In "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" the protagonist is Connie, a fifteen-year-old girl who is obsessed with her good looks (Oates 308-309). “Oates effectively portrays a teen-ager who haunts the shopping malls and hamburger joints with other girls just like her, who fights with her mother and feels contempt for her ‘plain and steady’ older sister, and who spends her time ‘thinking, dreaming about the boys she met” (Johnson 99). This popular girl not only likes to hang out with older guys: afterwards they go somewhere private to have sex (Oates 310-311). Her mother rarely asks "Where are you Going?" or "Where have you been?" (311). She does not know what Connie really does when she goes out with her friends because "Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home. . . " (309) and when her mother did actually ask questions she ". . .was simple and kindly enough to believe her" (311).
Connie's "wisecracking exterior . . . conceals her insecurity and dreamy romanticism" (Johnson 99); she spends the whole summer dreaming about boys and how wonderful it is to be with them (Oates 312). Oates writes:
Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice it had been, how sweet it always was, not the way someone like June would suppose but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs. . . . (312)Meeting Arnold Friend was a rude awakening for Connie. She had originally seen him at the drive-in restaurant when she was with another boy (310). When he drives up on a sunny Sunday (312) Friend talks to Connie about the music they are listening to, introduces her to his friend Ellie, and tries to convince her to come on a drive with him (313-314). Connie eventually gives into her fear and presumably goes with Friend (321-323).
Charles Schmid–who bacame known as the Pied Piper of Tucson in a Life Magazine article–did not have only one victim, but three (Moser 19). Alleen Rowe was fifteen when she disappeared (80D; Ramsland 3). She actually discussed things with her mother, who "had lately been concerned about Alleen's friendship with a neighborhood girl named Mary French" (80D). Mary was one of Schmid's girlfriends, so Alleen knew Schmid, too (82; 3). Alleen had mixed feelings about him: "'He's creepy,' she once told her mother, 'he just makes me crawl. But he can be nice when he wants to'" (Rowe qtd. in Moser 82).
One night Schmid, a friend of his named Saunders, and Mary picked Alleen up from her home (82; 3). Mary had convinced her to drive out Golf Links Road to drink in the desert with them (82; 3); Schmid had decided ahead of time to kill Alleen (3). After they had been talking in a wash for a while Mary went back to the car (82; 3). Schmid raped Alleen, then killed her by hitting her in the back of the head with a rock (3). The three friends dug a grave together and buried Alleen in the sand (82; 3). Then they went back to the car and wiped it clean of prints (82; 3). Alleen's mother reported her daughter's disappearance to the police but they believed that her daughter had simply run away (82; 3).
One of Schmid’s other victims was Gretchen Fritz, who he saw for the first time about two months later at a swimming pool (84; 4). Schmid was warned that she was trouble (4), but he liked her so much that he followed her home (84; 4). Schmid would lie about nearly anything to make himself look good or get women to sleep with him (24 ; 2); Gretchen lied just as much (4). Schmid had rich parents who funded his pursuits (80D; 2); Gretchen’s parents were rich, too, and did not approve of her behavior (4). The two eventually dated, and they were wild about each other, but they often argued about the other women he saw (84 ; 4). The details are unclear, but Schmid eventually killed Gretchen, who was seventeen, and her sister Wendy, who was thirteen (19, 87; 3), one night after they had been to a drive-in movie (87). He later buried the two sisters in the desert (87-88; 5) and was eventually convicted of the crimes (7).
Oates chose not to give her readers such a clear-cut ending, but despite some differences the two stories are similar in many ways. Schmid preferred blondes (84) and Connie is blonde (Oates 309). Friend's hair was black (312), the color Schmid dyed his (Moser 23). Friend was barely taller than Connie (Oates 314) and "one of his boots was at a strange angle, as if his foot wasn't in it" (319). Like Schmid (Moser 21-23), Friend's boots were ". . . stuffed with something so that he would seem taller" (Oates 320), he drove a gold car (310; Moser 23), and wore makeup so he appeared to be tanner (319; 23). Connie notes Friend's muscular physique (314); Schmid was a gymnast (21). The biggest difference between the victims is that all of the girls Schmid killed knew him ahead of time while Connie had only seen Friend once before (Oates 310) and while It is clear that Alleen resisted Schmid’s attack (Ramsland 3), it appears that Connie ultimately did not (Oates 321-323).
