Wonderland (2 page)

“Oates’s unblinking curiosity about human nature is one of the great artistic forces of our time,” observed
The Nation
as her output proliferated throughout the 1990s. Her novels further examined the violence underlying many realities of American culture: racism (
Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart
, 1990), alienation (
I Lock My Door upon Myself
, 1990), poverty (
The Rise of Life on Earth
, 1991), the interplay of politics and sex (
Black Water
, 1992), feminism (
Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang
, 1993), success (
What I Lived For
, 1994), serial killers (
Zombie
, 1995), family disintegration (
We Were the Mulvaneys
, 1996), outlaw cults (
Man Crazy
, 1997), criminality and greed (
My Heart Laid Bare
, 1998), and fame and celebrity (
Broke Heart Blues
, 1999, and
Blonde
, 2000). “A future archaeologist equipped only with her
oeuvre
could easily piece together the whole of postwar America,” said Henry Louis Gates, Jr. “No one knows the darkness of our age, of our own natures, the prison of our narcissism, better than Joyce Carol Oates,” wrote
The Washington Post Book World
. Her volumes of short stories dating from this period include
Heat
(1991)
, Where Is Here?
(1992)
, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque
(1994),
“Will You Always Love Me?”
(1996), and
The
Collector of Hearts: New Tales of the Grotesque
(1998). “Oates has imbued the American short story with an edgy vitality and raw social surfaces,” stated the
Chicago Tribune
, and Alice Adams deemed her short fiction “immensely exhilarating, deeply exciting.” In 1994 she received the Bram Stoker Lifetime Achievement Award in Horror Fiction.

“Joyce Carol Oates belongs to that small group of writers who keep alive the central ambitions and energies of literature,” said
Newsweek
. Though best known for short stories and novels, she has also won acclaim for her poetry, essays, and plays. “The best of Miss Oates’s poems create a feeling of controlled delirium, verging on nightmare, which is a lyrical counterpart of the rich violence of her novels,” wrote
The New York Times Book Review
. Her volumes of poetry include
Women in Love and Other Poems
(1968),
Anonymous Sins and Other Poems
(1969),
Love and Its Derangements
(1970),
Angel Fire
(1973),
Dreaming America
(1973),
The Fabulous Beasts
(1975),
Season of Peril
(1977),
The Stepfather
(1978),
Women Whose Lives Are Food, Men Whose Lives Are Money
(1978),
Celestial Timepiece
(1981),
Invisible Woman
(1982),
The Luxury of Sin
(1983), and
The Time Traveler
(1989). As George Garrett noted: “The bright center of all Joyce Carol Oates’s art and craft has always been her poetry.” Her several collections of essays—
The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature
(1972),
New Heaven, New Earth: The Visionary Experience in Literature
(1974),
Contraries
(1981),
The Profane Art: Essays and Reviews
(1983),
(Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities
(1988), and
Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going: Essays, Reviews, and Prose
(1999)—display a range of knowledge and interests that explain why she numbers among America’s most respected literary and social critics. Oates made a name for herself as a dramatist early in her career with plays such as
The Sweet Enemy
(1965),
Sunday Dinner
(1970),
Onto-logical Proof of My Existence
(1972), and
Miracle Play
(1974). During the 1990s she resumed writing plays and turned out
In Darkest America
(1991),
I Stand Before You Naked
(1991),
Gulf War
(1992),
The Secret Mirror
(1992),
The Perfectionist
(1993), and
The Truth-Teller
(1993), which have been performed Off-Broadway and at regional theaters across the country.

“Joyce Carol Oates is one of our most audaciously talented writers,” judged Erica Jong. “Her gift is so large, her fluency in different genres—poems, short stories, novels, essays—so great, that at times she seems to challenge the ability of readers to keep up with her. In an age of specialization she is that rarest of generalists, a woman of letters. She gives her gifts with such abundance and generosity that we may pick and choose, preferring this Oates to that, quibbling about which of her many talents we like best.” John Updike concurred: “Joyce Carol Oates was perhaps born a hundred years too late. She needs a lustier audience, a race of Victorian word-eaters, to be worthy of her astounding productivity, her tireless gift of self-enthrallment. Not since Faulkner has an American writer seemed so mesmerized by a field of imaginary material, and so headstrong in the cultivation of that field.”
The New York Times Book Review
concluded: “What keeps us coming back to Oates Country is her uncanny gift of making the page a window, with something happening on the other side that we’d swear was life itself.”

Joyce Carol Oates’s most recent novels include
Middle Age: A Romance
(2001),
I’ll Take You There
(2002),
The Tattooed Girl
(2003),
The Falls
(2004),
Missing Mom
(2005), and
Black Girl, White Girl
(2006).

As a young writer, Joyce Carol Oates published four remarkable novels,
A Garden of Earthly Delights
(1967);
Expensive People
(1968),
them
(1969), and
Wonderland
(1971). They were all nominated for the National Book Award, and Oates won the award for
them
in 1970. The novels have been considered as a loosely connected saga of American class struggle in the twentieth century. Oates, in the Afterword to
Expensive People
, said that they “were conceived … as critiques of America—American culture, American values, American dreams—as well as narratives in which romantic ambitions are confronted by what must be called ‘reality.’ ” In her Afterword to
them
, Oates described
Wonderland
as the book that “thematically ends the informal series, moving … into the yet-uncharted, apocalyptic America of the late Vietnam War period when the idealism of antiwar sentiment had turned to cynicism and the counterculture fantasy … had self-destructed.”

