The drama of affluence in Joyce Carol Oates's recent novels Balciunaite, A. Citation Balciunaite, A. (2010, October 8). The drama of affluence in Joyce Carol Oates's recent novels. Retrieved from https://hdl.handle.net/1887/14045 Version: Not Applicable (or Unknown) Licence agreement concerning inclusion of License: doctoral thesis in the Institutional Repository of the University of Leiden Downloaded from: https://hdl.handle.net/1887/14045 Note: To cite this publication please use the final published version (if applicable). THE DRAMA OF AFFLUENCE IN JOYCE CAROL OATES‟S RECENT NOVELS Proefschrift ter verkrijging van de graad van Doctor aan de Universiteit Leiden, op gezag van Rector Magnificus prof. mr. P. F. van der Heijden, volgens besluit van het College voor Promoties te verdedigen op donderdag 8 oktober 2009 klokke 15.00 uur door Asta Balčiūnaitė geboren te Pasvaliečiai, Litouwen in 1966. Promotiecommissie Promotor: Prof. dr. Th. L. D‟haen Leden van de Prof. dr. J. W. Bertens (Universiteit Utrecht) promotiecommissie: Prof. dr. J. L. Goedegebuure (voorzitter) Dr. J. C. Kardux Prof. dr. R.K. Todd ISBN 978-90-8891-114-9 For Eric, Lionė and Raimis Contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 Influences 7 Methodology 10 1. The Fate of Women: Eden County Motifs in Oates’s Recent Novels 15 The Nuclear Family and Family Values 19 Liberated Wives and Mothers 33 Charlotte and Betsy: Contemporary Women 40 The Importance of Memory and Tradition 47 2. Success and Failure in What I Lived For and My Heart Laid Bare 53 Union City: Reflections of Failure and Success 57 Decadent Dublin Versus the Fallen Union City 64 Work and Gambling 67 Upward Mobility 74 The Language of Housing 79 The Meaning of Success: Corky‟s Irish Roots 83 3. Anesthetized Life: Middle Age and Authenticity 89 Structure and Classical Tragedy 95 Boredom in the Novel‟s Setting 98 Male Perceptions of the Meaning of Life 104 Female Perceptions of the Meaning of Life 114 Artistic Boredom 122 4. Image, Artistic Freedom, Rootless Existence and Myth 129 Character and Personality 135 v Image 138 Artistic Freedom 150 Rootlessness 155 Myth and Entertainment 162 5. The Artist as Antagonist: Transgressions of Genre and the Use of Parody 171 Romance and Parody 176 Social Melodrama 183 The Appropriation of Crime Fiction 189 Facts, Reality and Parody 201 Conclusion 209 Notes 215 Bibliography 247 Primary literature 247 Secondary literature 252 Summary 265 Samenvatting 269 Curriculum Vitae 273 vi Acknowledgments First and foremost, I would like to express my gratitude to Dr. Maarten Knoester for his guidance, encouragement and valuable contribution to the manuscript. Even after he ceased to be associated with INHolland, Dr. Knoester spent many an hour reading my drafts and several of Oates‟s books. My thanks also go to Dr. Ruta Kazlauskaite and Dr. Vivien Collingwood for reading the drafts. A lot of people have supported me by simply making suggestions or engaging in short discussions. It is not possible to name them all, but I would particularly like to mention Daniel Gibb, Petra Hogendoorn and Dr. Anne Sophie Riepma. I was very privileged to be one of the first of the INHolland staff to re- ceive support for a PhD project. Thanks to this institution‟s decision to become a university of applied sciences and thereby stimulate research, I was able to finish this project. Above all, I am grateful to my husband, Eric Helsper, without whose sup- port and understanding this project would not have been possible. vii Introduction In a recent interview, Joyce Carol Oates stated that her work is concerned solely with the “moral and social conditions of her generation.”1 Indeed, Oates has explored the life of “her generation” in more than 50 novels, including fiction for young adults, and more than 30 short story collections, novellas, dramas, essays, and volumes of poetry and literary criticism. Her reviews appear regularly in The New York Times, The New Yorker, The New York Review of Books, and in similar magazines and newspapers. She has also edited a number of collections of short stories and anthologies. Finally, in addition to being a writer, Joyce Carol Oates is also the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton University. In histories of American literature, Oates‟s name is often closely asso- ciated with those of Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, Joseph Heller, John Up- dike, John Cheever and Philip Roth, the so-called literary traditionalists of the 1970s.2 Some of Oates‟s work from the 1980s, meanwhile, has been compared with postmodernist fiction for its diversity of style and use of parody. During this period, Oates became “a kind of traditionalist John Barth, parodying the historical novel in A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), Heming- way or Mailer in an essay on boxing, and a whole array of forms and styles in other works.”3 The Oxford Encyclopedia of American Literature firmly states that, “regardless