Transilvania, 2019 (Anul 125, nr. 1-11)
2019-10-01 / nr. 10
oo Instances of Violence in Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Fiction Mirela PETRAŞCU Universitatea „Lucian Blaga” din Sibiu, Facultatea de Litere şi Arte Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Faculty of Letters and Arts Personal e-mail: mirela.petrascu@ulbsibiu.ro Instances of Violence in Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Fiction The aim of the present paper is to reappraise some short stories published by Joyce Carol Oates in the last decades of the twentieth century in order to identify a pattern of violence that pervaded, in the writer’s opinion, the American cultural landscape of the time, one marked and marred by consumerism, material saturation and void spiritual expectations, as well as to show that the writer’s obsessive recurrence to violence was, before the age of online communication, a genuine reflection of a society in which the individual’s desire for public visibility would easily become a substitute for fame and/or success. Keywords: violence, American life, American Dream, home, displacement. ---------------------------S---------------------------One of the most prolific writers in the United States of America, Joyce Carol Oates has written, over the course of several decades, short stories, novels and essays in which she has depicted, alluringly yet with brutal accuracy, scenes of American life, most often with violence as key conceptual pattern. She was awarded the National Book Award in 1970, was nominated twice for the Pulitzer Prize and three times for the Nobel Prize for Literature (with the latest nomination in 2007). On the American literary scene she has always been a rather unique and singular figure, given her proclivity, her frequently assumed Victorian narrative stance, her inclination for Gothic fictional instances and the violent narrative twists that are a defining element of her writing. One of the most frequently encountered issues in her fiction, for which she has often been criticised, is the pervasive use of violence. Whether inflicted on men or on women, whether triggered by men or by women, violence is so frequent and so intense that readers take it for granted instead of being shocked by its amount, recurrence and intensity. Throughout Oates’s work, violence has been symbolic of contemporary American culture. Be it linear narration, stream of consciousness, fragments of diaries, temporal dislocation or collage, Oates’s fiction is all-encompassing of the American culture and way of life, a fictional exercise in experiencing America. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar claimed that “the violence associated with some of her fiction is a result of her sense that ordinary people cannot always articulate or even understand the ways in which they are trapped in the convulsions of history.” (Gilbert and Gubar, 2276) One might wonder why American culture, which is the quintessence of freedom, self-sufficiency and selfdetermination, keeps producing such rising violence, as, at least with the characters in Oates’s fictional space violence is a modus vivendi, an intrinsic part of their lives. A potential answer might be that the very culture of comfort and convenience, dominated by the myth of progress and success, ultimately turns individuals into captives of their own pursuit, once they attain a oint where there is no more hope, as everything that as been promised them has already been achieved. It 65