Manipulation: King and Pawn “Manipulation, fueled with good intent, can be a blessing. But when used wickedly, it is the beginning of a magician's karmic calamity” (“Manipulation”). Manipulation is too often a tool used for wrong intent. With wrong intent, manipulation most always benefits one person, and hurts another. This is the case throughout Joyce Carol Oates’ short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, which revolves around two characters, Arnold and Connie, and is based on a true story of a serial killer who manipulated women into trusting him. Throughout the story, Arnold manipulates Connie in clever, conniving ways. Arnold’s traits make him a master manipulator, while Connie’s traits cause her to easily become a pawn …show more content…
In turn, her home life is also a large reason she is so easily manipulated. Her father is mostly absent from her life, which causes emotional distress, especially for girls her age. Because of this, Connie craves for attention from guys because she is not able to get it from her father. Additionally, Connie is not able to view her parents as an example of a healthy relationship, since her father is not around a lot. This enables Arnold to manipulate her because she doesn’t know what healthy attention is. Along the same lines as her father, Connie’s mother is dissatisfied and hates that Connie is so obsessed with her looks, often “[scolding] Connie about it” (Oates 2203). This causes Connie to be distant from her mother. Thus, Connie feels little, compared to her sister, who gets all the attention from their mother. The absence of both parents allows Connie to be manipulated because she feels alone, often rebels against the rules, and wants to be away from her family. All of the aforementioned traits make Connie a target, so much so, that Arnold, a master conniver, cleverly uses them to his …show more content…
For example, Arnold is calm throughout the story. He always has an answer for her, such as when Connie was trying to convince him her father would be coming home, but he kept giving her answers that convinced her of the contrary. This makes him a master manipulator because his answers seem believable, which causes Connie to believe what he says more. Throughout their interaction, Arnold maintains his cool facade which puts Connie more at ease and less on-guard. Socially, Arnold is clever and calm and was obviously able to talk to people in order to find out information about Connie, such as her name, and her family. This makes him manipulate easily because he then used this information to coerce Connie into leaving with him, as he threatens her family when he says, “‘[C]ome out her nice like a lady and give me your hand, and nobody else gets hurt, I mean, your nice old bald-headed daddy and your mummy and your sister in her high heels’” (Oates 2213). Along with this, Arnold appears to be very charming. Initially, Arnold flatters Connie and puts her at ease before he threatens her, which she does not expect. He also uses non-threatening gestures such as leaning against his car and constantly smiling at Connie. This makes him a master manipulator because he is able to socially charm and flatter people in order to get what he
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.
"Connie, don't fool around with me. I mean—I mean, don't fool around," he said, shaking his head. He laughed incredulously. He placed his sunglasses on top of his head, carefully, as if he were indeed wearing a wig…” (Oates 6). Joyce Carol Oates’ short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” highlights an altercation, meeting, conflict and dispute between a teenage girl, named Connie, and a psychotic rapist named Arnold Friend. Throughout their altercation, Arnold Friend tempts and encourages Connie to get in the car with him and lead her to a variety of possible dangerous situations, one of which includes her getting raped . There is no doubt that Joyce Carol Oates’ uses Arnold Friend in her short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” to symbolize the Devil and embody all of the evil and sinister forces that are present in our world. This becomes apparent when the reader focuses on how deranged Arnold Friend is and begins to
Agatha Christie once stated, “Crime is terribly revealing. Try and vary your methods as you will, your tastes, your habits, your attitude of mind, and your soul is revealed by your actions” (Thompson). In a perfect world, there is no such thing as crime and every action committed by a person has a positive outcome. But knowing there is no such thing as a perfect world, incidents happen. The Federal Bureau of Investigation declared recently that crime has risen .7 percent since 2011 (Department, U.S Justice). With a brief love for crime and violence, Joyce Carol Oates conveys these unjust acts of disobedience into short stories. Though her stories prove intriguing, and her details of physical characteristics are exact, she lacks the realistic details of an actual killer. Presented in her short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates character Arnold Friend lacks the potential to kill in comparison to Charles Schmid. The real life serial killer Arnold depicts. Schmid is a much scarier killer with a more demented mindset.
In the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates, many elements of fiction are used to convey subject of themes represented throughout the story, such as disguises. Throughout the story the use of characterization, detail, and allusions represents the presence evil in the modern world. Oates used these elements to capture evil that illustrates the theme that ‘Looks can be deceiving’.
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).
Oates shows archetypes throughout the story. The symbolic archetype shown is “the friendly beast” or “the tempt”. The friendly beast, of course, would be Arnold Friend; Arnold never hurts or does anything to Connie, he just tempts her by saying, “we’ll drive away, have a nice ride.” The temptation for Connie is that she wants to grow up, get away from her family and live her own life. Although, Connie is very ignorant; Connie believes her looks will get her very far in life, but what she doesn’t realize is that ignorance does not equal bliss. In The Sitting Bee Dermot McManus talks about how Connie struggles with independence and how she wants to do things on her own. McManus says “that Connie still relies on others to take her home and other things, and how
Arnold Friend’s layers of deception. Connie’s blindness is the pretext of her loss of innocence
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’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” tells the tale of a fifteen year old girl named Connie living in the early 1960’s who is stalked and ultimately abducted by a man who calls himself Arnold Friend. The short story is based on a true event, but has been analyzed by many literary scholars and allegedly possesses numerous underlying themes. Two of the most popular interpretations of the story are that the entire scenario is only dreamt by Connie (Rubin, 58) and that the abductor is really the devil in disguise (Easterly, 537). But the truth is that sometimes people really can just be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Connie, a victim of terrifying circumstance will be forever changed by her interactions with Friend.
Joyce Carol Oates' short story "Where are you going? Where have you been?" 'runneth over' with Biblical allusion and symbolism. The symbols of Arnold Friend, his disguise, and the music that runs through the story contribute to an overall feeling of devilishness, deception, and unease.
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.
The external conflict in Oate’s story, Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been, is when Connie meets this mysterious stranger named Arnold Friend. Connie first comes across Arnold when she is hanging out with a boy named Eddie. The second time she glances at him he says, “Gonna get you, baby” (p. 7). She ignores him and continues enjoying her date with Eddie. Soon enough, when Connie’s family left for a barbeque and she stayed home alone, she heard a car pull up on the drive way. Arnold then initiates conversation with Connie and asks her if she wants to go for a ride with him. She rejects his offer because she has no idea who this “Arnold Friend” is, yet he keeps insisting, “Don’tcha wanna see what’s on the car? Don’tcha wanna go for a ride?”
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...
In the short story “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?”, by Joyce Carol Oates, the use of the symbolism of Connie’s clothes, her fascination with her beauty, Arnold Friend’s car and Arnold Friend himself help to understand the story’s theme of evil and manipulation. The story, peppered with underlying tones of evil, finds Oates writing about 15-year-old Connie, the protagonist of the story, a pretty girl who is a little too into her own attractiveness, which eventually gets her into trouble with a man named Arnold Friend. The story is liberally doused with symbolism, from the way Connie dresses to the shoes on Arnold Friend’s feet. In “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” the reader can pick up on some of the symbols very easily, while others need deeper thought. The subtle hints of symbolism throughout the story create a riveting tale that draws the reader in. Connie finally succumbs to Arnold Friend at the end of the story, it then becomes obvious that he represents the devil and the symbolism of her clothing and Arnold’s car all tie together to create a better understanding of the story.