Where Are You Going This Assignment Did

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 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 over her mother. "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 to sneak out to the drive thru when she is supposed to be with her girlfriends at the mall causes Connie to feel a sense of superiority over her parents.

With the introduction of Arnold Friend into the story, however, the tone of the tale begins to shift. Before Friend arrives, the main conflict of the story is between Connie, who is willing to take a risk and press at the boundaries of her suburban life, and the conventional, dull existence of her parents. Friend has a kind of demonic knowledge of everything about Connie in a way that terrifies the girl: "I took a special interest in you, such a pretty girl, and found out all about you -- like I know your parents and sister are gone somewheres and I know where and how long they're going to be gone" (Oates 1966). When Friend first pulls up to her door, Connie is excited, thinking it is one of the boys from school, then, despite her disappointment she is flirtatious with Friend. But when she notes how much older he is than her, she quickly realizes that the sexualized persona she has been putting on is just an act, and she is terrified.

The introduction of the ironically name 'Friend' (who is seeking a sexual relationship with Connie and is no friend at all) is almost as shocking to the reader as it is to Connie. The progression of the story, from describing Connie's flirtatiousness, to her first experimentation with boys, seems to suggest that the conflict she will have will be regarding her early sexual experimentation. Instead, Arnold Friend's presence makes Connie and the reader realize how innocent Connie still is, and how little control she has over who desires her and how she can use her body. Friend's black leather and beat-up car makes him seem dangerous and very different from the ordinary townspeople Connie wishes to distinguish herself from, but by the end of the story it is clear how conventional Connie's morality is: "Maybe you two better go away,' Connie said faintly'" too afraid to be assertive.