The world of Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” is an amalgamation of black and white, where the readers are not privileged to an easy “handle” on the affair that befalls the young and impressionable Connie. The story is a powerful fixture of numerous interpretations and almost mythic strata of a susceptible youth’s conscious and unconscious desires and fears. Throughout the story, the author conveys copious indications that Connie’s encounter with Arnold Friend is not reality, but a nightmare the intention of which is to frighten her into delving deeper into her conscience and making the realization that her behavior might have truly nightmarish consequences.
The protagonist, Connie is a rebellious teenage figure whose angst urges her to refuse the image everyone imposes on her, that of a nice and polite daughter, sister and girl, in favor of a sexualized persona which emerges only when she is removed from the surroundings that stifle this side of her personality. As the author says, “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home” (Oates 251). Right from the very start, the reader is presented with Connie’s secret: her double-sidedness. At home, she is a typical teenager, who argues with her mother and sister, but at the end of the day, she is still her family’s little girl.
On the other hand, her public persona is something utterly different. She talks, walks and smiles in a much different way than she does at home, in an effort to portray herself as a young woman who is aware of her physical attributes and loves the attention she is getting. In a sense, both her personas are equally immature and both possess characteristics of an undeveloped identity. She pays quite a lot attention to how she looks, more importantly whether she is beautiful enough to be the centre of attention wherever she is, she listens to music and while out with friends, she does not shy away from flirting with boys. She is testing the limitations of her physical appearance and her sexual appeal.
Like most teenage girls, she is unconsciously lost in her dreams of an escape from a small, rural town where she finds herself stuck. Connie’s dream-like escape, which she so desires, is like that of the fairy tale character Cinderella, although it promises pleasurable resolution, unfortunately brings unresolved tensions upon her, as they are upon many young women, by a mass culture that, despite aspirations otherwise, unwarily depersonalizes, debases and devours the feminine ideal, branding these girls on the threshold to womanhood as nameless, faceless, even heedless victims of culturally prompted masculine sexual appetite, consumption and disposal (Kozikowski 91). Being taught by the mass media that a woman is beautiful only as long as she is deemed so by the male populace, Connie perceives nothing wrong with this kind of life. She strives persistently towards her own public depiction of a mature young woman, by wearing clothes that accentuate her firm, youthful body, by using make up to emphasize the beauty of her eyes, lips, face, all in order to be able to flirt with (older) boys more successfully.
Throughout the story, the reader senses a dream-like atmosphere, which offers a suggestion that the nightmarish experience was just a dream. Oates hints at this explanation, when she mentions that Connie fell asleep sunbathing outside, sitting on her bed, feeling the relaxing joy of music emanating from her radio, when she hears Arnold Friend’s car (Oates, Showalter 97). It is quite probable that while relaxing in the sun and listening to music, Connie was lost in her daydreams: “Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of lovethe way it was in movies and promised in songs; and when she opened her eyes she hardly knew where she wasShe shook her head as if to get awake” (Oates 253). Consequently, these daydreams turn into a nightmare the main protagonist of which is an amalgamation of all the boys she has ever met, a demon in his own right, stemming from the very depths of Connie’s subconscious.
In the beginning of Arnold’s dangerous wooing ritual, Connie actually feels attracted to him, despite his mismatched appearance, his hair resembling a wig, his weirdly transparent skin and his utterly unusual manner of walking, as if his shoes did not fit him. He is unlike anyone she has ever met, and she perceives him as the older, more mature and sexualized man who is to take her away from the mediocrity she has been condemned to since she was born. However, his gold convertible slowly starts to lose its sheen, and the grand entrance that Arnold has made slowly starts to dissipate into a threat to Connie. His words that he knows everybody, like her family and friends and where they are currently, give rise to suspicions in Connie’s mind that he is not really the prince she has been waiting for, but is more of a wolf that is about to devour Little Red Riding Hood. As he continues telling her things such as: “I’m your lover. You don’t know what that is yet but you will,” it becomes obvious that she is far from the sexually mature persona she has deemed herself to be (Oates 262). She realizes where socializing with such people will eventually lead her and finally acknowledges that all Arnold wants is sex, and not the happily ever after she aches for. Arnold Friend is the satanic figure of her nightmare, the incarnation of her own erotic desires, her compulsive sex drive which is a destructive force which will ruin her nor only physically, but also morally (Oates, Showalter 13).
The scene of her endeavoring to grab the phone, which results in a quasi-rape imagery symbolizes the pinnacle of Connie’s fantasy. It started off with her in control, but as Arnold’s intentions become more palpable, more libidinous, she slowly but surely regresses to a child-like state, where she needs a protector, but no one is home. She finds herself crying for help: “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 was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness” (Oates 266). The stabbing motion with no tenderness serves as a symbol of rape, but just a short time later, Arnold is at the door, where he was before, urging her to come out. If Arnold is a figment of her own nightmarish imagination, the rape is nothing but a premonition of something that might possibly happen to her if she continues to pursue the route of sexual gratification. In the end, it is only her own breath that stabs her lungs.
The Little Red Riding Hood did not manage to slay the Big Bad Wolf, but nonetheless, this encounter with danger had a profound influence on Connie. Her moral consciousness has been changed, but it becomes clear at the end, where she opens the door and goes to her sinister prince that she has regressed to a perpetual state of the victim child. She now understands the error of her ways, but is too devastated to do anything about it. Her wish upon a star and her death wish have become one and the same (Kozikowski 106).
Works Cited:
Kozikowski, Stan. “The Wishes and Dreams Our Hearts Make in Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?.’” Journal of the Sort Story in English. 33 (1999): 89-107. Web. 24 Feb. 2012.
Oates, Joyce Carol, and Elaine Showalter. Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? New Jersey: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Print.
Oates, Joyce Carol. High Lonesome: New and Selected Stories 1966-2006. New York: Harper Perennial, 2007. Print.
