Beholder, Seal Your Lips In Joyce Carol Oates, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, the fifthteen year old protagonist, Connie, lives a divergent life. At home Connie is very narcissistic and is always in the mirror. Her mother would criticize and oppress her about her looks. When her mother would start complaining, Connie would raise her brow and go into a standing stupor. The sight of her mother and everything around her melted into a shadowy darkness. She blocked out every statement, envisioned her mother as a mirror, and she was the spotlight. She knew she was charming and everything above her negativity. In like manner, Connie’s mother would routinely compare Connie to her older sister June. June is her mother’s favorite, “June …show more content…
Connie’s mother is jealous of Connie and her appearance. She tries to rob Connie of her blessing by depressing her. She castigates Connie by saying, “Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you're so pretty? (1)” In addition to her jealousy, Connie’s mother once was alluring, the old photo albums doesn’t lie. Her looks faded away with time and that’s why she makes it a mission to criticize Connie. Due to animosity between Connie and her mother, June is always praised for. June is characterized as “so plain and chunky and steady (1)” and a goody goody. It was always said, “June did this, June did that, she saved money and helped clean the house and cooked that Connie had to hear her praised all the time by her mother... (1)” Connie’s mother wants Connie to be like her sister. Always chastising, “Why don't you keep your room clean like your sister? [...]—what the hell stinks? Hair spray? You don't see your sister using that junk.” Connie could only block out so much before her emotions started to unravel. She wished for the worst wish imaginable. “Connie's mother kept picking at her until Connie wished her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it “[would be]” all over. …show more content…
Connie wished a wish that you should not speak into existence. Though her wish was for both her mother and herself to be dead, it didn’t work out as so. “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Connie (the beholder) saw fit that her beauty made her unstoppable. The eyes of the beholder asked for a beastly wish which took hold of her. Connie’s words and negligence to her family lead her to the Devil’s trap. In the end, Connie should have been more mature than the plight she was in. She shouldn’t have let her plight grow to the extent she became an insurgent to her family. It’s acceptable to go out with your friends to have some time away from the home life, but to go out and be none other than yourself is not acceptable. Two aspects that is a lesson from this story. One, negligence to your family is a big mistake. Little range away from the family is ten times better than neglecting them. Two, think before you speak. The Devil picks up on diabolical statements. He’ll twist what comes through the lips and seize the words of the
Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” clearly illustrates the loss of innocence adolescents experience as they seek maturity, represented by Connie's dangerous encounter with Arnold Friend. Connie symbolizes the many teens that seek independence from their family in pursuit of maturity. Connie’s great desire to grow up is apparent from the beginning of the story, as she experiments with her sexuality. However, it is clear that Connie is not interested in pursuing a relationship, but relishes the maturity she feels after being with the opposite sex. After following a boy to his car, she was “gleaming with a joy that had nothing to do with Eddie or even this place” (2). This suggests that Connie's exploits
Connie's character plays a big role in what ultimately happens to her. Connie is a vain girl that thinks the way you look is everything. She plays the stereotypical part for girls in today's society. She thinks that as long as you are pretty and dress a certain way then you are everything. This comes across when Oates writes "Connie thought that her mother preferred her to June because she was prettier" (980). By flaunting her looks she could easily give a guy like Arnold Friend perverted ideas about her. It could make them see her as easy, which he did.
Connie is only concerned about her physical appearance. She can be described as being narcissistic because "she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirror or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right" (Oates 148). Connie wants her life to be different from everyone else's in her family. She thinks because she is prettier, she is entitled to much more. She wants to live the "perfect life" in which she finds the right boy, marries him, and lives happily ever after. This expectation is nothing less than impossible because she has not experienced love or anything like it. She has only been subjected to a fantasy world where everything is seemingly perfect. This is illustrated in the story when Connie is thinking about her previous encounters with boys: "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 he had been, how gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs" (151).
Ignorance and vanity can be good, in small amounts, but too much can lead to very unwelcome consequences. Connie, a teenage girl who can’t get enough of herself, learned this the hard way when a strange man by the name of Arnold Friend arrives at her house with the intent of taking her on a ‘date’. Instead of calling the police or locking herself in, like common sense would imagine, Connie uneasily greets Arnold from her door when he gets out of his car, instantly letting her vanity and ignorance get the best of her. Joyce Carol Oates shocks the reader with the twist ending in her short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” in which after hearing Arnold’s threat towards her family, Connie hands herself over to Arnold allowing him
Joyce Carol Oates begins the story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been by addressing Connie’s “habit of craning her neck to glace into mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right” (316). This is interesting because when Connie’s personified death, Arnold Friend, arrives honking at her driveway, her very first instinct is to check and see how her looks. This later plays a role when Friend asks if she would like to go for a drive in his topless car where her hair will be blown around. To Connie, “gawking” (316) herself, was a form of making herself feel high and beautiful but she had two sides of doing everything, “one way when she was at home and another way when she was away from home,” (317). Linda Wagner
Her exposition is painstaking. She sets the scene by making the main character and protagonist, Connie, parallel to an average girl in the sixties. Oates' narrator introduces Connie using elements of description which puts emphasis on the vanity of the main character. Connie's mother is quickly introduced and is used by the narrator to reveal how much disdain her mother has for her vanity. The narrator uses the main character's mother to introduce her sister, June.
