To criticize Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” as a horror story, I will examine three main Criteria. First, the story’s main characters and their description as victims and predators. The readers’ identification of how the characters are relatable, and how the author’s portrayal of them touches the reader’s sympathy. Secondly, suspense and extraordinary and mysterious elements taking place in the story and the predator’s motive. Anticipation and dread also belong to this criterion, but I will not examine it because it is not relevant to the story. Lastly, the ending of the story and whether it is predictable or it is unexpected.
“Where Are you Going, Where Have You Been?” tells the story of a girl named Connie, who spends
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her time going out with friends and meeting new boys. One evening she meets a strange guy in a parking lot. On Sunday afternoon when she is home alone the strange guy shows up in her driveway, and he introduces himself as Arnold Friend. Arnold and Connie start having a conversation, and she soon realizes that Arnold is a threat. At some point, he starts threatening her family if she calls the cops. Connie tries to call the police, but her attempt isn’t successful because she is too nervous and panicked and eventually she gives up and joins Arnold. In the story, Connie represents a typical teenager who spends most of her summer time going out with friends and meeting boys. She is superficial and vain. She is an ordinary teenager who lives her life as any girl who is in her age. She has problems with her mother and sister as all teenagers. She is full of teenage attitudes: flirty, fantasizing about romance, and constantly looking into mirrors to see her beauty. She is obsessed about how she looks, she always listens to music and wants to explore her sexual desires. She has two personalities. She acts one way when she’s home and another way when she’s somewhere else. The first words that we hear from Arnold are “Gonna get you, baby.” (Oates, 1974) He is psychotic and stalked Connie to her house. Arnold is a manipulative character that the author represents him as the ‘predator’, who uses his tongue as a tool to make Connie his victim. No matter how much Connie tries to refuse his suggestion of having a ride, he keeps talking and talking. He never abuses Connie physically, but his use of words and his manipulative language are enough to threat and horrify Connie and reach his goals of having her. Connie’s character is relatable to readers because she signifies teenagers and their mindsets.
She is relevant to readers because of her precociousness; the reader understands her conflict in finding independence and sexual desires. The author represents her as the ‘victim’ of the story but not as a victim who suffers from violent abuse. Oates portrays her as a victim of mind-manipulation from the strange guy standing in her driveway. Arnold’s character is not relatable to the readers because he is an unordinary character, a psychopath, and a supernatural human being. In contrast to Connie's deep and emotional character, Arnold identity is not clear, and the reader isn’t provided with a background story similar to Connie’s. As the story goes on, it is obvious that he’s not the person he pretends to be. He is much older that he says he is. His intentions could be interpreted as a rapist and even a …show more content…
murderer. At the beginning of the story, the author portrays Connie as a spoiled teenager who sees herself prettier than her mother and sister. To evoke sympathy for Connie is not easy because she thinks she’s better than everyone and everything. However, Oates introduces another side to her character that is in the process of defining herself and finding out who she is. Connie has a dual personality. She acts differently when she’s home and when she’s outside. “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home.” (Oates, 1974) The sympathy for Connie is stronger when Arnold’s actions represent a threat to her. When his intentions are clear, the readers have sympathy for her as she is trapped in a position that is beyond her. “Her heart was almost too big now for her chest, and its pumping made sweat break out all over her” (Oates, 1974), and at this moment she has become the victim and the pray. There are several suspenseful elements in the story. From the very beginning, we are introduced to the negative relationship Connie has with her family. But, this provides the story a suspenseful moment, when she has to decide between sacrificing herself or her family she chooses to surrender herself to Arnold. Oates puts elements of suspense in her story through her style of writing. The language used is casual. For this reason, Connie’s realization of the danger she’s in becomes more striking. The way and the style Oates uses to describe Arnold’s casual conversation with Connie and how he manages to control Connie without any physical force. Connie realizes that she has to call the police, but she couldn’t do it because of her state of anxiety and stress, she grabs the phone, but all she does is screaming into it. She realizes that she can’t fight Arnold back and walks out through the door and gives herself to him as if she no longer owns herself. When Connie tries to tricks Arnold that her dad is coming back to take her, Arnold answers back, and we find out that he is aware where Connie’s family are, and he even has a knowledge of what they are doing at an exact given moment, he even knows her best friend’s name. However, we never know how he found out all these information. The unknown information in the story add a mysterious element that adds more suspense in the readers, as they start figuring out how dangerous and threatening is this stalking character. The numbers painted on his car hold a mystery in there meaning that the audience never finds out what they mean as well. Arnold’s actions represent an extraordinary case of stalking. He sees Connie one time in a parking lot. They don’t meet properly, and they don’t exchange names. But the most extraordinary thing happens when Arnold appears in her doorway, as he has all the private information about Connie’s life. He seems to stalk virgins and attractive young girls. Therefore, his case of stalking represented by the author is an extraordinary one. Arnold is motivated by her prettiness and the fact that she is vain. Arnold finds Connie attractive from their first and only meeting. Arnold knows that Connie is vain and can easily be a victim of manipulation that he is so skilled at. Eventually, Arnold successes in manipulating her and make her do what he wants her to do from the very beginning, he even makes her paralyzed from the fear he causes her. The ending of the story is unexpected and unpredictable.
