Joyce Carol Oates is arguably our greatest living woman writer — and one of our greatest living writers period. She has said that she is "very sympathetic with most of the aims of feminism."

Many critics have faulted her for the wealth of violence in her fiction; Oates answered them in an essay entitled "Why Is Your Writing So Violent?" in which she said that the question was "always insulting . . . always ignorant . . . always sexist . . . war, rape, murder, and the more colorful minor crimes evidently fall within the exclusive province of the male writer, just as, generally, they fall within the exclusive province of male action."

But sexism, of a particularly virulent sort, informs many of Oates's depictions of violence. In much of Oates, victims — especially if they are women and the crime is rape — either seek out violence, enjoy it, and/or deserve it. In her recent works, as we shall see, there has been a punctuated evolution away from this type of portrayal.

That Joyce Carol Oates often writes of women as desiring or deserving sexual violence is especially troubling since some of her most inflammatory depictions of female victimization were published in the 1970s — the very time when the women's movement was most active around rape.

In her novel, Do With Me What You Will, Oates says, in effect, that if one is going to discuss victim precipitation, rape is the place to start. Oates writes about attorney Jack Morissey's successful defense of an accused rapist and tells the reader that his strategy was to suggest "the guilt of the victim, the conscious or unconscious complicity of the victim in the crime." She adds, "And rape was an excellent issue . . . because — in a sense — it was a crime only if the victim resisted: it became a crime only through the strenuous activity of the victim."

Oates is fully aware of this idea's hideous moral implications. In an essay for Time magazine on the Mike Tyson rape case, Oates denounces the suggestion of victim precipitation as "outrageous."

In another essay, Oates harshly criticizes William Faulkner for his "dismissal of the very possibility of rape in male female relations." She goes on to call Faulkner's "vicious and even demented sentiments which, if followed to a logical conclusion, would indict the victim for having been the 'cause' of the crime."

The latter is an instance of the pot calling the kettle black so blatant it can only be deliberate since (as we will shortly see) these "vicious and even demented sentiments" inform many of Oates's own portrayals of violence.

Why should the guilty victim figure prominently in Oates? There are several interlocking reasons.

One of the many goals of this richly talented author is to synthesize literary modes, uniting the realistic with the allegorical, and the naturalistic with the mythological. The man or, far more commonly — both generally and in Oates — the woman, who is "asking for it" is a stock character in folklore. Indeed, the image of "woman as victim" permeates Western mythology and Oates has written of it in a stunning variety of permutations.

The motif of victim precipitation also has deep religious reverberations. Christianity was founded by a figure who, according to its very own Bible, courted an agonizing and violent death. While the story of Jesus ("the Son" and God "the Father") is decidedly phallocentric, its special appeal to women may lie in the ease with which its central symbol is transformed into a feminine one. A man humiliated in front of a mob, flogged, then tortured to death on a cross, naked or nearly so, bears an uncanny resemblance to a victim of sexual assault. Rape in the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates can sometimes be understood as a "woman's crucifixion." A final important reason that victims of violence are often "indicted" in Oates's fiction is her own world-view. Oates believes that we are all participating in a "communal consciousness." One of the chief failures of our era (which she sees as coming to a close), Oates has written, is its insistence on "the old corrupting hell of the Renaissance ideal and its 'I'-ness, separate and distinct from all other fields of consciousness."

The "logical conclusion" of this philosophy could be that the complicity of the victim is necessary for a crime since victims and attackers share "fields of consciousness."

By the North Gate was Oates's first published collection of short stories. One of the stories in the volume, "Pastoral Blood," prefigures many of Oates's later tales of female self-annihilation. On the anniversary of her father's death, a young woman named Grace impulsively decides to die and sets out to deliver herself to an unknown murderer. Her plans go awry when she is "only" raped by a drunken African-American thug. Oates ends the story with Grace’s resolve to "reject, flatly, the easy suicide of insanity [playing upon the legend circulated in the wake of Caryl Chessman's crimes that rape victims go crazy]." Grace decides she will do better next time and actually get murdered. "Experience is the best teacher."

The same collection contains "An Encounter With The Blind," one of the relatively rare Oates stories in which the guilt of a male victim is at issue. "An Encounter With the Blind" is one of the earliest stories Oates published in the mode she has called the "realisitc allegory," a story which is realistically detailed even as it "shade[s] into parable."

