Introduction to Literature

1
Introduction to Literature

• Lesson Ten Oates
• Teenagers

Margarette Connor
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Joyce Carol Oates (b. 1938)

• Unyielding in her attempts to chronicle how
  violence and tragedy can corrupt women and
  those around them. It's a recurring theme in
  Oates's work, but certainly not the only one. In
  her varied writing, which ranges from fiction to
  plays to nonfiction, Oates is exposing the darker
  side of America's brightest facades.

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Chronicler of society

• "I am a chronicler of the American experience,"
  Oates says. "We have been historically a nation
  prone to violence, and it would be unreal to
  ignore this fact. What intrigues me is the
  response to violence its aftermath in the
  private lives of women and children in
  particular."

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Prolific writer

• Over 70 books.
• She also writes plays, essays, and book reviews,
  edits anthologies and Ontario Review,
• she and her husband, Raymond Smith, founded in
  1974.

5
Quantity over quality?

• "Some criticism is plainly envious Oates herself
  has noted that 'perhaps critics (mainly male) who
  charged me with writing too much are secretly
  afraid that someone will accuse them of having
  done too little with their lives.'"
• Elaine Showalter, critic, colleague and friend

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Honors

• National Book 1970
• Bobst Award for Lifetime Achievement in Fiction,
  1990
• Pulitzer Prize finalist in 1993 and 1995
• The PEN/ Malamud Award for Excellence in Short
  Fiction
• O'Henry Prize for Continued Achievement in the
  Short Story
• 14 O. Henry Awards
• 16 stories selected for the annual Best American
  Short Stories anthologies
• 6 Pushcart Prizes
• member of the American Academy of Arts and
  Letters, 1978

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And

• Twice nominated for the Nobel Prize for
  Literature

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Parents

• Born 1938, in Lockport, New York
• Parents Frederic and Caroline Oates.
• She attended grammar school in a one-room
  schoolhouse.

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University

• Graduated from Syracuse University as
  valedictorian.
• While a student there, she won the coveted
  Mademoiselle fiction contest, just like
  Sylvia Plath.
• Received an MA in English from the University of
  Wisconsin, 1961.

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Marriage and Detroit

• She married Raymond J. Smith in 1962 and settled
  in Detroit, Michigan.
• Started teaching college in Detroit.
• From 1968-78, she taught at the University of
  Windsor in Canada, just across the border from
  Detroit.

Oates, Smith and her parents
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Princeton

• Since 1978, Oates and Smith have lived in
  Princeton, New Jersey
• She is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished
  Professor of the Humanities at Princeton
  University.

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Publishing

• Published her first book, a collection of short
  stories called By the North Gate, when she was
  25.
• Since then she has published two to three books a
  year!

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Where are you going, Where have you been?

• The story encompasses many of Oatess themes
  the romantic longings and limited options of
  adolescent women the tensions between mothers
  and daughters the sexual victimization of women
  and the American obsession with violence.
• Elaine Showalter

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Story into film

• Smooth Talk starring Laura Dern and Treat
  Williams.
• Won the Grand Jury Prize, Sundance Film Festival,
  1986

Laura Dern as Connie
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Based on a real incident

• Some questions we should ask first
• What importance should be given to the background
  material?
• Does the story benefit from outside material or
  should it rather be discussed "as is", as a
  self-contained text?
• Does there exist something like a self-contained
  text anyway?

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The Pied Piper of Tuscon

• Name was Charles Schmid.
• In 1964 he brutally murdered three girls.

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His description

• he stood five feet, four inches tall, but added
  three more inches by padding his stack-heeled
  cowboy boots with rags and tin cans. He also dyed
  his reddish-brown hair black, used pancake
  make-up, whitened his lips, and applied a fake
  mole to his left cheeka beauty mark.

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Oates on Schmid

• She writes about Schmid and the influence of his
  story in an article originally published in the
  New York Times, March 23, 1986
• Im going to quote at length, because I think
  its important.

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Schmid quote pt one

• Some years ago in the American Southwest there
  surfaced a tabloid psychopath known as "The Pied
  Piper of Tucson." I have forgotten his name, but
  his specialty was the seduction and occasional
  murder of teen-aged girls.

