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 GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS (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.”
Although his delicate, blond daughter Clara is pretty and intelligent, she can envision no routes out of her environment but stealing and sex; the pregnant female bodies that repel Carleton are her unescapable destiny. As a little girl, she dreams of becoming a teacher, but the teacher calls her “white trash.” As a young teenager, she tells Lowry, a mysterious blond man with a sharp profile like the jack of spades, “I don’t know what I want, but I want it!” In her powerlessness, Clara gambles on Lowry because he provides an immediate means of escape, even though she has no plan or destination.
Part II is named for Lowry, although he remains a shadowy and enigmatic character. A drifter and a loner, Lowry likes “just to be in motion”; he likes his car, and the act of driving. But he “don’t stay in one place long.” He takes Clara along as his passenger, helps her find a room and a job in his hometown of Tintern, New York (a version of Lockport), and eventually takes her virginity, in a scene where Clara, although willing, “felt as if he had gone after her with a knife.” Although Clara knows by this point that she doesn’t want to get married (“You just end up having babies”), she falls back into the ancient scenario; she becomes pregnant, Lowry leaves, and she is forced to deploy her resources of female sexuality, beauty, and cunning in order to survive.
In her most self-determining act, Clara seduces a prosperous married businessman, Curt Revere, and persuades him that he has fathered her child. “Today she changed the way her life was going and it was no accident.” In another sign of Clara’s partial taking of control, Revere teaches her to drive and buys her a car. Clara finally has wheels but nowhere to go, and she imagines that her infant son, Swan, will grow up to live out her fantasies: “He’s going by train and by airplane/All around the world,” she croons to the sleeping baby.
But Swan too is doomed. In part III we meet Swan as a teenager, bookish and intense, an artist manqué, but ultimately a failure who seeks manhood and control in a gun, and destroys himself. Clara’s fate is to watch endlessly as her fantasies play in their most elemental form on television: “She seemed to like best programs that showed men fighting, swinging from ropes, shooting guns and driving fast cars, killing the enemy again and again until the dying gasps of evil men were only a certain familiar rhythm away from the opening blasts of the commercials which changed only gradually over the years.” While this passage from the original text of the novel is overtly satirical about the mindless violence and repetition of television, it is also a terse and tragic image of Clara’s helpless identification with male combat, vengeance, and death.
In 2002, Oates expanded this passage, along with rewriting more than three-quarters of the rest of the book. Among the changes, she restored some of the language that had been thought too obscene in 1967 and added details about Clara trying to copy the styles of movie stars, so that she more emphatically takes on the characteristic of the
iconic Blonde, the vehicle and victim of American cultural fantasies, about whom Oates would write throughout her career with great compassion.
EXPENSIVE PEOPLE (1968)
Published at the height of the counterculture and antiwar movement, Expensive People, Oates has recalled in her Afterword to the book, was received by critics “as an expression of the radical discontent … of a generation of young and idealistic Americans confronted by an America of their elders … steeped in political hypocrisy.” Set in “Fernwood,” an imaginary Detroit suburb, the novel is Oates’s most playful and experimental black comedy of the ’60s, and is linked to the other Wonderland novels more by its fascination with place, identity, and power than by its political concerns. The people of the story are “expensive,” rather than rich; their luxury comes at the cost of their children, servants, and rejected past.
Expensive People is narrated by Richard Everett, an obese, half-crazed adolescent living at “4500 Labyrinth Drive,” who is obsessed with his mother, the glamorous novelist Natashya Romanov, whom he calls “Nada”—nothing. Although she claims to be an aristocratic Russian émigré, Nada is actually a self-reinvented figure from a working-class family in upstate New York. Oates foregrounds some of the parallels between Nada and herself; Nada is considering plots and titles for the very first-person novel we are reading; and her embedded short story, “The Molesters,” is one that Oates published the same year in the Quarterly Review of Literature.
Oates’s biographer, Greg Johnson, suggests that Expensive People is actually her dark autobiographical “dialog with herself about the prospect of motherhood.”* As Oates herself remarked, “not even Nabokov could have conceived of the bizarre idea of writing a novel from the point of view of one’s own (unborn, unconceived) child, thereby presenting some valid, if comic, reasons, for it remaining unborn and unconceived.”† Richard is an angry and neglected son who comes to feel that he is only a “minor character” in his mother’s life.
Oates’s concern, however, is as much with the conflict of creativity and procreativity for the woman writer as with actual motherhood, and her dialogue is as much with Nabokov and the aesthetic school of fiction as with herself. Throughout the 1960s and early ’70s, Nabokov was the novelist Oates most frequently invoked as the epitome of the pure aesthetician who writes with no purpose but delight in language. While living in Detroit, she has said, she “was galvanized to believe that the writing of a novel should be more than purely private, domestic, or even, contrary to the reigning Nabokovian imperatives of the day, apolitical and aesthetic” (Afterword to A Garden of Earthly Delights).
In The Anxiety of Influence, Harold Bloom has argued that strong artists repress the writers who most tempt them to imitation, and perhaps Oates herself was unaware of her attraction to Nabokov’s art. Her hint that “the most immediate model for the novel’s peculiar tone was evidently Thomas Nashe’s The Unfortunate Traveler … my narrator alludes to ‘that other unfortunate traveler from whom I have stolen so much,’ ” is misleading if not a deliberate leg-pull. In her Afterword, she does kindly tip-off the eager reader-detective that she herself in rereading Nashe “can see only occasional and glancing similarities.” In fact, Richard Everett often sounds like the perverse narrator of Nabokov’s Lolita, Humbert Humbert, in his unfortunate travels across the United States.