During the teenage years they no longer want to be labeled the “child; matter of fact, they have a strong desire to rebel against the family norms and move quickly into adulthood. This transition and want for freedom can be a very powerful and frightening thing as there are evils in this world that cannot be explained. Most parents try to understand and give their teens certain freedoms, but at what expense? Joyce Oates gives us a chilly story about a teenager that wanted and craved this freedom of adulthood called “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”. This is a haunting story of a young girl by the name of Connie who gives us a glimpse of teenager transitioning from childhood with the need for freedom and the consequences of her actions. Connie is described as a very attractive girl who did not like her role in the family unit. She was the daughter who could not compare to her older sister and she felt her Mom showed favoritism towards her sister. Connie is your average teen who loves music, going out with friends, and she likes the attention she receives from boys. During this time, Connie is also growing into her sexuality and is obsessing with her looks as she wants and likes to be noticed by the opposite sex. Her sexual persona and need to be free will be what is fatal to her character’s life and well-being.
Oates drew the character of Connie very well - she possesses many of the qualities that teenaged children share. According to developmental psychologists, adolescents become highly critical of siblings, and peer relationships take precedence over familial ties during these years (Feldman, 455). These traits are apparent in Connie’s unflattering description of her older sister June, “…she was so plain and chunky…” (209) and the fact that Connie spends many nights out with friends, but refuses to attend an afternoon picnic with her family (211).
In Joyce Carol Oates’, “ Where are You going Where have you been,” it was a sunday morning when Arnold continues another one of his daily routines. The main girl, Connie, is a self-centered and shy girl, whose mother is always puts her in the background and makes her feel excluded. For instance, her mother says rude comments like “you think your so pretty” and “you don't see your sister using that junk” (1). Then a guy came into her life. “Where are You Going Where Have You been illustrates a man who uses charms and good looks to get young or middle aged women to satisfy himself, but with this one girl he has some trouble along the way.
It is easily inferred that the narrator sees her mother as extremely beautiful. She even sits and thinks about it in class. She describes her mother s head as if it should be on a sixpence, (Kincaid 807). She stares at her mother s long neck and hair and glorifies virtually every feature. The narrator even makes reference to the fact that many women had loved her father, but he chose her regal mother. This heightens her mother s stature in the narrator s eyes. Through her thorough description of her mother s beauty, the narrator conveys her obsession with every detail of her mother. Although the narrator s adoration for her mother s physical appearance is vast, the longing to be like her and be with her is even greater.
Connie has the need to be viewed as older and as more mature than she really is, all the while still displaying childlike behavior. She shows this childlike behavior by “craning her neck to glance in mirrors [and] checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right” (Oates 323). This shows that Connie is very insecure and needs other people’s approval. Although on one side she is very childish, on the other side she has a strong desire to be treated like an adult. This longing for adulthood is part of her coming of age, and is demonstrated by her going out to “bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant[s]” and meeting boys, staying out with those boys for three hours at a time, and lying to her parents about where she has been and who she has been with (Oates 325, 326). “Everything about her ha[s] two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home” (Oates 324). Even her physical movements represent her two-sided nature: “her walk that could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearin...
Have you ever been so focused on achieving your dreams that you become unaware of your current situation? When we focus on the goals ahead of us, we fail to see the obstacles and dangers that are in front of us. In order to achieve our goals we involuntarily put ourselves in an unwanted situation. Connie, herself, struggles to achieve her goal of being a desirable girl that turns heads when she walks into the room. She becomes so set on being this girl that she doesn’t realize the danger of the situation. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates utilizes metaphors, diction, and imagery to show how Connie is in a constant tug between her reality and her dreams, and how this confines her freedoms in a world that is surrounded with malevolence.
In the story ‘Where are you going, Where have you been?’ by Joyce we can get an insight into Connie's relationship with her mom using the first description we see about Connie's mother and she “noticed everything and knew everything”(4). Here we
Connie’s clothes and infatuation with her own beauty symbolize her lack of maturity or knowing her true self, which in the end enables her to be manipulated by Arnold Friend. Connie was enamored with her own beauty; in the beginning of the story Oates states that Connie “knew
However, as I continued to read the story I began to wonder if maybe Connie’s life was not in any way parallel to my own. I have a younger sister where she has an older sister, but that is where the similarities end. Her mother is always telling her that she should be more like June, her older sister. It seemed to me that June living with her parents at her age was unusual, but the fact that she seemed to enjoy this and was always doing things to h...