of the outdated complaints of some critics against her productivity and ability to write in so many literary forms, the range and depth of her oeuvre have made her undeniably, and deservedly one of the most distinguished and celebrated American authors.”4 The Encyclopedia of American Literature5 asserts that Oates‟s best works include the novel them; The Wheel of Love, a collection of short stories that contains her most widely- anthologized short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”; the novels, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart and Black Water; and the essay, “On Boxing.” Judging from critical reception of her most recent works, the novels Blonde and The Falls also stand a good chance of being ranked among Oates‟s best works. The first studies of Joyce Carol Oates‟s work appeared at the end of the 1970s. Since then, scholars of her work have had one difficulty in common: that of categorizing her work and assessing her achievements. Joanne V. Creighton, who has written two books on Oates‟s works, argues in her first 1 book, Joyce Carol Oates,6 that if Oates‟s depiction of psychological and environmental limitations places her within the tradition of American Natu- ralism, so her visionary perspective in the same works counters this tradition. In her second book, Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years,7 Creigh- ton claims that Oates‟s work belongs to traditional American Romanticism, due to her attention to personality and desire to transcend limitations. Creigh- ton therefore suggests the term, “post-modern romantic,” to characterize Oates. Oates herself has made the following comment on her technique: “My method has always been to combine the „naturalistic‟ world with the „sym- bolic‟ method of expression, so that I am always – or usually – writing about real people in real society, but the means of expression may be naturalistic, surreal, or parodic. In this way I have, to my own satisfaction at least, solved the old problem – should one be faithful to the real world, or to one‟s imagi- nation?”8 Oates‟s work has been discussed from a number of different perspectives. Gary Frederic Waller9 claims that Oates is writing about the possibilities of transcendence, while Ellen Friedman in Joyce Carol Oates10 argues that in her novels, Oates calls for the limitation and deflation of the ego and unrea- sonable ambitions. In an examination of Oates‟s tragic vision, Mary Kathryn Grant11 concludes that Oates‟s tragedy, which arises from the absence of communal relationships and her characters‟ isolation, is a tragedy without catharsis, and that her characters are often superficial. Grant also predicates that Oates‟s strength as a writer primarily lies in her exploration of personali- ty and more experimental modes of writing, rather than in her frequent use of 19th-century realist styles. For Gavin Cologne-Brookes,12 meanwhile, Oates‟s significance lies in her practical approach to art, which serves as a tool for better understanding of social problems and opportunities. He argues that Oates is a pragmatic writer. For Malcolm Bradbury,13 Oates is especially important as a writer of gothic novels and stories; while Harold Bloom14 has claimed that only one novel, them (which addresses social problems, and is written in a naturalistic mode with some experimental features), will remain a lasting achievement. An overwhelming diversity of forms and styles, then, is probably the most important characteristic of Oates‟s oeuvre. Any further attempt to classify Oates thus becomes a real challenge. Joyce Carol Oates is a very versatile writer; as John Barth once noticed, she writes “all over the aesthetic map.” Most scholars adopt a chronological approach when classifying her work: “Early Novels, approximately 1960s-1970s,” “The Gothic Novels, 1980- 1986” and “A Return to Realistic novels, from 1986 till today.”15 In each of 2 these periods, a central topic is recognizable: the early novels focus on the lower classes and social problems; Oates‟s gothic period includes experi- ments with 19th-century genres; and the realistic period investigates both the lower- and the middle classes, and focuses on moral and social issues inhe- rent in American culture. Mature Oates, as Gavin Cologne-Brookes indicates, is “practicing the conventions of realism, both revise[s] and renew[s] them.”16 In addition, Oates remains interested in experimenting with styles and themes, uses pseudonyms, and writes popular fiction. In this study, I undertake a cultural analysis of Joyce Carol Oates‟s recent novels; that is, the study focuses on those novels in which Oates concentrates on the “moral and social conditions” of the American middle class. Indeed, over the last two decades, Oates has distanced herself from lower-class portrayals and has increasingly depicted the middle-class world, even though she retains great sympathy for the underprivileged and continues to write about social injustice.