290 Contemporary Literature, 1970 to Present
Monroe’s life and untimely death. The elusive American dream is central to
each of these works.
Oates’s most anthologized and most frequently discussed story, “Where
Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” made its first appearance in the fall
1966 issue of Epoch magazine. The story, dedicated to Bob Dylan and written
as a response to his song “It’s All Over Now Baby Blue,” joins five decades of
Oates’s best work in the collection High Lonesome: New and Selected Short Sto-
ries (2006). Oates has said she believes that this story is the one for which she
will be most remembered. It documents the sexually charged power struggle
between a girl and the strange man-devil who shows up at her door in a gold
convertible to proposition her. Connie is depicted as a generic teenaged girl at
odds with her mother, who constantly compares her to her sister, June. The only
value Connie sees in herself is beauty, which she believes makes her mother
favor her over the incorruptible June. Her father seems absent from family life
even when he is physically present. Although evil seems to be the overriding
theme of the story, like much of Oates’s work, “Where Are You Going, Where
Have You Been?” has family dynamics at its center: Connie is ultimately vul-
nerable to Arnold Friend because her identity is so generic, and he gives her
the opportunity to become the girl “who saved her family” by going away with
him.
The title story of Oates’s massive collection is strikingly representative of
her most pervasive theme: violence. “High Lonesome” documents the decline
of a failed patriarch, his betrayal, his suicide, and a loved one’s revenge against
his betrayer. In it, Daryl, an unreliable narrator, describes how his cousin Drake,
a police officer, is accidentally involved in a prostitution sting that busted Pop
Olaffson, their pathetic and unassuming step-grandfather. Even though Daryl
admits that Drake never intended to arrest Pop, he remains unmerciful to him
in the story’s cinematic, blood-spattered ending.
Another highlight of the collection is “Heat,” which depicts the double
homicide of twin sisters, barely in their adolescence. The killer is the gentle,
kind, and mentally handicapped Roger Whipple, whose characterization belies
the influence of the Gothic genre on Oates. Whipple, reminiscent of Franken-
stein’s creature, snaps after being overstimulated by the antagonizing Rhea and
Rhoda Kunkel. Told from the perspective of an unnamed narrator, a childhood
friend of the Kunkel twins, the story’s sympathy clearly lies with Roger. The
narrator recalls the numerous horrors the twins subjected her to, including the
time they forced her to strip naked so they could feel power over her; she also
describes the twins’ cruelty to Roger in great detail.
Although she is known best as a writer, Oates prefers to think of herself
as “a teacher.... That’s a different kind of activity. Being a writer is something
I would rather just do, instead of talking about being” (“Writing and Weaving
an Emotional Thread”). In 1967, due to race relations and objections to the
war in Vietnam, Oates left her job at the University of Detroit for a position at
the Canadian University of Windsor. She moved back to the United States in
1978 to accept a teaching job at Princeton University, where she is now Roger
S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities.