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One of the main characters of the story by Joyce Carol Oates is a fifteen year old girl Connie. She has a conflict with her mother and tries to ignore all comments about her personality. The girl likes to look in a mirror at her face and think that she is pretty. Despite the opinion of her mother, she is really cute. Connie has a long dark blond hair, which is always stacked into a nice hairstyle, and a lovely smile that attract the attention of everyone on the street. The girl was looked like her mother, on the photos where she was young and beautiful. The girl may seem imperceptive and immature because she cannot opposes anything to the reproachful speeches of her mother. 2) Define Connie’s relationship with her mother, sister, and father. What is missing from this family? Why does Connie wish her “mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over”? …show more content…
Connie had the difficult relationships with her family.
Mother always blames the girl because Connie very often admires in front of a mirror. Also, mother constantly puts the older sister June as an example for Connie and it leads to alienation of the girl. Connie's father spends not enough time at home because he is busy on the work and when he returned to family, he just had supper, read newspapers and went to sleep, as a result, Connie feels a lack of parental attention. There is not enough love and care about each other in their family; therefore, they are separated and far apart even when living in one house. Furthermore, Connie wishes that her mother had died and she wants her own death, so that all ended as soon as possible, because mother disparaging a girl all the time as if she was a fault in something. Connie believes that mother loves her eldest daughter more than
her. 5) Does Arnold have supernatural knowledge about Connie, her family, and her friends? Can his apparent clairvoyance about the barbecue be explained in naturalistic terms? When Arnold Friend appears in a story, he knows almost everything about Connie, her family, and Connie's friends. The girl guesses that Arnold is not from here and he cannot hold such information. It could be explained by a fantastic nature of this character. The author does not give a clearly evidences if Arnold real human or maybe a vision or a dream, that Connie saw after a hot day and too much time spent in the sun. Only one can be for sure, all of his knowledge are supernatural and cannot be explained in a naturalistic terms. Consequently, Arnold can be considered as a girl's imaginary creation, which she has endowed by all these knowledge. 7) Why doesn’t Connie succeed in breaking loose from Arnold’s spell? Arnold Friend tried to put a spell on Connie by his charming voice and clever jokes, but when he began saying nasty things about her family hoping for the response, he is frightened off her. Connie was not a silly little girl and deep down she loved her family, so she did not succumb to the temptation to escape from the home with a charming stranger. 10) What are Connie’s two sides? Is Connie’s case unusual for a girl her age in our society? In what ways is she atypical? Connie has two sides of her behavior. One side is Connie at home and another Connie is anywhere away from home. Everything she does at home was quiet and unnatural, even her clothes look different from her outdoors image. She laughs and hears music everywhere when she goes out from home. That kind of duality makes her different from other kids of her age, but in many things she was a typic
In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been” by Joyce Carol Oates, Connie is a normal teenage girl who is approached outside her home by a guy named Arnold Friend who threatens to harm her, and she obeys, if she does not get in the car with him. Connie is the main character in this story who teaches us that sometimes we might search for adult independence too early before we are actually ready to be independent and on our own. Connie is so focused on her appearance that she works hard to create a mature and attractive adult persona that will get her attention from guys. This search for independence conflicts with Connie’s relationship with her family and their protection of her. Connie’s insecurity and low self-esteem is triggered by her fear of intimacy. Connie confuses having the attention of men with actually having them pursue her in a sexual way.
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).
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...
However, as I continued to read the story I began to wonder if maybe Connie’s life was not in any way parallel to my own. I have a younger sister where she has an older sister, but that is where the similarities end. Her mother is always telling her that she should be more like June, her older sister. It seemed to me that June living with her parents at her age was unusual, but the fact that she seemed to enjoy this and was always doing things to h...
