45 pages • 1-hour read
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
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Themes
The Search for Identity
The Bildungsroman is an ancient storytelling trope that symbolizes a coming of age and fall into experience. Although Connie’s fall into experience comes at a severe price, it still possesses all the characteristics of a classic Bildungsroman. The Bildungsroman often casts a young person as its central protagonist: a hero—reluctant or not—who is tasked with a difficult undertaking, through which experience is attained, often through bloodshed or violence.
Connie’s story follows these characteristics, albeit in a modernist retelling of the myth. She begins the story unappreciative, self-interested, and aware only of the illusions of a naïve view on life. Her main interests over the summer are narrowly focused on boys and popular music. Her family and friends are only a useful means to an end. For these reasons, Connie at the beginning of her story leads a life of immaturity, as her perceptions of the world are not yet complete. It is only when she crosses out of the boundaries of her life, moving beyond the “ordinary world,” that she discovers a true fall into experience.
Connie’s fall is best represented in the sudden and grisly encounter at the hands of Arnold Friend, an older man that comes into her life claiming that he can knock down her father’s house, and with it the life of comfort that Connie knows. Because he is an older man masquerading as a youth—a reversal of Connie as a young woman feigning maturity—Arnold also represents the mythic trope of the shadow. In the Bildungsroman and hero’s journey, the shadow is a dualistic counterpart to the central protagonist, representing a darker version or destructive agency present within the hero. Whether Oates meant Arnold to be interpreted as metaphor, magic, or man, his penchant for disguise mirrors Connie’s own reckless roleplaying. As Connie faces the abject horror that Arnold brings to her doorstep, she is forced to shed her pretenses and illusions, embracing her own destruction and thus fulfilling her fall into experience of the world.
The Uncanny Quality of Urban and Suburban Spaces
In modernist literature, uncanny horror in literature is used to convey anxieties rising out of World War I’s destructive upheaval of society. In their canon of literature, modernist writers depict cities and suburbs as mysterious, uncanny “liminal spaces,” areas which are suffused with a sense of the in-between, belonging to no one and used only as a means to an end by everyone. In modern cities and at the time of Oates’s writing, cities had already grown into vast zones of highways, shopping malls, and fast-food restaurants where no natural trace of the world resided except in designated parks or arranged in rows on residential streets. In much of the story, Connie traverses these spaces, hurrying across highways and even making love to boys in back alleys.
Oates uses uncanny horror to create an added dimension to the narrative, marking a trajectory in which Connie’s final victory is a return from the divisions of modern architecture to the unitary oneness of nature or the sublime. While Connie dries her hair in the sun, she is suddenly overcome with the heat of the day. When she wakes up, she senses the boundaries of her backyard have been expanded or ebbed away by the encroaching line of trees in her backyard. Later, as Arnold arrives, Connie’s gravel driveway is said to be “long,” alluding to a remoteness to the house. Oates thereby incorporates another classic horror signature belonging to “gothic horror” from European and American southern traditions, in which the setting of a story often is focused on an architectural structure—usually a mansion—surrounded by an encroaching and menacing nature. As Friend chases Connie inside, she is struck with the unfamiliarity of her kitchen, suddenly not recognizing its dimensions. When she relents, succumbing to her ride with Arnold, Connie finally regards the greenery as beautiful and goes to it, leaving the confusion of modern architecture behind and returning to nature.
In the story’s opaque final scenes, Connie is overcome with a vision of sylvan outlooks that she had never seen before “except to know that she was going to it” (266). This enigmatic end and sudden intrusion of the pastoral is reminiscent of the “sublime” of Romantic Era poets and novelists, who meditated on and wrote of the awe-inspiring force of nature while alluding to the transience of humans in contrast to nature’s timelessness. In the context of Connie’s final fate at the end of “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” the sudden intrusion of greenery comes in sharp contrast to the story’s original setting, presumably a suburb near the city where Connie goes to movies and eats burgers with her friends. Because the story takes place in a decidedly urban environment, the final image casts an uncanny quality over the text.
How Patriarchal Gender Roles Can Lead to Tragedy
In the story’s final scene, Arnold directs Connie to stand up, walk out of her house, and leave with him on a ride. He is trying to persuade her that there is no better option in the world than to accept the role as her “lover”, stating, “Be nice to me, be sweet like you can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in” (266). Although the theme of gender disparity is present throughout, this is Oates’ most political brushstroke in the short story, implying that Connie’s downfall is not merely an outlying encounter with an abductor of women but rather that there are many “Connies” in America, girls lost to the expectations of a systemic patriarchy.
The question that Arnold asserts is insidious because of the weight it holds in Connie’s world. Early on, Connie considers her mother in comparison to herself: “Her mother had been pretty once too, if you could believe those old snapshots in the album, but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie” (249). This line draws a correlative between the two, suggesting that her mother’s life is a possible stand-in for Connie’s future. It also suggests that the currency of Connie’s world is her sex appeal and ability to be desired by men. This poisonous thought drives Connie’s actions and lays bare power structures depicted throughout the short story.
Connie’s mother and sister also negotiate this same power structure, albeit in different ways. Her mother does not work, instead pitting her daughters against each other in an unsettling beauty pageant: “Connie thought that her mother preferred her to June just because she was prettier” (253). Her sister June works at Connie’s school, having made herself steady, obedient, and well-mannered. Meanwhile, Connie seeks for “something to depend upon” (251) beyond her pale home life, exposing herself to dangerous situations to do so. Although the pretense of the music that Connie loves is to subvert the cultural rules, Oates alludes to the fact that Connie is still prey to expectations of traditional gender roles.
As she creates a double life to become more desirous to older boys, Connie changes the way she dresses and skirts the vague attempts at adult supervision by authority figures. Because she receives no guidance on the risks of this behavior, seeking to enjoy “the pure pleasure of being alive” (251), Connie becomes prey for Arnold, who first spots her at the drive-in restaurant where she picks up men and listens to music. Therefore, when Arnold tells Connie that there is not anything else for a girl like Connie but to be “sweet and pretty,” he is leveraging an anxiety embedded deep within Connie, who understands that in time the summer would end, forcing Connie more strictly into the confines of her role in the patriarchy. Oates’s authorial voice never condemns or casts judgments on Connie’s actions. Instead, Oates gestures at the failings of Connie’s role models and the victory in Connie’s choice to use her agency to save the lives of her family.
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