When we first meet The Senator we are told that he is 42 years old and the owner of the "largest farm in Tintern." Oates calls him "The Senator" throughout the story but tells us that his name is B. (for Bethlehem) Arnold Hollis. This "loud red-faced friendly man" is soon in a saloon where he is cheerfully grousing about the workers on his farm, uppity "n——" who had the nerve to complain that the lodging at "Bethlehem's" place "wasn't clean enough." Here The Senator meets and gives a ride to Blind Boy Robin, a frail young man who says he is traveling the world to do his "duty."

Behind the wheel of his truck, with a knife at his throat, The Senator learns that Blind Boy Robin's "duty" is "to rid God's world of all kinds of sinners."

The Senator is genuinely terrified that Blind Boy Robin will murder him. But part of what gives his terror its hypnotic power is his growing sense that he is indeed guilty and that this very strange stranger has been sent by fate to enact a rough justice upon him. Frantically, he protests his own goodness, only to have Blind Boy Robin offer him the "privilege" of dying like Christ, "sharin' the world's sin, since you got none of your own."

But The Senator named Bethlehem knows that he is anything but without sin. Recalling how he had once almost been killed by a bear The Senator thinks "He wouldn't have minded that, just a bear, a crazed bear. But this — this boy –

'You know too much boy! You found out too much — somebody tole you — some n—- or somebody — "

The Senator then runs his car off the road and escapes his tormentor. But he confirms Blind Boy Robin's judgment of him when he gives the knife back to the hitchhiker, thus making himself an accessory to future murders.

Oates' first novel, With Shuddering Fall, featured a pivotal — and victim precipitated — rape.

With Shuddering Fall is a revenge story masquerading as a love story. The protagonist is the seemingly passive country girl Karen Herz; the antagonist, her lover Shar Rule, a restless, crude, race car driver.

Karen appears entranced by the young hoodlum after he brutally beats her father. When she runs off with her father's attacker, the story recalls "Romeo and Juliet." But Oates instead weaves a quite different tale, as Karen faithfully — albeit unconsciously, for her inertia is mental as well as physical — carries out her father's command to kill Shar.

Especially relevant to this essay is the means of Karen's revenge. She taunts him into raping her, thus making him responsible for her ensuing miscarriage. What's more, the rape and subsequent miscarriage give Karen power over him. Her rape is, in the novel's terms, an act perpetrated by Karen against Shar. Shar wanted the rape to be "a communion of pain." But he is disappointed: as the man in rape, Shar is the pain-causer while the victim is (from the novel's perspective) in the far more enviable position of pain-taker. The humiliation and physical agony of the rape has afforded Karen a masochistic cleansing. In the novel's quasi-religious view: "the communion of pain had given Shar to Karen but had not given Karen to Shar." Communion is a vital motif in WSF; in the rape "communion" Karen "wins" because she partakes of Christlike suffering; her miscarriage may even be seen as a kind of death. Having "died" for him, Karen is in a moral position to demand a martyr — and Shar commits a fiery suicide on the race track at her implicit command.

The novel ends with Karen accepted back by her family after she attends a church service where the victim/murderess (from the same act) identifies with Christ during the communion.

Two Oates novels which followed With Shuddering Fall and focused on female protagonists also featured pivotal rape scenes.

A Garden of Earthly Delights is a larger novel than With Shuddering Fall , both in length and ambition, though it shares with the latter (as do many of Oates's early short stories) the rural setting of Eden county and the focus on a female protagonist.

While Garden is a complete work in itself, it is also, along with the novels which followed it, them and Expensive People, part of a trilogy meant to represent the rural, urban, and suburban experiences of American life as interpreted by Joyce Carol Oates.

In A Garden of Earthly Delights, Oates exposes the fraud of the American dream for the rural dispossessed and tells a story of a woman's manipulation of men and her use of sexual deceit to survive.

When Clara is a child, an incident of near-molestation occurs. She and her best friend, Rosalie, want to go to town to celebrate the latter's thirteenth birthday. They hitchhike and are picked up by a man.

