Chopin and Oates: An Awakening Research Proposal

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The wildly prolific Joyce Carol Oates also delves into the role of modern women in her fiction writing, although a quick review of her works spanning the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, suggests it is more difficult to draw as direct a connection between Oates' major works and biography than it is with Chopin. However, like Mrs. Mallard of "The Story of an Hour" briefly delights in a fantasy coming to life, only to find her hopes dashed when the promise of freedom is taken away, the heroine Connie of "Where are you going, where have you been," finds her fantasy of being seductive and more beautiful than her conventional mother and sister to be far different than she realizes in reality. In Oates, much more explicitly than in Chopin, the trap of femininity 'used' as a vehicle of liberation for the teenage Connie becomes a lie, as Connie becomes the victim of rape and possibly (it is implied) even murder. The weak-hearted Louise of "The Story of an Hour" might fantasize about using her inheritance to travel. However, Connie actually makes herself look beautiful -- but when she is confronted with Arnold Friend who styles himself on an image of James Dean and other rebellious male figures, she discovers that beneath the veneer of approval for her and his apparent rebellion he just wants her sexually and he is ugly and old. Connie originally wanted to be powerful through her sexuality but her culture has rendered her passive as a woman so she merely lets Friend into her home, as if she has no other choice, given how she has lived the previous years of her life.

Fortunately, connections exist in Oates' life and Connie's other than their working-class backgrounds.

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Oates was born in Syracuse, New York, although she has written about women and America in a variety of genres, and now is one of Princeton's most celebrated authors. Her short story does reflect her obsession about how class and gender intersect in a way that is distinct from Chopin's -- Oates focuses on a young, impressionable girl of a 'lower' class, isolated from what she sees as exciting city life, rather than a married woman who is hungry for experience. But Connie has been so unprepared and unprotected for confronting the experience of being a beautiful, sophisticated woman that she is just as psychologically weak as Mrs. Mallard to resist Arnold Friend.

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