It makes sense to call these novels the Wonderland Quartet, not only to emphasize their historical connection, but also to suggest that they share elements of the surreal and hallucinatory vision that Oates had highly valued in her favorite childhood book,
Alice in Wonderland
. Reprinting the series in modern paperback editions nearly forty years after their composition allows us a new perspective on their collective meaning and illuminates their place in Oates’s overall career. In the mid-1960s, Oates saw herself as a social realist devoted to chronicling the lives of her parents’ generation in the Depression, and writing about the marginal and powerless inhabitants of towns like Lock-port, New York, where she grew up, and cities like Detroit, where she lived from 1962 to 1967. “Moving to Detroit … changed my life completely,” she has said. “Living in Detroit, enduring the extraordinary racial tensions of that city … made me want to write directly about the serious social concerns of our time.”
^*

But rereading the Wonderland Quartet from the distance of a new century, we can see that aesthetic, private, domestic, apolitical, and psychological issues mix with or even dominate Oates’s political and public concerns. Alongside class and racial tensions, Oates also dramatizes more coded and perhaps more impassioned preoccupations with the destiny of women, the creative freedom of the woman writer, and the function of art itself. Paradoxically, all four novels use male narrators, the male point of view, or masculine themes—territory many women writers, from Jane Austen on, had deliberately avoided. Moreover, Oates clearly identifies with the longing, frustration, and energy of these male figures; we could even call the series “portraits of the woman artist as a young man.”

To portray female experience and sexuality, Oates revived the Female Gothic. In the classic eighteenth-century Gothic novel, a young heroine encountered a powerful male, who represented the oppressive but sexually thrilling patriarchal system that imprisoned her in a haunted castle or convent. But the modern Female Gothic is a parable of women writers’ fantasies, desires, and nightmares about creativity vs. procreativity—the anxieties of giving birth to stories instead of babies, in a society that viewed female artistic ambition and sexuality as unnatural and deviant. The obsession with monsters and freaks, in the work of Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers, was a metaphor for this anxiety, and the mother’s body, rather than the haunted castle, is the place of imprisonment, since it represents the fate of women who give in to their sexual desires.

In the classic American fiction Oates admired—Faulkner, Hemingway, Poe—men too are in flight from the engulfing maternal body, which symbolizes the biological opposite of self-determination, intellect, and adventure. But men have agency, control, the means of escape; while women seem powerless and paralyzed by their biology, their poverty, and their passivity. Oates’s heroines in the 1960s, like Gothic heroines in the eighteenth century, are dependent on men to rescue, even abduct, them and carry them away.

The America Oates grew up in resembled these fictional worlds. Born June 16, 1938, in a working-class Catholic family, Oates was raised on a small farm in rural Millersport, New York. Lockport (pop. 25,000), where she was bussed to school in the 1950s, was an industrial town, bisected by the Erie Barge Canal and its many metal bridges over seething dark water, recurring images in her fiction of sexual temptation and danger. As a child, she read American classics, but neither in her reading nor in her life would she have encountered strong professional women, or daring women writers. As Arnold Friend tells the teenage Connie in Oates’s 1966 short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” all a girl can do is “be sweet and pretty and give in.”

Yet by the time she graduated from high school, Oates had determined to be a writer, and she found her own path almost unaided. As a brilliant undergraduate at Syracuse University, and as a graduate student in English at the University of Wisconsin, she met hardly any female professors. At Wisconsin, she met another graduate student, Raymond Smith; they married in 1961, and she followed him to Beaumont, Texas, where he had a teaching position. After a year, the couple moved to Detroit, where Ray had a job at Wayne State. Oates was also teaching at the Jesuit-run University of Detroit, where she and a nun were the only female faculty in the English department.

Oates had begun to publish fiction as an undergraduate, but her first real successes came in 1963, when she published her first collection of short stories, and in 1964, when Vanguard Press brought out her novel
With Shuddering Fall
. Sylvia Plath’s
The Bell Jar
and Betty Friedan’s
The Feminine Mystique
also appeared in 1963, harbingers of a decade of feminist questioning and activism. But for Oates, the women’s liberation movement was not yet important; for her, career and marriage signified freedom and mobility, and the 1960s were the years of her “romance with Detroit … romance with novel writing itself” (Afterword,
Expensive People
).

A G
ARDEN OF
E
ARTHLY
D
ELIGHTS (1967)

A Garden of Earthly Delights
, ironically named for the Hieronymous Bosch triptych, has three parts, each named for a man to whom the central figure, Clara Walpole, is related as daughter, lover, and mother. Ostensibly the novel is Clara’s story, but as a poor and uneducated girl, Clara has few choices, and although Oates has given the child Clara versions of some of her experience, particularly her elementary schooling, the male characters have much more scope for action and drama. In part I, the most naturalistic part of the novel, Carleton Walpole is a migrant fruit picker, with vague aspirations to a more meaningful and dignified life, but trapped by an adolescent marriage and many children. His heroes are boxers, like Jack Dempsey, who prove their manhood by stoic endurance: “The more punches a man takes, the closer he is to the end.” Angry and discouraged, Carleton is disgusted by his pregnant wife, Pearl, a “sallow-faced sullen woman with hair she never washed, and her underarms stale and sour, body soft as a rotted watermelon.” In his mind, women have no real will, but can only fight against nature not to let go of their youth and beauty; “when a woman does, that’s the end. Like letting a garden go to weeds.”