While Connie was not afraid of Friend at first “. . .the narrative takes a sharp, unexpected turn when Connie is suddenly left alone, separated from her giggling friends and her stern but protective family” (Johnson 100). She was already nervous about being alone (Oates 312), but when she hears a car coming up the drive she becomes self-conscious about her appearance (312). When talking to Friend "She couldn't decide if she liked him or if he was just a jerk, and so she dawdled in the doorway and wouldn't come down or go back inside" (313). At first glance Arnold appears to be a flat and static character, but as his conversation with Connie progresses and warnings start to sound in Connie’s head new aspects to the character unfold. She becomes uneasy because she cannot tell what Friend is looking at while he’s wearing shades (313), he knows her name already (314), and all of his actions just seem a little off (314-316). “He stood there so stiffly relaxed, pretending to be relaxed, with one hand idly on the door handle as if he were keeping himself up that way and had no intention of ever moving again” (316). Like Schmid with Gretchen (Moser 84; Ramsland 4), Friend did his homework before he came to see Connie: he asks questions about her, he follows her home, and knows details about her life before they even meet like her friends’ names (Oates 315), that she was with a guy the night before (317), and that her parents will not be home for hours (318). Friend uses this information to empower himself, to show Connie that she is vulnerable and does not have a chance to escape. In Connie’s moment of crisis Friend coaxes:
I mean, anybody can break through a screen door and glass and wood and iron or anything else if he needs to, anybody at all and specially Arnold Friend. If the place got lit up with a fire hone you’d come runnin’ out into my arms, right into my arms an’ safe at home—like you knew I was your lover and’d stopped fooling around. (319)It slowly becomes clear to Connie that Friend wants her and will not take no for an answer (319-320). In this moment Connie tries to resist but has an epiphany: there is nothing she can do to escape, she is trapped. “Friend’s mesmeric influence on Connie. . represents a superhuman force” (Urbanski). Oates writes:
She cried out, she cried for her mother, she felt her breath start jerking back and forth in her lungs as if it were something Arnold Friend were stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness. . . . She was hollow with what had been fear, but what was now just an emptiness. All that screaming had blasted it out of her. . . .She thought, I'm not going to see my mother again. She thought, I'm not going to sleep in my bed again. (321-322)Friend reiterates this: “The place where you came from ain’t there any more, and where you had in mind to go is canceled out” (322). He lets Connie know that he has the power and she has no choice but come with him else he hurt her loved ones (322). Connie is suddenly initiated with a right of passage that no one would wish to experience.
This initiation story is emblematic of Oates’ stories and “has generally been recognized as uniting Oates's greatest strengths as a short story writer" (Johnson 99). Oates uses realism so we can identify with Connie but "Violence, or the threat of violence, always lurks in the background of her work. Her writing ‘involves conflict between a seemingly settled, peaceful life and a sudden intrusion of violence'. Often the violence is psychological or sexual . . ." (Steinberg). In a world where the most popular programs are crime dramas and news broadcasts that relate violent crimes in vivid detail every day, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" may seem tame in comparison but "horror resides in the transformation of what we know best, the intimate and comfortable details of our lives made suddenly threatening" (Sullivan qtd. in Wegs 87) which is exactly what "The Pied Piper" was all about: no one felt safe anymore.
Modern readers are used to receiving a clearly defined ending, but Oates chose to use open denouement, to leave us wondering if Friend followed through on his threats (which he almost certainly did) and if he is still out there hurting someone else. “. . .Oates's ability to absorb and then to transmit in her fiction the terror which is often part of living in America today. . . " (Wegs 87) is what makes her stories seem real and applicable.
Claffey, Charles E. "Chappaquiddick Metaphor." The Boston Globe. 10 April 1992, city edition: METRO/REGION 1. Academic Universe. LexisNexis. 11 April 1992. Tomlinson Library, ID. 29 March 2005. <http://www.lexisnexis. com">.
Johnson, Greg. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.
Moser, Don. "The Pied Piper of Tucson." Life. 4 March 1966: 18-24, 80C-90.
Oates, Joyce Carol. "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Literature: A Pocket Anthology. Ed. R. S. Gwynn. New York: Pearson Longman, 2005. 308-323.
Ramsland, Katherine. "Charles Schmid: The Pied Piper." Court TV's Crime Library. 2005. 31 March 2005. <http://www.crimelibrary.com/serial2/schmid/index.html>.
Steinberg, Sybil. "Prolific Oates." Publishers Weekly. 13 September 2004. Academic Universe. LexisNexis. 16 September 2004. Tomlinson Library, ID. 29 March 2005.
Urbanski, Marie Mitchell Olesen. “Existential Allegory: Joyce Carol Oates ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’” Studies in Short Fiction. Gale Database. Spring 1978. 31 March 2005. <http://galenet.galegroup.com/servlet/GLD/>.
Wegs, Joyce M. "'Don't You Know Who I Am?' The Grotesque in Oates's 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'" Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Ed. Linda W. Wagner. Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1979. 87-92.
No comments:
Post a Comment