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Josce Carrot Oatess Women

CONSTANCE AYERS D E N k

case --hisky,--it.-would---beabsorbed.,the
dead poek and artists. You cannot
easily enough by sensibifities inured tom value him alone; you must set him, for
Joyce Carol Oatess special achieyement misiv, an$ cat,harsis would be impos- contrast and komparison, among the
deaa.There
is no more appropriate
is her ability to reduce contemporary sible.
The fearless commitment to go wher- aesthetic principle than this by which to
American social reality to liberating: ficever she must go emotionally, demon- understand ,and to evaluate theart of
tions. Her resources are courage anda
knowledge of self and the literary past. strated in Them, ,characteriies all of her Oates. , Having absorbed the shaping
Open and receptive to what is, Oates half-dozen novels and seventy or more , myths of the Greek and Judeo-Christian
sees the present as avariation of wh,at short stories. She has, moreover, the en- traditions. of Western literature and of
has already been, and by reducing hanced limits of the well-exercised. There the American experience, Oates both resnow tq familiar fictions, she tames, is nothing she will not feet, , and by urrects and domesticates them inher
civilizes and, throughthe catharsis pro- virtue of this natural faculty she is fiction, providing a link between the past
enormously womanly.
Oates,
an artist and present, between the collective unvided by herart, educates,
whose,sex opens her to significant levels conicious and modern life. Putting us in 1
, Oates believes strongly in,the authorof ,awareness. is as , conscious of being touch with the collective unconscious,
ity of the individuals experience of a woman,as she is of being an artist. she reveals the primitive meaning and,
reality. Notonetoconfuse
behavior,
In fact, she synthesizesboth modes of therefore, the humanity of contemporary
or what one does, ,with identity, or who perception in her art.Her artistic method life, for the vital source of all action is
one is, she defines experienc,e as a is so much a part of her being that she the unconscious life of therace
itself.
process in which , eiternal reality im- frequently uses ,physical analogies to ,ex- But she is not simply writing clever
pingessignificantly
not only upon the plain it. In .the preface to Them, for ex- , art, that is, artbasedupon
cultural
conscious life of the individual but upon ample, she--describes in sexual terms her knowledge
of
earlier art. Herart
is
the unconscious as well. Life is a series encounter with the materials of the deaijly serious and wants to absolutely
of encounters, each of which has the novel: Their livespressed
upon mine re-create and reinterpret the world. Her
potential to make the unconscious- more
their world
enteredme with notion of bringing back t~ life is closely
accessible. The truly human life requires tremendous power, and ina sense the allied with the artists special mission of
continual growth, which in turn depends novel wrote itself.. It ,was a birth with- .bringing ib life. At the end of the tradiupon the individuals ability to integrate
out labor. as if the author were an auto- tion, she is creating a newbeginning,
a new experience into the total person- matic instrument of some hidden natural
which is very intimately relatedto her
ality. (More often than not, however, in force.

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consciousness as a woman and as an
an effort to maintain equilibrium, one
simply denies or resists the healthful- ..- . . ,Oatess method .&-,related.in &e-- -artist.
- -- : 1 ~ -- --, ----.
disintegrating effects of new expenencis, other way to her sex., In her collection ,
Oatess
most
recent
novel,
D
o
and such reactions lead either to stagna- of short stories, Marriages and Inftdeli- with Me What You Will (1973). is untion or to madness.) Eachstate
of ties (1972), there is one entitled The questionably related tothe
womens
integrity, albeit temporary, reveals more, Dead in which the centralcharacter,a
movement in America. It is dedicated
but one can never fully understand the writer named Ilena Williams, explains her ,to, PatriciaHill Burnett, a member of
self, for the learning process is unending. latest dork,a series of shortstories in NOWS national board,, ,and its subject
Oatessfictions, products of her own honor of certain dead writers with whom is ,the raising of a young womans condescent into the ,abyss, are designed, she felta kinship, an explanation that , sciousness,andher liberation. Elena, the
like all generous art,to humanize and might serve as Oatess own for the very central character of Do WithMe Whar
make whole. Although Oates has been collection in which the story appears: I YOU will,,unlike so many fictional womregarded with susiicion .because o f . the want to honor the dead by reimagining en whose quest for selfhood ends in
violence of her subject matter, the writer their works, by reimagining their obses- suicide, ,madness or marriage, breaks
is psychologically healthy, andher
art sions:.
in a way marrying them, join- through to a higher level of awareness
remarkably sane. She informs and makes ing them as a woman joins-a man . . . and, newly integrated, affirms not only
meaningful the facts
that
assault us spiritually and erotically. Her work, whatshe wants butalsohow
she willget
dailyin
the newspapers. For example, then, is a woman artists self-conscious it. Her new-found freedom and its dlrecThem (1969),, a naturalistic novel of act of love, sometimes humorous, always tion are of, course historically condilife in aDetroit slum, shocks only be- serious.
tioned, a solution that does not make ,
cause it is perceived as fiction, and this,
Butit is also more. Inthe same story, the novel popular with more radical
of course, is its- value, This constitutes The Dead, Ilena Williams says of her- feminists. Oates, however, is neither an
its ability to liberate. As a news story or self: I dont exist as an individual -but - idealist nar an--ideologist; yet-it is notonly as a completion of atradition,,the
surprising that having chosen tomake
Coirslance Denne teaches English at Baruch end of something, not the best part of it liberation her subject, she sought lo
college, the City University of ,New Fork. but only the end. It will be recalled that dramatize it in a , woman.Women are
She is editor of James Fenitnore Coopers
GieaningsinEurope:
Italy, and Satanstoe, in hisessay, Tradition and fhe Individ- at the present time more interesting to
.as well as co-editor oj Gleanings in Europe: uab Talent, Eliot wrote: NO poet, no. her than men. She believes that men
artist of any art, has his complete mean-, have a far more ,difficult time . . existFrance-ull to be published f o i theCenter
of Editions for AmericanAuthors
by the ing alone. His significance, his apprecia- ing, trying to measure up to the absurd
State Universiv of New York.
tion is the appreciation of his relation to standards of masculinity in our ,culture
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and in nature, and that women are more

