her mind Hertz's voice denying the significance of her suffering:

You were not crucified and changed into flat pieces of bread—and if Christ were not God, but only Christ, only a man, is His suffering any less? It is more, certainly more; we men do not have resurrections. But you are still alive. Consume yourself with bitterness, destroy your own life—but remember that all that you have done is your own doing.

(314)

The combination of incest and Roman Catholicism makes Karen's failure inevitable, determined by the final image of the father's inescapable voice internalized by his daughter.

In a world without mothers and without alternatives, Karen's efforts to escape the limitations of patriarchal definitions always circle back to her father, patriarchy's representative. Karen's condition is not representative of all modern women any more than it is representative of all Roman Catholic women. Karen is too violently erotic, too incestuously determined, too split between body and soul to represent those who do not share her incest-victim profile and her Roman Catholic context. Oates's fictional world, lacking mothers, dominated by fathers and their needs, offers few alternatives to violence and spiritual disintegration. Little wonder that the feminine Oates characters mindlessly wander until sexually initiated and victimized. But Oates's assertion that this passive victim is “representative” makes invisible the differences among women, wherein lie choices for self-definition and spiritual liberation.

Works Cited

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———. Bellefleur. New York: Dutton, 1980.

———. The Goddess and Other Women. Greenwich: Fawcett, 1974.

———. Marya: A Life. New York: Dutton, 1986.

———. Mysteries of Winterthurn: A Novel. New York: Dutton, 1984.

———. With Shuddering Fall. New York: Vanguard, 1964.

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

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