The uneducated Clara is clever in an intuitive way; she appears to tease the man, enjoying the knowledge of his attraction to her and the unfamiliar sense of power she receives from it.

She looked at the man. A strange dizzy sensation overcame her, a sense of daring and excitement. She met his gaze with her own and smiled slowly, feeling her lips part slowly to show her teeth. She and the man looked at each other for a moment. He took his hand away from her knee. Something strange seemed to be happening but Clara did not know what it was. She seemed to be doing something, keeping something going. The sun was warm and dazzling. Then she forgot what she was doing, lost control, and her smile went away. She was a child again. She leaned against Rosalie to get away from the man's smell.

Then Clara angrily and successfully deflects his sexual aims: she "slashed at his hand with her nails. He winced and released her. 'Goddam old a——-!' Clara cried, jumping out. 'Go f— yourself.'" The resourceful girl-child throws a glove in her would-be molester's face so she and her girlfriend can make a quick getaway.

Later, Clara is raped by Lowry, the man she loves. The rape scene in Garden is both less dramatic and far less pivotal than that in With Shuddering Fall. Clara neither enjoys nor provokes this abuse — except by the strained logic of Lowry himself who was aroused when a suddenly frightened Clara screamed and ran toward him because a bloodsucker was on her foot.
She felt as if her body were being driven into the ground, hammered into it. She felt as if it were being dislodged from her brain and she would never get the two together again. Then everything broke and she felt his muscles go rigid, locking himself to her and waiting, suspended between breaths that must have made his throat ache.
. . . Between her legs her flesh was alive with a pain that was so sharp and burning she could not quite believe in it. She felt as if he had gone after her with a knife. She felt as if she had been opened up and hammered at with a cruelty that made no sense because she could not see what it meant.

This rape is neither glamorized nor romanticized — yet its aftermath is the real beginning of Clara and Lowry's relationship. We read that, while still physically hurting from it, Clara "felt a sensation of joy." And then: "He kissed her and Clara made a slight gesture of impatience, mock disgust, then he held her head in his hands and kissed her again. She felt his tongue against her lips and smiled while she kissed him."

them was Oates' first novel set in the city. Like Garden, them featured impoverished characters with a heavy emphasis on sordid detail. It is the saga of Loretta Walpole, her son Jules, and daughter Maureen, who survive urban life at high cost to their psyches and morals. Here again, the guilt of Oatesean victims is highlighted.

Loretta Walpole is raped by a police officer who comes to her aid after her young lover has been shot to death by her brother. In the room with her boyfriend's very fresh corpse, Loretta "heard [the police officer] unzipping his pants. She half rose, maybe to run out of the place or maybe to make it easier for him, and he grabbed hold of her and the two of them stumbled back against the table." She is described as "struggling with Howard, struggling to make it easier for him." Like the rape victim of classic fantasy, Loretta is at once reluctant and desirous. In the following chapter, she has married her rapist.

Later, Loretta's daughter, Maureen, is brutally beaten by her enraged stepfather, Furlong, who has discovered her at prostitution. This crime, too, occurs with the victim's complicity. Maureen is repeatedly warned by her little sister that Furlong is "mad as hell" and that her mother wants her "to come where she is, at Ginny's." But "Maureen went on by" to meet Furlong and get beaten by him.

Still later in the novel, Loretta's son, Jules is looking through a detective magazine and sees a story: "'Jail-Bait Slashed, Raped, and Slain in Boise.' The story was illustrated with several photographs of a fourteen-year-old girl with a snippy face, long blond hair, a strange, demonic pleasure evident in her mouth . . ."

Child molestation is portrayed within Expensive People. Its role and depiction is suitably convoluted, as befits this deliberately odd novel. Expensive People poses as the memoirs of Richard Everett, a disturbed teenager who murdered his mother, a successful writer, when he was only eleven and who is planning to commit suicide after he has finished writing this book.

Richard buys the mail-order rifle which he will eventually use to kill his mother after reading and re-reading "some twenty, thirty times" a short story called "The Molesters," written by his mother and published in The Quarterly Review of Literature.

It is a case of art deliberately and consciously feeding off itself: "The Molesters" was indeed first published in The Quarterly Review of Literature — by Joyce Carol Oates.

