Nativity in the Short Story the Girl With the Blackened Eye

Girl With the Blackened Eye

Blaming the victim, blaming the self:

"the Girl With the Blackened Eye" by Joyce Carol Oates

Why do women stay with men who abuse them? This question has been asked time and time again, of celebrities as well as ordinary people. In her story "The Girl With the Blackened Eye," author Joyce Carol Oates sees low female self-esteem as one of the reasons women are abused and often do not actively resist their abuse. Society implicitly assumes that a woman with an abusive man 'deserves what she gets' and this perception creates an almost physical paralysis on the part of the girl of the title. A woman's spirit as well as her body is beaten down by cultural assumptions of how women should behave. The girl is a victim even before she becomes a victim.

In the story "The Girl With the Blackened Eye," the young, female protagonist is abducted and held captive by an older man. The girl is so emotionally victimized and terrorized by the man that she does not resist, even when given the opportunity to escape. At first, the reader is incredulous at this development. However, the girl's passivity is understandable, Oates suggests, given the expectations that are often placed upon young girls: they are expected to be 'good' and not to resist the advances of a man. Enacting this feminine role, however, is dangerous and ironically leads to the girl losing her virginity and her life, rather than protecting her.

Rather than being angry at her captor, the girl, who narrates the story in the past tense from the perspective of an adult, seems to be angrier at herself and the sexualized young teenager she was at the time of her abduction. She describes herself as follows: "A high school girl in the 1970s. A silly little girl who wore tank tops and jeans so tight she had to lie down on her bed to wriggle into them, and teased her hair into a mane. That girl." Although she is sexualized, however, she clearly does not have a clue about what her performance of sexuality means. The girl, by referring to herself as 'that girl,' clearly regards herself as an object of study and observation, rather than as a fully-fledged human being who is in control of her sexuality. Oates suggests that this indicates that patriarchal culture has produced the girl's sexual identity, rather than a conscious design on the part of the girl.

This is what makes the girl so vulnerable to the manipulation of her captor. "He knew all my secrets, what a dirtyminded girl I was, what a nasty girl, and selfish, like everyone of my privileged class as he called it." Even more so than the physical assault she experiences, which she describes in fairly cool and clinical terms, despite its brutality, the ways in which the man affirms what the girl fears, that she is what society tells her a 'bad' girl is, causes her to blame herself rather than him for what transpires. "He raped me, beat me, and shocked me with electrical cords and he stubbed cigarette butts on my stomach and breasts."

The young, vulnerable girl has no sense of self-empowerment, and no sense of self. She sees her identity as something fragile that can be easily extinguished, rather than as something solid. "What you call your personality, you know? -- it's not the actual bones, or teeth, something solid. It's more like a flame...a flame can be extinguished so there's no sign of it, like it had never been." The girl is delirious and only half-aware of her surroundings because she is so sick, young, and battered. Only luck and her captor's decision not to kill her after abducting her preserve her life. But even when she is being paraded around in his car, it does not occur for her to escape, not just because of her physical sickness. "Just a girl with a blackened eye, you figure she maybe deserved it."