Comparing Joyce Carol Oates 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been'

Maggie Mulry

College Composition II (Honors)

ENG 112

Purugganan

The Unfortunate Reality of Empowerment

Women have long been portrayed as the inferior sex in literature. It is not uncommon to read of a strong male protagonist accompanied by a more subservient female companion who seems to merely tag along and provide validation for the actions of her superior. This outdated style seemed to take a turn in the early 19th century though with the onset of Gothic literature. In this new wave of literature, women took on a vastly different role, often questioning not only the men in their lives but also society's view of women as a whole. As is the case in both Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”, and Charlotte Perkins

Stenson’s “The Yellow Wall-Paper”. In her modern story, Oates tells the tale of Connie, a superficial and insecure teenage girl desperate for male validation. Connie does ultimately find the attention that she so seeks in the mysterious and dangerous Arnold Friend. Stenson’s classic story of a woman locked away and driven to insanity by societal constraints is equally moving. Thus, through their depictions of both Connie and the Narrator as women desperate for self-expression and freedom in the suffocating patriarchal societies of their respective times, Oates and Stenson explore the idea of women seeking both empowerment and independence in their lives.
Connie in Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” is a girl divided. While she is only fifteen and still a youth in the eyes of society, she is desperate to be viewed as a mature woman and is in an almost constant search for sexual liberation thus “everything about her had two sides to it”. Everything from her walk, to her talk, to the way that she dresses is a facade employed to represent herself to others as something different from her own reality. Music plays a vital role in this dualism. It is made clear throughout the story that music is very important to Connie, “something [she could] depend on”. Some, if not all, of Connie’s desire to be viewed as a more sexualized version of herself can be attributed to her fixation on music. “She believes everything her culture has taught her about herself as a young woman, herself as a sexual object, and herself as a person questing for adventure.” With these ideas about how she is meant to act so firmly rooted in her mind, Connie is naturally more predisposed to fall victim to a man who confirms this vision of herself. Arnold Friend is that man. Superficially, Friend is everything that Connie has been conditioned to find appealing. He drives a “bright gold jalopy”, exactly the kind of car that would appeal to a rebellious young girl as it symbolizes not only independence and freedom but also sex and rock and roll. He listens to “Bobby King [from] XYZ Sunday Jamboree”, the same station that Connie listens to. He even dresses the way that all the other boys dress, “the tight jeans...the greasy leather boots...and the tight shirt” Friend is everything that Connie thinks that she wants. He is the physical incarnation of what society finds cool and sexy, and that is what makes him all the more dangerous to this extremely impressionable girl.
Friend also fills a more personal and psychological void for Connie. There are no strong male figures in her life. Her father is hardly ever home, and even when he is he “didn’t bother talking to [Connie] much”. Connie cannot find male guidance in her friend’s father either, seeing as he merely serves as a taxi to the girls, “dr[iving them] the three miles to town…. and le[aving] them at a shopping plaza… never bother[ing] to ask what they had done”. This “moral indifference of the entire adult society” leaves Connie in desperate need of guidance on a subconscious level. While outwardly she relishes in the fact that she seems to be able to act as she pleases and make choices for herself, her inner child still seems to long for someone to control and protect her. Friend fills this role as well. Towards the end of the story, when Friend is becoming more aggressive and direct with her, the reader senses Connie beginning to fall apart and resorting to her inner juvenile. Friend proceeds to strip her down emotionally until she is “hollow with what had been fear but what was now just an emptiness”, and she in turn falls into the role of a subservient female, allowing him to exercise complete control over her. When Friend commands her to put the phone back, the one thing that could save her, Connie obeys and kicks the phone out of her immediate reach. At this point it may seem that Connie has lost herself, that she has become merely a pawn that Friend can manipulate as he so pleases, but it is in this moment when Connie is the most free that she has ever been. At this moment Connie is, for the first time in her life, in complete control over herself. Friend has made it clear that he “[isn’t] coming in [her] house”, so Connie could theoretically wait until her family returned and then she would be safe. She instead “get[s] up all by [her]self” and walks out of the house with Friend of her own volition. This decision to go with Friend shows that Connie has finally left behind that second part of herself, her innocence, and has embraced Friend as the “incarnation of [her] unconscious erotic desires and dreams”. She is no longer a girl divided between two realities of herself, but instead one woman true to her natural desires.
Like Connie, the narrator in “The Yellow Wallpaper” is torn between two versions of herself, and thus cannot be true to her ultimate reality.