likelyconsciously to feel ,the need for
self-emancipation. Less locked into roles,
women are more open to the energies
of the unconscious and, therefore,, the
prehistoric sources of identity are more
accessible to them than to men. This view
of women,however, has alwaysbeen a
strong structuring tenet in Oatess workthis and the very real historical obstacles
that limit women in time. One can see
Oates discovering the subject as one goes
through her work. ,Thus, Elena represents
the logical culmination ofi an artistic
interest in the lives and consciousness of
women that Oates has been exploring
with increasing concentration in her fiction for more than a decade.
In her first collection of short, stories,
By the NorthGate (1963), Oates at-
tempted to make explicit the ahidden,unliberated lives of three very diffelent
women who represent those who,are
inarticulate . . . whosuffer
and doubt
and love, nobly, who need to be immortalized or at least explained.? In Sweet
Love Remembered, she shows through
Amie, a young waitress at a seaside resort, the isolating intuition that the world
was false and painful, and the-fear that
this knowledge, will remain unsharable.
Images, the summary of a young womans significant life through a series of
flashbacks, describes the terrible but normal involvement of a sensitive,bright
girl with family and religion, neither of
which offers her a role. At Mass, watchingthe priest and the altar boys, she
experiences the isolation of being outside the magic just as she is always to
feel thepain of imagining and resisting
the self she believes her family would
have herbeandthe
sorrow of being
someone else* instead. Because Oates
understands so well a little girlsexaggerated notion of others expectations of
her and her sense of having failed them,
she is able to. delineate exquisitely the
recurrence of this childlike emotion in a
grown woman, who experiences it exactly as if she were a little girl again.
In Pastoral Blood, Oates examines the
reaction of a typically American, collegeeducated girl (Pretty girl! The work of
centuries, civilizations, to bring forth
such a product) to the spiritual desert,
of an impending marriage and a suburbantrap,
whose banal life has been
simply a preparation forthe
kind of
deadness symbolized by a mechanical
girl inthe window of a jewelry shop:
staring and beautiful, fleshless yet nicely
human, with an arm sweetly extended
and movingslowly back andforth, displaying on one finger a diamond ring.
Her f i s t novel, With Shuddering Pall
(1964), at variation of the God/ Abrastory with
h a d I s a a c myth, treatsthe
considerable irony, for she describes with
598