The short story interpolated into Expensive People has only one sexual abuser in the story but, as the title indicates, more than one "molester." It is told in three parts, each of which begins with the sentence "I am six years old." In the first section, the girl is sexually molested by a male stranger but remains psychologically whole. In the following segments, the child is progressively more traumatized: in the second part she tells her frantic mother that "I like him. I like him better than you!" and, in the final section, she has come to believe in her own contamination because the abuser "did something terrible, and what was terrible came onto me, like black tar you can't wash off."

As Greg Johnson observes, "the man's gentleness and her own innocence preclude any immediate sense of guilt or violation. Rather it is the hysterical, mean-spirited reaction of her parents that 'molests' her consciousness with intimations of evil."

Here, in this story in which "the parents are the more dangerous molesters," Oates appears to champion the views of Alfred Kinsey on the subject:
It is difficult to understand why a child, except for its cultural conditioning, should be disturbed by having its genitalia touched, or disturbed by seeing the genitalia of another person. . . . Some of the more experienced students of juvenile problems have come to believe that the emotional reactions of the parents, police, and other adults . . . may disturb the child more seriously than the contacts themselves.

Kinsey's interpretation (so similar to that of Oates' "The Molesters") has been blasted by feminists, among them Florence Rush, who said that "With the usual male arrogance, Kinsey could not imagine that a sexual assault on a child constitutes a gross and devastating shock and insult, and so he blamed everyone but the offender."

The Wheel of Love, published in 1965, is a collection of short stories which, as a writer in Kirkus Reviews noted, "brilliantly search for the mystic/mythic folk imperatives of female sexuality." The heroines are often immediately recognizable "types": the emotionally anesthetized Catholic nun; the deprived, celibate young widow; betrayed wives; adulteresses; "other women"; and rebellious teenaged girls tentatively and awkwardly exploring the wonders and dangers of sex.

This volume includes the short story which remains Oates's most famous and widely anthologized, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" Like "An Encounter With The Blind," the story is a realistic allegory. Oates gives her protagonist, pretty, fifteen-year-old Connie, enough detail to make her convincing as an individual within a realistic context and at the same time suggests that she is representative of teen-aged girls of her era — which is, vaguely, somewhere in the late 1950s to mid 1960s.

We are given to understand that Connie enjoys her budding sexuality, reveling in the trashy fantasies inspired by rock music, enjoying necking and "making out" in boys' cars at shopping malls, and sharing giggly secrets with her female friends.

One fateful Sunday, while the rest of her family is off at an outing, a strange fellow calling himself "Arnold Friend" drives up to her house in a gold jalopy. Some critics call the story "an inverted fairy tale" because, instead of the knight in shining armor coming to rescue the maiden, we have the devil in "a funky souped-up convertible" taking her to her doom.

Connie recalls seeing Arnold Friend at a mall; flattered by his attention, she flirts with him as she would any boy. As his manner becomes more threatening, and Connie realizes that he is not a youth but a grown man pretending to be a teenager, both she and the reader experience a growing terror.

Oates has structured the story so that the conversation between Connie and "A. Friend" takes place with him beside his car and Connie inside her home, standing behind a flimsy locked screen door. He could enter by force but does not — demanding that she cross over to him, which she does in a state of numbed, classically feminine acquiescence.

For all the trashiness of Connie's fuzzy fantasies, she is also a heroine: on this terrible Sunday, she gives in to Arnold Friend when he threatens her family. Like Jesus Christ, she sacrifices herself to save others.

Greg Johnson calls the story a "feminist allegory," one that warns that young women of the Sexual Revolution "are 'going' exactly where their mothers and grandmothers have already 'been': into sexual bondage at the hands of a male 'Friend.'" But to call it feminist (at least without qualification) is to obscure the seductiveness of Connie and the way "Where Are You Going, Where Are You Been?" suggests that the female's sexual teasing leads men to destroy her.

A profoundly old-fashioned sensibility suffuses the final story in the volume, "What Is The Connection Between Men And Women?" Initially unnamed, the heroine is a young, chaste widow. It is her fate to spend her days in "a world of women. She sees women all the time." A man approaches and we are told that "the flesh of her body began its long, silent wail." Then this same man begins stalking her. She is scared but, like the woman of so much "all she needs is a good lay" folklore, aroused: "Something began to pulsate in her loins, in the secrecy of her dark, moist flesh." Through one of the man's phone calls the reader is finally told that the heroine's name is Sharon. The stalker follows Sharon home, knocks on her door and, as the story ends she "reaches up to slide the little bolt back and everything comes open, comes apart."

