In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, Joyce Carol Oates’s work makes me feel uneasy. I do agree with Korb as it’s an inverted fairytale. Connie hated her family and acted differently around them. Because she did this, she had 2 different personalities she took on in different situations. There was one she favored more which was when she was away from her family. She specifically hated her mother and wanted her so badly to be gone because she didn’t fit her idealized version of herself that her friends knew. Arnold Friend represents a skewed version of all her desires. Someone infatuated with her gives her an escape into becoming her idealized self completely. In return for this, she had to give up her family, especially her mother. I think she comes to for a second when Arnold Friend tells her that her mother was dead when all she wanted to do was call her mother for help to protect her. The uncertainty of the ending leads me to believe the story is about the grooming and objectification of young girls. She felt like she needed to have a more mature adult nightlife but later we see her breakdown like a child, being naive and not being able to tell if Arnold and Ellie were trustworthy or even around her age. It’s a distorted version of a fairytale that the reader knows in a real-world situation will have very scary dangerous consequences, implied by the ominous ending.
Daily Archives: November 20, 2022
Regarding the story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, I understand why Rena Korb interprets it as an “inverted fairytale”. It highlights a teenage girl, Connie’s, naivety and vanity as she grows into a young woman, craving independence (her family-life doesn’t exactly help with that either). She soon became familiar with Arnold Friend and Ellie who had seemingly been stalking her and had learned things about her she never revealed. Unknown to Connie, Arnold is manipulating her, faking this folksy persona to a degree that you suspect he’d spent years perfecting. Personally, around this time, it’s getting hard for me to contain my emotions as I can understand the physical jolt she implies from her bubbling anxiety as she finally sees what the man in the backseat looks like. To relate back to the inverted fairytale angle, I would say the typical prince charming is alluring and persistent (somehow not seen as creepy) as where Arnold Friend can be interpreted as the embodiment of evil as the implication at the end of the story is spoken for.