chilling accuracy the lengths to which a society, boththe blonde Claraandthe

young girl will go for paternal approval, dark-haired Nada remain dissatisfied and
to remain Fathers good girl. The isolated. Both have sons whose love they
cure that follows the mental breakdown cannot satisfy: in A Garden of Earthly
of the protagonist is worse than madness, Delights Swan attempts to kill his mother,
ending, as it does, for once and for all Clara, but failing in that commits suicide;
the possibility of , resurrection. Al- in Expensive People Richard kills Nada
though Oatess point is that generally and then proceeds to eat himself to death.
societys institutions are all too ready to Claras ascent from the shack of a misupport a womans enslavement, she of- gratory farm worker to the great stone
fers a refreshing alternative to this bleak house inEden County parallels Nancy
assessment in the character of Grace in. Romanows transmogrification to Natasha
At the Seminary, a story jn the collec- Rompov of suburban Cedar Grove-yetl
tion Upon the Sweeping Flood (1966). Oates seems to be pointing out, no matter
Here Oates clearly affirms the mystical in what direction women move, their
potentialities of women,
,problems remain the same. In these novels
the principal question the women face is
The two novels that subsequently how to act in iccordance with their
appeared seem to analyze stereotyped inner authority andstill meet the responsiwomen, but Oatess stance is so critical bilities of external relationships. Oates is
that both offer rewarding insights when pessimistic aboutthe possibility ?f findviewed from a feminist perspective. Both ing an answer, for in both novels hungry
A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967) sons will to kill their mothers for crimes
and Expensive People (1968) are con- of which the women are not even aware.
cerned centrally with womens relation- Because of the impossibility of ever meetships with their sons. In spite of the fact ing the outrageous demands of children,
that, they have made it in American motherhood is perceived asalwaysand
inevitably a death sentence.
The Wheel of Love (1970) includes
twenty stories of which thirteen concern
womenexclusively. All, however, show
Wandering in beach fog
an acute awareness of womens real lives
i was the only one
andinner states of consciousness.Similarly, sixteen of the twenty-four superb
to discover the bodies
stories in Marriages and infidelities
o f three sea birds
(1972) incisively explore the psychic
discarded by the surf.
states of women. In the same year Oates
Pressing gently against the sand
published Wortderlund, which contains
three excellent portraits of women, who
almost a3 once on air
together articulate the collective misery
,
when fast wing tips trembled
of the second sex. Finally, in her latest
on surf thunder.
book, The Hungry Ghosrs (1974),, a
series of devastating satires on academics,
Another I found still
writers and critics, Oates cannot resist
olive, kneeling in the cold
offering in Upfrom Slavery a wryly
wafer, shivering ut my feet.
sympathetic portrait of Molly Holt, a
young lecturerin
English at Hilberry
i t screamed as 1
University,whose hiringand firing are
picked it up and stroked
both causedby her sex.
the unruly feathers.
Oatesswomen have never been
A n intimacy between man and bird.
any less free than her male characters;
Yet, armed wirh my ignorance
allhave inhabited a world that they are
of sea 6irds,, I could
powerless to change./ However, in Do
not name it.
With Me Whar You Will which, incidenThe eyes . . .
tally, synthesizes Oatess theory of art,
stbic black beads, fierce
her method, and her interest in women,
she sees a way out, not through the law
butrons, forced the question.
or any other of our present institutions
I have found a hundred
but through awakened human consciouslike rhese this summer
ness. Where but in a character forced by
and left them shuddering
experience to journey intothe
self in
order
to
.find both authenticity and
in the rising tide
authority wouldthisnewconsciousness
and mounted the rocks
appear? Oates suggests that it wouldbe
homeward in a jog
born of woman. Do With Me What You
Will is-to use terms with which Oates
about us al[.
herself is so comfortable-a
myth of
Michael Niflis
creation; it is about the divinity in womI

THE NAmoN/December

7, 1974

en. Galvanized by an orgiastic experience, always been regarded with suspiqion, and servations ofwhite ,men, but wherever
which puts her, mystically, in direct con- it .is Oatess prophecy that salvation or quotable material has survived from
tact with an ultimate reality, the, source liberation will not be possible in our early- Indian contact with the incoming
of her energy,,Elena, the Queen of Sleep, time for anyone until her image of wom- European, Brandon has tracked It, down
awakens, harnessesthe animal ,energy of an becomes both paradigm and prologue .and placed it in context. But it is in his
the universe, and discovers the courage of a new heresy. In Do With Me What interpretive passages,as inthe chapters
to clear a passageway through
the
You Will Oates has made her own con- Cities of Gods and The Image Makworlql for herself. Like the symbolic act sciousness as a woman the subject of her ers, that Brandon gives meaning and
of Adam and Eve in the Christian myth,
work^ and affirmed the,possibility of lib- substance to the Native American as
this ,too is a criminal act, an act of self- eration for all humankind fromthe re- cultural innovator and as a contributor
assertion which shatSers the old paternal- stricting structures of the past-but
not to the formation of society in both conistic structures, Mysticism, however, has until and only after women wake up. 0 tinents. The contributions, as we are
brought to see, are deeply ingrained in
the institutions and life style that distinguish the New World from Old World
society.,

T& LAST AMERICANS: The Indian

in American Culture. By William Brandon. McGraw-Hill Book Co. 553 p p .
$12.95. ,

