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 that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright and pink on these evenings out; her laugh, which was cynical and drawling at home" (Oates 1968). Connie knows how to flirt with older boys but she is unaware of the potential consequences of doing so. Tragically, at the end of the tale she is -- Joyce Carol Oates is ambiguous -- either raped or murdered, or both, by a man named Arnold Friend. Arnold spotted Connie when she was 'coming on' to older boys and easily dominates her emotionally before he dominates her physically. An older man, he is no match for her childlike will.

The story of Connie is a common one, and Oates' story is just as relevant as when it was first penned in 1968. What is so frightening about Oates' tale is that it could even more easily happen today. In the era of the Internet, Arnold Friend could lure Connie to his home posing as a young man. And younger girls are assuming sexual personas like Connie. One writer spoke of "8- and 9-year-old Los Angeles girls in a national dance contest. Wearing outfits that would make a stripper blush, they pumped it and bumped it to the Beyonce hit "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)" (Orenstein 2010).

Upon...

There is a nearby drive-in where older boys offer to buy the girls hamburgers. The girls are breathless with the attention, not because they like the older boys so much as they are intoxicated with the atmosphere and the sense of doing something forbidden. "Their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed up out of the night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for" (Oates 1968). Connie is not even old enough to drive, but her parents think that they are acting responsibly, dropping her off at the shopping mall and asking her about the movie she ostensibly saw afterward.
Connie seems to view her parents at best as slightly dense, and even believes that her mother favors Connie and approves of Connie's beauty and seductive power. Connie's mother was once beautiful herself and lives vicariously through Connie. "Connie thought that her mother preferred her to June just because she was prettier, but the two of them kept up a pretense of exasperation, a sense that they were tugging and struggling over something of little value to either of them" (Oates 1968). Connie's sister June, in contrast, is very unexciting and conventional, and Connie's mother seems almost happy that she has a daughter who more perfectly embodies the cultural ideal of beauty. "She [Connie] knew she was pretty and that was everything" (Oates 1968).

Connie's mother has trouble separating her own…