In her short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been,” Joyce Carol Oats demonstrates how vanity and innocence combined, can bring bad consequences in someone’s life. That is the characterization that the author gives about Connie, a 15 year old teenager who thought that she had the world in her hands, because she never thought of the consequences of being promiscuous or too “outgoing.” The innocence of her age and her overconfident personality did not let her see how vulnerable she was to the dangers of the outside world.
The author of the short story projects Connie as a very independent, extrovert and libertine teenager, who just liked to hang out with her girlfriends, and meet boys. Her outgoing personality combined with her physical
…show more content…
This big distance in between her and her family took her to relay in something else that could give her pleasure and joy, this were all the boys that she had been with. Expending time with boys gave her a sense of happiness, where she would daydream about them all day long. An example of this is when Oats says: “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 has been with the night before and how nice had been” (p.439). For Connie, the boys were the ones that disconnected her from her family, they were a way of escape since it was not that pleasant to be around her family.
Connie’s social life was very active, because of this she knew a lot of people and a lot of people knew her as well. One night when she goes to a restaurant with her girlfriends, she sees a guy in a convertible jalopy painted gold. The guy stares at her, making her feel uncomfortable. After that, he says to her “Gonna get you, baby”
First of all, Connie was not happy at home. The story says that her father "was away at work most of the time," and "didn't bother talking much to them," so Connie didn't have love from him and had to find male attention somewhere else. Connie found her happiness in escaping with her friend to the drive-in restaurant and daydreaming about boys. But the happiness she found in both of these things had nothing to do with actual events; it is based on a fantasy. When she was out at the drive-in with a boy, her face gleamed "with the joy that had nothing to do with Eddie or even this place; it might have been the music." When she daydreamed about boys, they all "fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face, but an idea, a feeling mixed up with the urgent pounding of the music..."
due to her family leaving to attend a barbeque. Like Chet, Connie also has to rely on herself to overcome her obstacles, such as the threatening Arnold Friend. Stegner and Oates both use this plot point in order to establish that their characters cannot rely on their family for help or protection, which emphasizes their transition to adulthood. In Stegner’s depiction, the purpose seems to be the successful overcoming of obstacles that a child, specifically a boy, has to go through in order to become a man.
In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates, Connie is a normal teenage girl who is approached outside her home by a guy named Arnold Friend who threatens to harm her, and she obeys, if she does not get in the car with him. Connie is the main character in this story who teaches us that sometimes we might search for adult independence too early before we are actually ready to be independent and on our own. Connie is so focused on her appearance that she works hard to create a mature and attractive adult persona that will get her attention from guys. This search for independence conflicts with Connie’s relationship with her family and their protection of her. Connie’s insecurity and low self-esteem is triggered by her fear of intimacy. Connie confuses having the attention of men with actually having them pursue her in a sexual way.
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).
In the short story, Connie is a young, naïve, sassy, little girl who hates her mom and sister. According to Oates, “Connie wished her mother was dead” (324). Connie enjoys going out with her friends and going to a drive-in restaurant where the older kids hang out. Connie is innocent, but thinks about love and sex. She is desperate to appeal to boys and succeeds at it when a boy with shaggy black hair says to her, “Gonna get you, baby” (325). Her encounter with this boy will change her life forever, because he is the antagonist that influences Connie’s loss of innocence. On a Sunday afternoon, the boy, Arnold Friend, visits Connie and asks her to come for a ride, which she declines. But, Arnold Friend won’t take “no” for an answer and threatens to go in the house. For example when Connie says she will call the cops, Arnold says “Soon as you touch the phone I don’t need to keep my promise and come inside”
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.
In many of Joyce Carol Oates short stories, she expresses her emotions from dealing with a tragic childhood, and trying to combine the natural world to what it really means. She wanted her stories to feel real by writing about society and people today, that others could connect with.
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).
Her father works out of town and does not seem to be involved in his daughters lives as much. Her older sister, who works at the school, is nothing but plain Jane. Connie’s mother, who did nothing nag at her, to Connie, her mother’s words were nothing but jealousy from the beauty she had once had. The only thing Connie seems to enjoy is going out with her best friend to the mall, at times even sneaking into a drive-in restaurant across the road. Connie has two sides to herself, a version her family sees and a version everyone else sees.
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...
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...
When Clarisse introduces herself, her individuality become obvious. While Guy and Mildred are caught up in following society’s unspoken rules Clarisse is unapologetically herself. While the only other female character is absorbed with the “parlor walls”, Clarisse is fascinated by the dew on the grass (7). She is eccentric, quirky, both idealistic and imaginative. She asks unusual questions such as, “may I make you angry again?” (21). She contrasts the other characters and her peer group. How many people would introduce themselves as “seventeen and crazy” (5)? In fact, many are convinced she is indeed crazy. The school makes her attend therapy sessions because they believe she is antisocial (20). She prefers wandering and watching people to driving fast cars and spending time at fun parks (7). She enjoys meaningful conversation not idle chatter. Clarisse’s unique and contrasting personality makes her a powerful character. These differences enable her to leave a lasting