DARCY MCNICKL~
The writing of American Indian history
within the past several years has flourished remarkably, as reflected both in the
volume and in the quality of reportage.
What is more, with the publication of
the decisions of the Indian Claims Commission, the testimony of expert witnesses
before that commission, the taped recording of oral histories by tribat elders and
the, reprinting of vast libraries of outof-print documents, the sources for future
studies and publication ,have expanded
inspectacu1,ar fashion. The story of the
first inhabitants of whaf Europeans chose
Lo call the New World may yet be told
with credibility.
II

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And theres the difficulty, Historians

haverecognized for some time that the
writing of a general Indianhistowpresents what appear to be itisuperable problemsof definition, time scale and move ment in space. The red race was infinitely
varied in physical appearance, #language
habits,,environmental adaptation, cultural
attributes and social organization. The
term Indian is, of course, a misnomer,
since it, purports to define what does not
exist. There are Dakotas, Navajos, Cherokees, Aztecs-all bodies of people who,,
in aboriginal times, probably had no
knowledge of one another and certainly
wbuld not make -the mistake of assuming that theywere interchangeable units
within a mass society:As families. bands,
tribes or confederacies, the first occupants
of the Americas had a fierce pride of
identity, such as modern nation states
exhibit. The very names by which -they
knew themselves trdnslate intb such terms

DArcy McNickle is program director of the

Center for the History. of the American Indian ut the Newberry Library.

I In developing this thesis, Brandon

refutes James Bryce, whom he quotes to
as the People, thereal P m p w 'pea-. the effect thatthe Indians in- American
Ple of the SUn, or simply PerSOnS: history have, done no more .than give
Each was an exclusive social entity: . , a touch of romance or a spice of danger
What William Brandon has attempted to the exploration of some regions . .
in The Lasf Americans-an updating and while over the rest of the countrythe
general revision of the text he prepared unhappy aborigines have slunk silently
for The American Heritage Book of In- away, scarcely even complaining of the
dianslis a general Indian history, such robbery of lands and the violation of
as fellow historians have doubted could plighted faith.
be written. Whether he has succeeded in
This essentially 19th+entury, viewis
embarrassing his archival gainsayers will thoroughly demolished by theauthor,
doubtless be variously judged by different who makes it clear ,that Indians were inobservers. ,
deed concerned over what happened to
their lands andtheir, community life;
There were sound reasons -for their survival into modbrntimes as keepdoubt. Much of the available source ma- ers of ethnic boundaries gives substance
terial until recent yearsconsisted of the to his argument!
documents resulting fromthe exploits of
Brandon also takes on as a challenge
Europeans and their descendants, inthe
the dilemma of stating. an acceptable
NewWorld. In order to write the Indian
unifying theme Br focus for interpreting
versionof events itwas necessary to dis- Native America, which historians have
entangle from this primary information cited as an obstacle to the writing of a
the threads of the Indian presence and -, general Indian history. Such a statement,
to allow for ethnocentric bias. Most-, tobetenable,
should have verifiability,it
attempts to write about Indians in Arneri should be applicable to all,Indian soci-
can history turnout to be accounts of eties great and small, and it should have
what happened aftercontact with whites the quality. of persistence through time
!-a history of Indian-white relations in and countering pressures.
vhich the Indian is seen only in reaction
Various contrasts between native, soto an incoming society and usually at a ciety and the practices of ,incoming Eurodisadvantage. His own society is only peans are detailed in The Last Ameridimly perceived, his motives are guessed cans: The great reigning motive of life
at, his destiny is under a cloud.
in
the
New World civilizations was alAs if the difficulty of finding authentic ways religious
, the chief force everysource material, were not enough to dis- where, from the wildest people of the
couragethe venturing scholar, thetask woods tothe mostdazzling ,Maya cities;
was made even more formidable by the whereas, The great reigning motive of
necessity of finding a unifying theme life inthe Old World was acquisition of
that wouldbind
together the infinitewealth,
property, business, the commerce
variety of Indian life spread across two of individual gain and ambition
and
continents. How t o , write aboutIndianin
this worldly welter religion was only
America, when Indian America wasexone of manyforces.
The thought ,is
perienced through a n , estimated 2,200 epitomized elsewhere, in the phrasing,
languages and was occupied by countless The Indian, worldwas devoted to liyseparate, identifiable political groups!
ing,,
the
European
world to getting.
The 70 pages of chapter notes and bibIt is in the attitude toward property
liography accompanying The Last Amer- that Brandon finds the most striking dificans suggest the extent of the search for
ferences between the two worlds and the
original sources. Most o f , the cited ma- key to Indian history as a social process.
terial, inevitably,is drawn fromtheobHe returnstothe comparison again and

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