This essay examines Joyce Carol Oates's short story "The Girl With the Blackened Eye" through the lens of victim-blaming and female self-perception. It argues that the protagonist's passivity in the face of abduction and abuse is not weakness but a product of patriarchal cultural conditioning that teaches young women to suppress resistance, accept blame, and distrust their own sense of self. The essay traces how the narrator's self-objectification, her internalized shame, and her belief that no one will help her all reflect broader societal norms. Drawing closely on the story's language and imagery, the analysis shows how these forces make the girl a victim long before the abduction itself occurs.
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 identifies 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 in the girl of the title. A woman's spirit, as well as her body, is beaten down by cultural assumptions about how women should behave. The girl is a victim even before she becomes a victim.
In the story, the young female protagonist is abducted and held captive by an older man. She is so emotionally victimized and terrorized 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 so 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 both 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 angrier at herself and at 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, she clearly has no understanding of what her performance of sexuality means. By referring to herself as "that girl," the narrator treats herself as an object of study and observation rather than as a fully formed human being in control of her own sexuality. Oates suggests that this indicates patriarchal culture has produced the girl's sexual identity, rather than any conscious design on the girl's part.
This is precisely what makes the girl so vulnerable to her captor's manipulation. His ability to exploit her pre-existing self-doubt is central to the story's argument about victim-blaming and gendered socialization.
"He knew all my secrets, what a dirty-minded girl I was, what a nasty girl, and selfish, like everyone of my privileged class as he called it." Even more than the physical assault she endures — which she describes in fairly cool and clinical terms, despite its brutality — the ways in which the man confirms what the girl already fears about herself cause 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 captor does not need to construct the girl's shame from nothing; he simply amplifies the self-doubt that patriarchal culture has already instilled in her. This dynamic — where the abuser exploits internalized shame rather than overcoming external resistance — is what Oates frames as the true violence of gendered socialization.
"Girl's identity feels extinguishable, not solid"
"Passivity normalized as cause of survival"
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