Joyce Carol Oatesの"Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" : Connieのゴシック的「他者」Arnold

概要

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Joyce Carol Oates's(1938-) "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is one of the outstanding modern Gothic stories. It first appeared in Epoch in 1966 and was later included in Oates's anthology of short stories, The Wheel of Love (1970). Walter Sullivan calls this story "an interlude of terror," as it does not directly depict such horrible scenes as rape and murder typical in the-18th-century classical Gothic novels. However, it makes the readers believe that a 15-year-old protagonist Connie is surely going to be the victim of the diabolical Arnold Friend, who is not her friend at all but an incarnation of the Devil. G.J. Weinberger argues that Arnold is Connie's "other self" representing not only her "mythic, irrational side ... but also a cluster of insights into the violence and sexuality of adulthood" and emphasizes that this is the story of Connie's initiation. Weinberger's analysis is insightful and persuasive, but there still remain some unsolved questions as to why the entire story is dominated by an atmosphere of vanity and Connie's death-wish. This paper, therefore, demonstrates that Arnold Friend is Connie's Gothic "Other Self," which represents her irrational and destructive impulses to overthrow the conventional ideas and vanity of everyday life which are shared by people in America in the 1960s.