Comparing Short Stories 'The Girl And Where Are You Going?'

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Joyce Carol Oates in his short stories “The Girl with a Blackened Eye” and “Where are you going? Where have you been?” have portrayed women who transgressed societal norms and the repercussions they had to suffer because of that. In this paper, I will focus on how these two short stories are intertwined and the former may be a sequel to the latter. In the short story”Where are you going? Where have you been?”The character of Connie is a portrayal of the 1960 American trend. She was rebellious and had problems with her family. Lack of maternal figure in her life, nevertheless her presence and her constant favouritism towards June, her elder sister may be a reason for her distance from her family. Her father, with the only description of “quiet …show more content…

Unlike a “good woman” she stayed out at night, flirted with boys and gave in to the temptation of a friend who later goes unnamed in the other short story. Name holds no value later because that is an acquired identity and Connie may forget her own name in the process. The construction of identity is questioned, deconstructed because even images of the abuser apparently did not match his profile. Memory is questioned because Connie knew Arnold's face, but her memory may have faltered after suffering the trauma. Later in the short story “The Girl with a Blackened Eye” a red haired, married, mothered, woman gets raped proving the futility of transgression on the part of a young girl. She neither went out at night, nor did she flirt, but still could not escape from the clutches of manhood. Patriarchal society constantly shifts the paradigm of measuring femininity and women are expected to follow it, otherwise they are bound to suffer. Connie loved to dress up, she liked going out and staying in touch but she did not agree to getting kidnapped by Arnold, he took up that liberty because he saw her out one night. Likewise in the other short story, the unnamed protagonist survived because she turned obedient to

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