PRAISE FOR JOYCE CAROL OATES AND
THEM
“If the phrase ‘woman of letters’ existed, [Oates] would be, foremost in this country, entitled to it.” —JOHN UPDIKE, The New Yorker
“[Oates is] a superb storyteller. For sheer readability, them is unsurpassed.” —The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“Three successful novels—Expensive People, A Garden of Earthly Delights, them—have wrought mayhem, rape, madness, murdered children, murdering children, workaday murder, what have you….[Them] collected all these bits and pieces of the Gothic wardrobe…and carried away the National Book Award in 1970. She deserved it.” —The New York Times
“To read Oates is to cross an emotional minefield, to be stunned to the soul by multiple explosions, but to emerge to safety again with the skull ringing with shocked revelation and clarity….Her superlative middle-American scope and focus…and her unerring dedication to curing the absence of empathy that pervades so much of our contemporary writing all combine to make her one of the top writers truly puzzling out the complexity of the American experience today.” —The Washington Post Book World
“Oates is a superb writer with a perfect eye and ear. She has the uncanny ability to give us a cinemascopic vision of her America.”
—National Review
“Her sweeping view of America as a delusive wonderland of colliding forces, where love as often as hate lead to violence, has established Miss Oates as a major—and controversial—figure in American writing….Like the most important modern writers—Joyce, Proust, Mann—she has an absolute identification with her material: the spirit of a society at a crucial point in its history.”
—Newsweek
Copyright © 1969, 1998, 2000 by Joyce Carol Oates
Biographical note copyright © 2000 by Random House, Inc.
Introduction copyright © 2006 by Elaine Showalter
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
MODERN LIBRARY and the TORCHBEARER Design are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
This work was originally published in 1969 by Vanguard Press.
A hardcover edition was published in 2000 by Modern Library, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc. This edition published by arrangement with Ontario Review, Inc..
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Oates, Joyce Carol
them / Joyce Carol Oates.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-345-48440-1
1. Working class families—Michigan—Detroit—Fiction. 2. Young women—Michigan—Detroit—Fiction. 3. Family—Michigan— Detroit—Fiction. 4. Poor—Michigan—Detroit—Fiction.
5. Detroit (Mich.)—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3565.A8 T48 2000
813′.54—dc21 99-054471
Ebook ISBN 9780525512561
www.modernlibrary.com
v5.2
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JOYCE CAROL OATES
Joyce Carol Oates, one of America’s most versatile and prolific contemporary writers, was born in the small town of Lockport, New York, on June 16, 1938. She grew up on a farm in nearby Erie County and began writing stories while still in elementary school. As a teenager she devoured works by Faulkner, Dostoyevsky, Thoreau, Hemingway, and the Brontës, and soon moved on to D. H. Lawrence, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Mann, and Franz Kafka. Oates graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Syracuse University in 1960 and was awarded an M.A. from the University of Wisconsin in 1961. During the 1960s and 1970s she taught English at the University of Detroit and the University of Windsor in Ontario, Canada. In 1974 she cofounded the Ontario Review with her husband, Raymond Smith. Oates was named a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters in 1978, the same year she became writer-in-residence at Princeton University, where she is currently the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor in the Humanities.
Oates’s first novel, With Shuddering Fall (1964), the story of a destructive romance between a teenage girl and a thirty-year-old race car driver, foreshadowed her preoccupation with violence and darkness. Her next novel, A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), is the opening volume in a quartet about different socioeconomic groups in America that incorporates Expensive People (1968), them (1969), for which she won the National Book Award, and Wonderland (1971). Throughout the 1970s Oates pursued her exploration of American people and institutions in a series of novels that fuse social analysis with vivid psychological portrayals. Wonderland exposes the shortcomings of the medical world; Do with Me What You Will (1973) centers on the legal profession; The Assassins (1975) attacks political corruption; Son of the Morning (1978) tracks the rise and fall of a religious zealot; and Unholy Loves (1979) looks at pettiness and hypocrisy within the academic community. “Like the most important modern writers—Joyce, Proust, Mann—Oates has an absolute identification with her material: the spirit of a society at a crucial point in its history,” noted Newsweek. Novels such as Childwold (1976) and Cybele (1979) showcase what Alfred Kazin called “her sweetly brutal sense of what American experience is really like.”
“Joyce Carol Oates is a fearless writer…[with] impossibly lush and dead-on imaginative powers,” noted the Los Angeles Times Book Review. During this same period she secured her reputation as a virtuoso of the short story with twelve acclaimed collections: By the North Gate (1963), Upon the Sweeping Flood and Other Stories (1966), The Wheel of Love and Other Stories (1970), Marriages and Infidelities (1972), The Goddess and Other Women (1974), Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? (1974), The Hungry Ghosts (1974), The Poisoned Kiss and Other Stories from the Portuguese (1975), The Seduction and Other Stories (1975), Crossing the Border (1976), Night-Side (1977), and All the Good People I’ve Left Behind (1978). “In the landscape of the contemporary American short story Miss Oates stands out as a master, occupying a preeminent category of her own,” said the Saturday Review. “[Oates] intuitively seems to know that the short story is for a different type of material from the novel: a brief and dazzling plunge into another state of consciousness,” remarked Erica Jong. “Miss Oates [is] our poet laureate of schizophrenia, of blasted childhoods, of random acts of violence.” Her stories have been widely anthologized, and she is a three-time winner of the O. Henry Continuing Achievement Award as well as the recipient of the PEN/Malamud Award for Lifetime Achievement in the Short Story.
“Joyce Carol Oates is that rarity in American fiction, a writer who seems to grow with each new book,” said Time. She set out in new directions in the 1980s with an acclaimed series of bestselling novels that exploit the conventions of Gothic literature: Bellefleur (1980), A Bloodsmoor Romance (1982), and Mysteries of Winterthurn (1984). In addition she wrote Angel of Light (1981), Solstice (1985), Marya (1986), You Must Remember This (1987), and American Appetites (1989): a succession of works that make it clear why Commonweal deemed her “the most relentless chronicler of America and its nightmares since Poe.” “Oates’s best novels are strongly reminiscent of Faulkner’s, especially in their uncompromised vision of the violence her characters visit upon one another and themselves,” said The Washington Post Book World. “Even her humor—and she can be hilariously funny—is mordantly ironical.” Using the pseudonym Rosamond Smith she began writing a series of psychological suspense novels: Lives of the Twins (1988), Soul/Mate (1989), Nemesis (1990), Snake Eyes (1992), You Can’t Catch Me (1995), Double Delight (1997), and Starr Bright Will Be with You Soon (1999). Her compilations of short stories continued with The Lamb of Abyssalia (1980), A Sentime
ntal Education (1981), Last Days (1984), Wild Nights (1985), Raven’s Wing (1986), and The Assignation (1988). In addition she enjoyed great success with On Boxing (1987), an eloquent meditation on prizefighting.
“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: Essays (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), Ontological 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).
CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE
INTRODUCTION: The Wonderland Quartet
by Elaine Showalter
AUTHOR’S NOTE
THEM
I. CHILDREN OF SILENCE
II. TO WHOSE COUNTRY HAVE I COME?
III. COME, MY SOUL, THAT HATH LONG LANGUISHED…
AFTERWORD by Joyce Carol Oates
Dedication
Also by Joyce Carol Oates
About the Introducer
INTRODUCTION
THE WONDERLAND QUARTET
Elaine Showalter
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 Lockport, 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 out time.”*1
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 exper
ience 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.”