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As Connie grows more frightened of Arnold's escalating threats, she eventually allows her own imagination to run wild, to the point where she can neither think clearly anymore, nor even manage to use her own telephone to call the police.
The fright-inspiring actions of the fearsome Arnold, are foreshadowed early on, when he warns Connie, the night before, after first noticing her outside a drive-in restaurant: "Gonna get you, baby" (p. 2279). From then on, Arnold's quest to "get" Connie feels, to Connie and the reader, in its dangerous intensity, much like the predatory evilness of malevolent fairy tale characters, e.g., the Big Bad Wolf, or the evil stepmothers (and/or stepsisters) that fix on Snow White, Sleeping Beauty, Cinderella, and other innocent young female characters as prey. In this, she is like those contemporary "third force" psychologists she has studied and admired chiefly Maslow and Laing) who posit a different human ideal: communion rather than mastery.
The shaggy-haired man who drives "a jalopy painted gold" (p. 2279) first notices Connie at a "drive-in restaurant where older kids hung out" (p. 2278). Like Connie, the reader becomes frightened by the appearance, words, and actions of Arnold and his accomplice "Ellie Oscar," who both seem like evil incarnate, especially after they arrive at helpless Connie's front door, taunt her, threaten her, and refuse to leave.
Connie's fear (and the reader's) then escalates. Ellie keeps asking Arnold "You want the phone pulled out?" (p. 2288), a refrain equally as predictable as when another wolf, in another fairytale, "The Three Little Pigs," threatens in a similarly rhythmic refrain "I'll puff and I'll puff and I'll blow your house down!" Next, Arnold even tells Connie, as she starts to lock her front screen door in hope of protecting herself from him, in a similar wolf-like fashion:
It's just a screen door. It's just nothing.... anybody can break through a screen door and glass and wood and iron or anything else he needs to, anybody at all, and specially Arnold Friend.... I don't mind a nice shy girl but I don't want no fooling around.'... Part of those words were spoken with a slight rhythmic lilt... [emphasis added] (p. 2287)
As Bender observes, of Oates and her literary...
...
Within "Where are you Going, Where have you Been?" A key motif that Joyce Carol Oates develops, again perhaps based on her own background and potentially, also, on her and/or others experiences, things sinister; threatening; invasive, even (yikes!) potentially fatal.
Joyce Carol Oates in fact shows evidence, within her short story "Where are you Going, where have you been?" Of in fact being both a nostalgic writer and an also sometimes (even gruesomely) realistic one: e.g., in terms of her juxtapositions of old fashioned fairy-tale elements against frightening contemporary working-class feminine realities (and threats). It is perhaps this quality of her work, then that most convincingly and revealingly underscores the perhaps-biographical roots of these (intricately-entwined yet stubbornly opposing) literary and personally creative aspects of her literary works.
Bibliography
Bender, Eileen T. "Joyce Carol Oates, b. 1938." Retrieved November 16, 2006, at http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/oates.html.
Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Home Page. Retrieved November 16, 2006, from: http://www.usfca.edu/facstaff/southerr/wagner.html#preface html>.
Friedan, Betty. The Second Stage. New York: Summit, 1981. 341.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. "Joyce Carol Oates 1938-." The Norton
Anthology of Literature by Women. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar
Eds.). New York: Norton, 1985. 2276-2277.
Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York:
Dutton, 1998.
Oates, Joyce Carol. Heat and Other Stories. New York: Dutton, 1991.
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" The Norton Anthology of Literature by Women. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (Eds.). New York:
Norton, 1985. 2277-2291.
O'Neill, Thomas. "Guardians of the Fairy Tale: The Brothers Grimm." National
Geographic (December 1999) pp. 102-129.
Preface." Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Linda W. Wagner (Ed). Boston:
G.K. Hall, 1979.
Bibliography
Bender, Eileen T. "Joyce Carol Oates, b. 1938." Retrieved November 16, 2006, at http://www.georgetown.edu/faculty/bassr/heath/syllabuild/iguide/oates.html.
Celestial Timepiece: A Joyce Carol Oates Home Page. Retrieved November 16, 2006, from: http://www.usfca.edu/facstaff/southerr/wagner.html#preface html>.
Friedan, Betty. The Second Stage. New York: Summit, 1981. 341.
Gilbert, Sandra M., and Susan Gubar. "Joyce Carol Oates 1938-." The Norton
Although one could write a gritty, objective tale about either boxing or farm workers, and although Joyce could have interviewed either the authors she critiques or the boxers she chronicles, her concerns are now more of a metaphysical nature, and her prose reflects this -- Joyce is now less a writer in the field of contemporary journalist, than a cultural critic who considers her subjectivity a strength rather than
Where Are You Going this assignment did not pass the instructors critique-her comments below: anthony, Thank sharing group project contributions. Your team a good job discussing text managing responsibilities group tasks group discussion board / group live chat, Suburban tragedy: The character of Connie in Joyce Carol Oates' "Where are you going, where have you been?" In her short story "Where are you going, where have you been?" Joyce Carol Oates describes the fate
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? A failure to communicate The heroine of Joyce Carol Oates "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is a young woman who has only just begun to understand the power of her sexuality. Like so many young girls, fifteen-year-old Connie is simultaneously an adult and a teenager: "Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere
For example within the poem this group of speakers "left school" (line 2) it is implied, because they had more "adult' things to do, like "Lurk late" (line 3), play pool, and hang out drinking through the night. Moreover, in this same tone these speakers just as nonchalantly predict (that as a result of their past and present actions combined) they will also "die soon" (line 8). It is as
The wildly prolific Joyce Carol Oates also delves into the role of modern women in her fiction writing, although a quick review of her works spanning the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, suggests it is more difficult to draw as direct a connection between Oates' major works and biography than it is with Chopin. However, like Mrs. Mallard of "The Story of an Hour" briefly delights in a
Distinctly from John Updike's teenage character Sammy in his short story "A&P," who realizes he has just become an adult; Connie as suddenly realizes she feels like a kid again. Now she wishes the family she usually hates having around could protect her. The actions of the fearsome Arnold, are foreshadowed early on, when he warns Connie, the night before, after first noticing her outside a drive-in restaurant: "Gonna get