There’s a mystery in the ending itself, which gives a sense of horror to the audience. The reader doesn’t know what is going to happen to Connie. Is she going to be raped? Or get killed? When Connie runs to the phone, the reader gets excited and feels that something good is going to happen to her and that her destiny is about to change to better. But the author misleads the audience and manipulates them to make the story more horrifying and exciting. As soon as Connie realizes the danger she’s in is pretty serious, the language of the story shifts from being realistic to supernatural. Connie’s hearts starts “pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn’t hers either”/ “She watched herself push the door slowly open as if she were back safe somewhere in the other doorway”. (Oates, 1974) This seems like more of a fiction and horror than real events. Arnold calls her “blue-eyed girl”, but her eyes are brown, which suggest that Connie isn’t the same anymore she has transferred into something completely different. The very last scene that we get from the story is Arnold surrounded by “vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him—so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it.” (Oates, 1974) This image can be interpreted as Connie’s defeat of sacrificing herself to save her family from Arnold’s threats of hurting
them. After examining the three criteria, “Where Are You going, Where Have You Been?” meets almost all the categories examined except Arnold’s character being reliable to the audience, which weakens the story as a horror. In contrast to Connie’s character as she represents young adolescences. Connie and Arnold are perfectly described as a prey and a predator, and it is obvious in their actions and reactions toward each other and themselves. As for suspense, the author puts elements of mystery, extraordinary events and the predator’s motive to attack his prey. The ending is the most unpredictable part of the entire narrative, and it is far from what the audience expectations. The author provides a false lead during the scene of Connie calling the cops. The audience gets positive vibes but it doesn’t last very long, and they are shocked by the ambiguous ending.
By doing that, it also gave Arnold Friend a hint that she was easy to manipulate. Then, concerning the dialogue element, the explanation for both the movie and the short-story will be the same since I use the passage between Arnold Friend and Connie at her house. Since Connie is responding so naively at the very beginning of their conversation, it is almost certain that Arnold would succeed to manipulate her. In fact, the biggest mistake she made was to actually get out of the house and start the conversation with him: "She went into the kitchen and approached the door slowly, then hung out the screen door, her bare toes curling down off the step" (314). Through this action, it already gave Arnold Friend the idea that she is innocent and vulnerable; the only thing left was to seduce her with his words. Finally, I believe the movie would better suits the theme because we can visually observe how innocent she is with her mimics, her behaviour, her clothing. Although Oates’ short-story is very descriptive, the message behind this story doesn’t have the same effect on us than the
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” is told from the point of view of a girl with “long dark blond hair that drew anyone’s eye to it” named Connie. Connie was a very pretty fifteen year old girl, which loved to go out with her friends and meet new people. Laura’s, the best friend of Connie, father “drove the girls the three miles to town and left them at a shopping plaza so they could walk through the stores or go to a movie”. It became a lifestyle for Connie which eventually became a problem being that she met a suspicious
the story is Arnold tempting Connie to leave the safe haven that is her home and
Arnold Friend takes advantage of Connie’s teenage innocence for something of a much more sinister purpose. Connie thought she had it all figured out until Arnold Friend came into her life and up her driveway on one summer, Sunday afternoon and made her realize how big and scary the world can be. Arnold embodies everything that Connie has dreamed about in a boy, but is in the most malevolent form of Connie’s dream boy. She always wanted to get away from her family because she has always felt as if she didn’t belong and Arnold can make this possible just in the most predatory way. She always thought sex would be sweet (and consensual) and that she would be in charge of how it progressed, Arnold strips her of the authority she’s held in any other encounter with a boy. The moral of the story is always be careful what you wish
The short story where are you going, where have you been is about a teenage girl who is, vain, self-doubting and affixed in the present. She does not know anything about the past or doubts it and has no plan of the future. She argues with her mother and she thinks she is jealous of her. The start of the plot is not very dramatic rather it is more like an introduction. We get a good description of the story’s Protagonist, Connie at the beginning of the story and through out. She is familiar, the typical American teenager, who dream, fantasize and have difficulty differentiating the real world from fairytale. Kozikowsky compares the story to the popular recent Disney tale “Cinderella” (1999). In “Where are you going, where have you been?” the setting of the story is not revealed at the beginning. The reader slowly learns about Connie’s family and her living condition throughout the story.