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Schmid quote pt two

• He may or may not have had actual accomplices,
  but his bizarre activities were known among a
  circle of teenagers in the Tucson area, for some
  reason they kept his secret, deliberately did not
  inform parents or police. It was this fact, not
  the fact of the mass murderer himself, that
  struck me at the time. And this was a pre-Manson
  time, early or mid-1960s.

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Schmid quote pt three

• The Pied Piper mimicked teenagers in talk,
  dress, and behavior, but he was not a teenagerhe
  was a man in his early thirties. Rather short, he
  stuffed rags in his leather boots to give himself
  height. (And sometimes walked unsteadily as a
  consequence did none among his admiring
  constituency notice?)

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Schmid quote pt four

• He charmed his victims as charismatic
  psychopaths have always charmed their victims, to
  the bewilderment of others who fancy themselves
  free of all lunatic attractions. The Pied Piper
  of Tucson a trashy dream, a tabloid archetype,
  sheer artifice, comedy, cartoonsurrounded,
  however improbably, and finally tragically, by
  real people. You think that, if you look twice,
  he won't be there. But there he is.

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Schmid quote pt five

• I don't remember any longer where I first read
  about this Pied Pipervery likely in Life
  Magazine. I do recall deliberately not reading
  the full article because I didn't want to be
  distracted by too much detail. It was not after
  all the mass murderer himself who intrigued me,
  but the disturbing fact that a number of
  teenagersfrom good familiesaided and abetted
  his crimes.

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Schmid quote END

• This is the sort of thing authorities and
  responsible citizens invariably call
  inexplicable because they can't find
  explanations for it. They would not have fallen
  under this maniac's spell, after all.

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Oates on Arnold Friend

• "Arnold Friend is a fantastic figure he is
  Death, he is Imagination, he is a Dream, he is a
  Lover, a Demon, and all that."

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Arnold

• Connie has two sides. Arnold plays her two sides
  to manipulate Connie.
• Broken glass?dangerous.
• Everything about Arnold is fake.
• Paragraph 72
• Arnold is a very dangerous guy.
• He is taking over Connies life

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Connie

• Connie has two sides mentioned in paragraph 5.
• Home v.s. everywhere not at home
• At the end, Connie decides to die in order to
  protect her fmaily.

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Oates on Connie

• Connie is shallow, vain, silly, hopeful,
  doomedbut capable nonetheless of an unexpected
  gesture of heroism at the story's end. Her
  smooth-talking seducer, who cannot lie, promises
  her that her family will be unharmed if she gives
  herself to him and so she does. The story ends
  abruptly at the point of her crossing over. We
  don't know the nature of her sacrifice, only that
  she is generous enough to make it.

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And again

• My story had an ending one might call tragic,
  since the heroine surrenders to death. She in a
  sense is transcending her mortal self she arises
  above her particularity and she's going to ascend
  to death. She looks out from the screen door, and
  she sees the organic world, which is the world
  from which we come, and we're composed of, and
  she's going to go to that world and she's going
  to die. A man has come for her, a rapist, and
  he's going to kill her.

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• Arnold creates a illusion for Connie that hes a
  protector.
• He constructs him as Connies only hope

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Imagery in the story

• Music
• -regulate Connies mood
• -sth makes Connie to go to somewhere
• Religion
• -the hamburger restaurant
• -work with music together

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Imagery in the story

• Death
• - Connie wishes her mother to be dead and
  herself suffers death
• Sexuality
• - Connies proud of that she can attract boys,
  but shes nervous, too.

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Imagery in the story

• Dreams/Reality
• - Connie is going back and forth from reality
  in the story.
• - dreams become scary
• - through dreams, she still has to face the
  reality

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• A close look at the story

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• Her name was Connie. Its past tense already,
  like a police report.

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• Paragraph 8
• sad picture.
• Connie and her mother are sometimes like friends,
  but she still suffer from a hard time with her
  mother since shes a teenager.

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• The music is really getting into Connie.
• Connie is isolated? a predicted danger.