In the story, Oates presents the main character, Connie, as a somewhat bratty teenager that does not have a close relationship with her mother or sister. Her mother shows envy towards her daughter making comments to her such as, “ Stop gawking at
actions to be deemed acceptable by her parents so Connie lives a dual life. She is one person at
Her exposition is painstaking. She sets the scene by making the main character and protagonist, Connie, parallel to an average girl in the sixties. Oates' narrator introduces Connie using elements of description which puts emphasis on the vanity of the main character. Connie's mother is quickly introduced and is used by the narrator to reveal how much disdain her mother has for her vanity. The narrator uses the main character's mother to introduce her sister, June.
Being sexualized by the boys around her, Connie is self-conscious and finds her worth in beauty. The story even states, “She knew she was pretty and that was everything” (Oates 422). She is concerned about her appearance and what others think of her because she has been taught that she lacks any value outside of physical beauty norms. Arnold Friend, even tells Connie, “...be sweet like you can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in?” (Oates 432). Between this coaxing and the consistent message about the importance of beauty, Connie is nearly forced to conform to this mentality, which displays the lack of respect for young females as human beings. This in turn leads women to self-degradation as they are consistently viewed as sexual
Connie was tired of the life she was living and, she was ready to make decisions for herself and to deal with the consequences for them. She knew that if her parents found out about her going to the diner that she would be in trouble. Connie did not care about the consequences for her actions. She felt like it was time to grow up and be a woman. She wanted to start to experiment with her sexuality. Connie wanted boys to start to notice her and talk to her. Connie thinks that guys could be her savior by helping deliver her from the pressure and anxieties from her sister and mother. Her going out on her own makes her realize that she does not have to please anyone, only herself. When Connie and her friend went to the diner she met this guy Arnold. Obviously being with Eddie for three hours in a dark alley and diner was not the best first move for her. This is the one decision that will change her life forever. This was probably the first guy that gave Connie some attention. So obviously she is going to soak him up and just...
The first conflict between Connie and her mother. The writer 's said. "They also examine the psychological principles that underlie Connie’s relationship with her mother and sister, as well as her rebellion, self-centeredness, insecurity, and sexual experimentation"(Oates267). They had a very poor relationship that contributed to her constantly wanting to rebel against what her mother truly
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
Oates drew the character of Connie very well - she possesses many of the qualities that teenaged children share. According to developmental psychologists, adolescents become highly critical of siblings, and peer relationships take precedence over familial ties during these years (Feldman, 455). These traits are apparent in Connie’s unflattering description of her older sister June, “…she was so plain and chunky…” (209) and the fact that Connie spends many nights out with friends, but refuses to attend an afternoon picnic with her family (211).
The three family members are adults at the time of this play, struggling to be individuals, and yet, very enmeshed and codependent with one another. The overbearing and domineering mother, Amanda, spends much of her time reliving the past; her days as a southern belle. She desperately hopes her daughter, Laura, will marry. Laura suffers from an inferiority complex partially due to a minor disability that she perceives as a major one. She has difficulty coping with life outside of the apartment, her cherished glass animal collection, and her Victrola. Tom, Amanda's son, resents his role as provider for the family, yearns to be free from him mother's constant nagging, and longs to pursue his own dreams. A futile attempt is made to match Laura with Jim, an old high school acquaintance and one of Tom's work mates.
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.
At one point in the book, Connie had wished death upon not only herself, but her own mother. the fact that Connie’s mother was possibly jealous of her own daughter, or just protecting her. Connie’s mother came off as someone who was jealous of Connie’s life when it came to boys, but also very being mother like, and trying to help her own daughter stay away from what Arnold Friend was trying to lure Connie into. Personally, I feel as if a mother should not be jealous of her own child, because there is no reason to feel jealousy towards your own, or any child. Connie could have possibly been jealous of her mother, as her mother was known to be beautiful. The author had said Connie was also very pretty, but if that was the case then why would that make her feel jealousy towards her mom for being pretty. This part of the book confused me because I felt as if a family should not hate on each other or wish death upon anyone,