“He wagged a finger and laughed and said, “Gonna get you, baby.” The quote foreshadows future events in the story because of the fact that Arnold says, “Gonna get you, baby.” There’s no actual reasoning behind why he chooses her, but it states he might try something later on. Oates also uses small wording to kind of hint at the readers. “Her mind was filled was all filled with trash daydreams.” (Oates 1). This quote tends to shape the short story. This quote leads readers to the possibility that Connie’s experience with Arnold could have all been a foreshadowing to a trashy daydream. In the article “Oates’s Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by David K. Gratz, he also points out the quote. “Both Rubin and Winslow note that seems to be falling asleep just before he arrives, and Rubin points out the nightmare quality of her being unable to act in the end.” (Gratz). This article more or less solidifies the fact that Connie might of fell asleep and dreamed up the whole encounter. In all, Oates uses multiple accounts of foreshadowing to further the possibility of the encounter being all just a bad dream of
...tomy between reality and dreams quite well throughout her piece. She provides the reader with two ways to experience the story: either as reality or as reality that turns into a nightmare. This dichotomy that Oates creates “allows the reader to escape this story, and allows this story to end” (Hurley 374). The end of the story shows Connie entering the new world of experience, and Oates wants the reader to sense her fear. Oates intricately provides the reader with clues that help see why Connie’s experience with Arnold is just a nightmare. She also allows the reader to see how this nightmare is meant to scare Connie into making the realization that her decisions have consequences. I hope that anyone reading this learns from Connie that not everything we do is good for us, and we have to think about the consequences of our actions, whether good or bad, before we act.
Connie's personality also had two sides to it. The side she displayed at home is mocking and sneering, and the side she displayed in public made her look trashy. It seemed that she didn't know who she was or what she wanted to be. All she let us know is that she wanted "the caress of love," she wanted someone to be "sweet, gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs" (Oates 980). This could have been why she did not put up much of a fight at the end and walked straight into Arnold's arms. It seemed almost like this was what she wanted and what she had been dreaming about.
Have you ever been so focused on achieving your dreams that you become unaware of your current situation? When we focus on the goals ahead of us, we fail to see the obstacles and dangers that are in front of us. In order to achieve our goals we involuntarily put ourselves in an unwanted situation. Connie, herself, struggles to achieve her goal of being a desirable girl that turns heads when she walks into the room. She becomes so set on being this girl that she doesn’t realize the danger of the situation. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates utilizes metaphors, diction, and imagery to show how Connie is in a constant tug between her reality and her dreams, and how this confines her freedoms in a world that is surrounded with malevolence.
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”. Backpack Literature. An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy & Dana Gioia. 4th ed. New Jersey: Pearson, 2006. (323-336). Print.
Joyce Carol Oates’s short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” clearly illustrates the loss of innocence adolescents experience as they seek maturity, represented by Connie's dangerous encounter with Arnold Friend. Connie symbolizes the many teens that seek independence from their family in pursuit of maturity. Connie’s great desire to grow up is apparent from the beginning of the story, as she experiments with her sexuality. However, it is clear that Connie is not interested in pursuing a relationship, but relishes the maturity she feels after being with the opposite sex. After following a boy to his car, she was “gleaming with a joy that had nothing to do with Eddie or even this place” (2). This suggests that Connie's exploits
Oates takes us to a journey of rebellion as the protagonist sorts through self-created illusion in order to come to terms with her own sexual inexperience. Connie’s desires for attention from the opposite sex, her vanity and immaturity blind her to think of the real intentions of guys, in this case Arnold Friend. A character that many critics argue is real, yet, others argue it was created by Connie’s mind.
When approached by Arnold Friend at first, she was skeptical but was still charmed by him. As she began to feel uneasy, Connie could have used her intuition to realize that he was trouble. Once she had been engaged by Arnold, her life was over. The influences on Connie and her lack of instilled reasoning led to her down fall. Her family’s fragmented nature was echoed in her actions; consequently, she was unable to communicate with her parents, and she was never was able to learn anything of significance. She felt abandoned and rejected, because no one took the initiative to teach her how to make good decisions. Connie was unable to mature until she was faced with death and self sacrifice. In the end, her situation made it difficult for her to think and reason beyond the position she was in. By not being able apply insight, she fell into Arnold Friends lure. Misguidance by the parents strongly contributed to Connie’s
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
Rubin attempts to convey the idea that Connie falls asleep in the sun and has a daydream in which her “…intense desire for total sexual experience runs headlong into her innate fear…” (58); and aspects of the story do seem dream like - for instance the way in which the boys in Connie’s daydreams “…dissolved into a single face…” (210), but the supposition that the entire episode is a dream does not ring true. There are many instances in which Connie perceives the frightening truth quite clearly; she is able to identify the many separate elements of Friend’s persona - “… that slippery friendly smile of his… [and] the singsong way he talked…” (214). But because of the lack of attachment with her own family, and her limited experience in relating deeply to others, “…all of these things did not come together” (214) and Connie is unable to recognize the real danger that Arnold Friend poses until it is too late.