Analysis Of The Temple By Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates could be described as a “social novelist” but of a peculiar kind. She is not concerned with demonstrating the power of relationships, but rather the struggle of people expressing their fate with relationships to society. Oates also wants to express her concern with people in a way that they express themselves and the conscious they are ‘living’ in. She is also more than most woman writers, she is expressively open to the social turmoil, and the chaos of American life. Oates states how the human mind is simply a “wonderland”, and the significance of that to the social conflicts that is America today simply collide but do not connect (Wagner-Martin, 117). She was born in 1938 in Lockport New York and has published over 40 novels and creating countless short stories, as well as plays and poetry. She had a passion for writing since she was young, but

Perhaps maybe these are characters Oates relates to since she consistently uses these traits. In another short story titled “The Temple” we can also see this idea. An unnamed older lady hears a constant mewing cry distant from her home, which drives her nearly insane. She digs in this garden which was her mother’s a long time ago, which notifies the reader that this home is very old if it was passed down in generations. She begins to dig in this unkempt garden for this sound, and discovers a skull and other fragments of a skeleton. There is no other character in this story, so when she’s talking aloud, she’s talking to this skull. The woman in this story could be going insane, since a skeleton can’t make sounds, she’s imagining it or she’s going insane from hearing the sound from somewhere else. When she’s talking to this skull, she says “I’m here now, don’t worry.” Which is odd enough because Oates uses his morbid use of imagery, and in this story, she connects it with an older lady who seems innocent but nearly crazy