Self-Discovery in Oates Naked

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Self-Discovery in Oates Naked

While other, less accomplished writers use violence to shock or provoke, Joyce Carol Oates is usually more subtle and inventive. Such is the case in "Naked," the story of a forty-six year old woman whose placid outer identity is ripped away by a brutal assault while out hiking not far from her fashionable, University Heights neighborhood. Like many of Oates' stories—and in this regard she probably owes something to Flannery O'Connor—"Naked" focuses on a woman so entrenched in her rigid self-image that nothing short of violence could make her vulnerable to a humbling, though redemptive, self knowledge.

The protagonist, a stolid, college administrator, prides herself on her liberal views and anti-racist, fair mindedness. Curiously, she remains unnamed throughout the story, though not without reason. Her namelessness brings us closer to her inner world while at the same time obliquely suggesting that, given these same violent circumstances, she could be anyone, even you or me.

Names represent a kind of social identity, and Oates' main interest here is in exploring what might happen when her character's social framework and the comfortably predictable life that goes with it are suddenly, and irrevocably, taken away. This, of course, is precisely what happens. What then, Oates seems to be asking, would be left? The answer, which is feverishly detailed in the remaining thirteen pages of this sixteen page story, is something this woman would never have asked for nor anticipated.

Like most people in her social sphere, the woman takes for granted the civility and restraints that have kept her, prior to her attack, comfortably exempt from the personal chaos that violence unleashes. All of...

... middle of paper ...

...the story concludes with the woman "crouched," still naked, "in the underbrush" below her house and marveling how strange it is to be seeing her husband at last after "having wanted so desperately to get home," and yet now feeling "no emotion" at what she saw. (138)

Works Cited

Hillman, James. Eranos Lectures 8, "On Paranoia," by Hillman. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1986.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Naked." Heat and Other Stories. By Oates. New York: Plume, 1991.

Robinson, Sally "Heat and Cold: Recent Fiction by Joyce Carol Oates," Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXI, 1992.

Notes

1. Robinson, Sally. "Heat and Cold: Recent Fiction by Joyce Carol Oates." Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXI, 1992. In Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 108. 383.

2. Hillman, James. Eranos Lectures 8, "On Paranoia." Spring Publications, 1986. 13-14.

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