The narrator is portrayed, from the beginning of the story, as a women so numbed to societies diminished view of her that she, in fact, believes it herself. She notes that her husband, John, “laughs at [her]”, but this does not seem to bother the narrator and she even justifies it saying that “one [is to] expect that in marriage”. It is at this point in the story that it becomes clear to the readers that the marriage between the narrator and John is not one of equals, but one of a dominant and a submissive, a doctor and a patient, a caretaker and a “sick” woman. This patronizing attitude that John displays with his “blessed little goose” was not uncommon in the time this story was written, which lends an explanation as to why the narrator doesn't seem entirely upset with her treatment. The narrator has been conditioned throughout her life to act a certain way, the way that society wants her to act. While both her husband and her brother have come to “same diagnosis” of the narrator, she “personally disagree[s] with their ideas” but doesn’t feel she has a right to voice her own opinion in her treatment. Instead she inwardly suppresses her true emotions and maintains the facade that she believes she is meant to display, something she has probably been doing her whole life. Trapped in her husband’s diagnosis, the narrator is confined to

a room devoid of all personal touch, and left to become “well again”. She isn’t allowed to leave the room, to socialize, or even to express herself through writing. This isolation and deprivation of self-expression is ironically just a more severe form of the suppression that the narrator faces on a day to day basis. In this room she cannot be her true self, John will not let her “repaper the room” to avoid the paper that bothers her so, just like society will not let her say and do as she pleases. Ironically, it is in this “repellent...revolting....and unclean”room that the narrator truly finds herself.
“Disguised as a feminine topic (interest in decor), the yellow wallpaper comes to occupy the narrator’s entire reality.” She cannot think of anything but the woman seemingly trapped behind this wallpaper that, like society, “slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you”.

As the story progresses, the woman becomes more clear to the narrator seemingly as the narrator begins to see more of herself in this woman behind the paper. She notes the woman “shak[ing] the paper”desperately trying to escape. The narrator notes though that “nobody could climb through that pattern”, just like nobody can safely break through societal barriers. “[The narrator] begins to strip off the wallpaper at every opportunity in order to free the woman she perceives is trapped inside. She becomes increasingly aware of this woman and other female figures creeping behind the surface pattern of the wallpaper.” As the narrator slowly slips into what society believes to be maddess, she is ironically becoming more and more aware of not only her own mental and emotional confinement, but that of all the other women in her society. They are all trapped behind this ugly and restricting wall, depriving them of any expression or power and forcing them to remain subservient to their male counterparts. With this realization, the narrator, now certifiably insane in the eyes of those around her, is fully aware of what she must do to become liberated. She rips away the wallpaper, freeing whatever may

or may not actually be behind it. Upon this escape of sorts, the narrator proclaims arguably the most important line of the story, the line that in a morbid way encapsulates her entire transition from confined and suppressed victim, to free and liberated woman : “I’ve got out at last, in spite of you (John) and Jane? And I’ve pulled off all the paper, so you can’t put me back”. This Jane, a woman not mentioned anywhere else in the story, is to be interpreted as the narrator. As the narrator creeps around the room, free at last, she is making it known that this new woman has escaped in spite of that other side of herself that wanted to remain true to what society wanted her to be. This new woman does not associate with that old shell of a woman left behind when the narrator freed herself, and while she may be viewed as mad now in the eyes of those around her, she is finally free within herself.
Empowerment and independence do not always go hand in hand with happiness and peace of mind. For Connie and the narrator, the ultimate price was paid to become free of the societies that were holding them down. Through Connie’s decision to embrace her sexuality and leave with Arnold despite her probable rape and murder, and the narrator’s descent into madness in order to finally be able to express herself, both Oates and Stenson commend these two women who sacrificed so much to be free.