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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 of a young, highly provocative girl named Connie. Connie is beautiful and only just emerging into a state of fully sexualized adolescence. "She was fifteen and she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right" (Oates 1966). Connie looks for approval from boys, but has a confident, cool air at home, as she easily manipulates her parents so she can go out late at night with her friends to the mall. Connie's combination of brashness and vulnerability give her roundness and complexity as a character that transcends a stereotype of a typical teenage victim. Connie's plight is particular to her circumstances; she is not simply a young girl who is attacked by a predator even though her ultimate fate is very common.

One of the reasons that Connie seems much stronger at the beginning of the story than she does at the end is because she seems so different from her parents. Her mother is a faded beauty who fights with her daughter constantly but, Connie senses, secretly favors her younger, more attractive daughter over her elder daughter June. This gives Connie a certain sense of power...

"Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie" (Oates 1966). The assertiveness Connie shows at home is not present in the more flirtatious position she adopts when she is 'on the prowl' for boys with her friends. "Her laugh, which was cynical and drawling at home -- 'Ha, ha, very funny,' -- but highpitched and nervous anywhere else, like the jingling of the charms on her bracelet" (Oates 1966).
To the reader, the setting of the short story seems fairly banal -- it is a typical suburban location where people attend barbeques and go to shopping malls. Teenagers hang out together and get hamburgers late at night or go to the movies. But Connie, because certain locations are forbidden, sees the drive-thru as an exciting place where she can meet boys and prove to herself that she has power, because she has beauty and can provoke desire. "All the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music and the humid night air of July" (Oates 1966).

Connie clearly wishes to be different than her parents and different from her sister. Her sister is overweight and dowdy, and is unable to escape the chains of the suburban life in which she dwells. Connie seems to love her mother, but she also feels a sense of superiority over her, given that she is young and beautiful, while her mother's beauty is fading. Her father is distant, and gives her no attention, so she seeks it from older boys. Her ability…