Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is a modern

interpretation of the classic narrative of evil tempting innocence. Oates’ version of the devil

allegory combines this Christian model of temptation with contemporary secular society. Connie

is a pretty fifteen year-old girl, beginning the process of maturation into adulthood. She begins to

become aware of her ability to act of her own volition, but her naivete renders her ignorant to

Arnold Friend’s layers of deception. Connie’s blindness is the pretext of her loss of innocence

and subsequent fall from grace.

Connie plays with the idea of adulthood, but at fifteen, she is still too young for her

actions to be deemed acceptable by her parents so Connie lives a dual life. She is one person at

home and someone completely different when she leaves. She unbuttons her blouse, adds some

sensuality to her stride, wears lipstick and adds a flirtation to her laugh when she leaves her

home and family. The narration implies that Connie experiments with sexuality, spending hours

with boys in alleyways, but her conception of sex, love, and boys is highly romanticized and

naive, “Her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and

how nice he had been, how sweet it always was, not the way someone like June would suppose

but sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs,” (122). Her idealized

conception of her encounters highlight her fixation on a kind of lived fantasy blinding her from

reality. Connie acts out mini-romances with boys that she compares to dreamy representations in

movies and songs. However, Connie’s preoccupation with boys has nothing to do with the

individual bo...

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that she omnisciently sees herself walk out to Arnold Friend and her inevitable ruin. Connie steps

outside of her house, marking her fall from grace, innocence lost, and the awakening of

consciousness.

The anthropomorphizing of a figure of absolute evil is archetypical -- from Satan in

Milton’s Paradise Lost, to Mephistopholes in Goethe’s Faust. The grotesqueness of Arnold

Friend lies in Connie’s blindness; she misses what any reader could easily miss. Through Oates’

depiction of an incarnate Devil preying on a contemporary youth, she captures the timelessness

of the reality and presence of evil. Oates deviates from Paradise Lost and Faust in that there is no

redemption for Connie. Her twisted fate is all there is for her. This nihilistic close leaves us with

a voided sentiment, but that seems to be just what the Devil would want.