Along with false clues, Nabokovian chess games, fake historical notes, mock-English houses and mock-English prep schools, and themes of bingeing and purging (one character eats himself to death), the novel features puns and literary parodies, especially an extended one of the Partisan Review, called The Transamerican Quarterly. The editor of this journal, a “professional intellectual” named Moe Malinsky, who is brought to Fernwood by the Village Great Books Discussion Club, is a greedy snob and hypocrite, who brags of meeting Princess Margaret and fighting Norman Mailer, and stuffs himself on the canapés while condemning the suburban lifestyle. Oates’s comments on the Review, via Richard, are merciless: “the magazine gives you a general frontal headache,” with its articles on Soviet economic growth and the decline of American art. Nabokovian literary games and labyrinths may be apolitical, Oates seems to suggest, but they are much more interesting than socialist realism.
Matricide is an extreme solution to the dilemma of the Female Gothic. Oates acknowledged in her Afterword that “the novel’s thinly codified secret” was “the execution of an ambitious woman writer as fit punishment for having gone beyond the ‘limits of her world’—upstate New York.” Nada is no suburban mom, but an artist, trying both to fit into the “normal world” of the American family and also to compete in the macho world of publishing. Like Virginia Woolf’s essay on “Killing the Angel in the House,” Nada’s fictional execution is Oates’s nightmare solution to the burdens of femininity facing the serious woman artist.
THEM (1969)
Some of the metafictional aspects of Expensive People carried over into Oates’s next novel, them. Oates introduced her epic story about a white working-class family with an “Author’s Note,” describing the book as “a work of history in fictional form,” based on the recollections of one of the characters, “Maureen Wendall,” and some readers took it literally, writing to ask how the Wendalls were doing. Oates herself appeared as a character in the novel, as the recipient of two letters from Maureen, who says she took a course on “Introduction to Literature” from “Miss Oates” at the University of Detroit in 1964, got an “F,” but has never forgotten the teacher’s apparent sense of control, happiness, and faith in books like Madame Bovary. The letters allow Maureen to confront the novelist, and protest against her relative powerlessness and insignificance as a woman whose life is much drabber than those in books.
Indeed, them cannot imagine any self-determination for its women characters. Its central story contrasts the experience of Maureen and her brother Jules, growing up in inner-city Detroit. She is the more bookish and intellectual sibling, but like Clara in A Garden of Earthly Delights, Maureen is doomed by her femaleness; she is frantic to escape, but has no way to earn money or get away except prostitution. When her stepfather finds out that she has been getting paid for sex, he beats her so badly that she becomes virtually comatose for two years. And this is a metaphor for all women’s lives; even a rich woman, as one character says, “lives in a dream, waiting for a man. There is no way out of this, insulting as it is, no woman can escape it.”
In contrast, Jules, partly modeled on Julien Sorel of Stendhal’s The Red and the Black, understands that even at his weakest he has more power than a woman. “A woman in a car only appears to be in control!” he thinks as a teenager. “Inside, her machinery is as wobbly and nervous as the machinery of her car.” One of Jules’s first jobs is playing messenger boy for a petty gangster who gives him a gun and sends him out to buy a Cadillac. Yet Jules has grandiose dreams of greatness; he feels fated to become an important man, and wants to model himself on the Indian mystic and theorist of nonviolence Vinoba Bhave, about whom he reads in Time magazine. He internalizes Bhave’s words: “Fire merely burns … Fire burns and does its duty. It is for others to do theirs.”
But Jules misunderstands this message as an endorsement of violence and anarchy, and carries it with him until he sees it embodied in the Detroit riots, with which them ends. Oates’s version of the riots is apocalyptic, with Mort, the professor who is the leader of the student radicals, on a death and ego trip, the students arguing about whether Lyndon Johnson or Martin Luther King would be more suitable targets for assassination, the black families looting, and the police as brutal and out of control as the rest. Jules joins the radical group and speaks on television for its “beliefs”: “It is only necessary to understand that fire burns and does its duty, perpetually, and the fires will never be put out.… Violence can’t be singled out from an ordinary day!… Everyone must live through it again and again, there’s no end to it.” In our last sight of him, Jules is heading to California in an air-conditioned car, to use
political organizing as a route to making big money in real estate. Somehow he has become the American Dream of success who will profit from the destruction of the weak.
WONDERLAND (1971)
Wonderland covers some of the same historical period as them but from a more surreal and openly Gothic perspective. In her Afterword, Oates has called the book “bizarre and obsessive,” a “torrential experience of novel-writing,” and a plunge into the “vortex of being.” Her hero, Jesse Vogel, is the only survivor of his family’s massacre by his deranged father; by good fortune, and through the help of various adoptive parents and mentors, he becomes a neurosurgeon who is fascinated by and drawn to the freakish, the grotesque, and the monstrous, although he wishes only to heal. Wonderland ends with Jesse’s daughter Michelle—Shelly, or “Shell,” as she calls herself—running away with a counterculture guru, Noel. Jesse sets out to rescue her from a commune on Yonge Street in Toronto—an ironically hellish haven for the drugged young.