Oates' 1973 novel Do With Me What You Will, together with the collection of short stories published the following year, The Goddess and Other Women, may represent the culmination of her obsession with the guilty victim — at least as it concerns her own gender.

Do With Me What You Will is a complex work. It ranks as one of Oates' most brilliant syntheses of realistic and allegorical modes. The two primary male characters represent the forces of Masculinity/Law while the heroine symbolizes Femininity/Emotion.

Early in the novel, our heroine, the archtypically passive and feminine Elena, hears a lawyer intone that the accused are innocent until proven guilty. She asks in bewilderment the troubling question that has haunted her creator: "Everyone is innocent . . . ? . . . Not just the bad people, but the people they do it to . . . they are innocent too?"

Towards the denouement of the novel, Elena Howe is depressed over her failing marriage to lawyer/father figure Marvin Howe and confused about her adulterous love affair with his (symbolic) son, the younger attorney Jack Morissey. She spots two male strangers she hopes will "liberate" her from her predicament into death. But Elena (like the heroine of "Pastoral Blood") does not get killed (unlike that heroine, she does not "even" get raped) and, so, decides that she must end her marriage. When she first met him Howe, Elena had asked him if victims were innocent. Now that she is leaving him, she answers that question — in the negative.

"I can't stay married to you."
"Why not?
". . . because I . . . I would be careless of my life if I stayed here. Because I might let something happen to me."
She saw, through her confusion, the sagging reluctant certainty in his face as if, somehow, he understood. Yet his voice was bewildered. he asked, 'What? What are you saying . . . ? I don't understand you.'
. . . Elena said: "If I stay here something might happen to me, I might be careless of myself. I might want to die. . . . I might make someone hurt me. I have to leave you or . . ."
"Did someone hurt you, what do you mean? Did someone . . . ?"
"No. I don't want to die. I don't want it," she said. "I . . . I don't want to make someone hurt me . . . I don't want to make someone into a killer. . . ."

1974 saw the publication of Joyce Carol Oates' The Goddess and Other Women. Male violence provoked by females links many stories in this collection: "Concerning the Case of Bobby T.," "The Maniac," "Waiting," and "Assault." These stories, especially the last one mentioned, buttress every stereotype about women-as-victims that the women's movement of the time sought to demolish.

At a time when feminists were trying to convince the public that women neither provoke nor enjoy battery, Joyce Carol Oates published “The Maniac,” a story in which a young woman thinks about her husband's slap, remembering that "Her mouth had bled" and thinks that "She didn't want him to strike her again. Or maybe she did want it, maybe when she caught up with him she would invite it after all."

"The Girl" is a story about the gang rape of a naïve teenaged girl that seems to start as a protest against society's indifference to this type of crime and then swerves into something quite different. The protagonist has been recruited by a peculiar, would-be filmmaker (or perhaps he is simply a con artist) to play the part of, yes, "The Girl" in what we are given to believe is a pseudo-arty project.

Things spin tragically out of control.

Scream! cries The Director.
But I can't, I can't get breath. They are at me. I scramble up onto my feet. But. But I have lost hold. I can't see. The Director is very close to us, right beside us. Turn her around, make her scream — hurry up — do it like this, like this, do it fast like this — come on –
The film is speeded up. Too fast. I have lost hold of it, can't see. I am being driven backwards, downwards, burrowed-into, like a hammer being hammered being hammered against all at once. Do I see noseholes, eyeholes, mouthholes?
Something being pounded into flesh like meat.

In the hospital, she is visited by a man she knows but, in her confusion, does not quite recognize (probably a brother or boyfriend). He tells her to just try to forget about it because "The police, they won't find them anyway . . . they don't give a damn about you . . . don't torture yourself."

Oates then shows why "The Girl's" violation ought not to be regarded so cavalierly.

But, but.
Raw reddened meat, scraped raw, hair yanked out in handfuls. A scalp bleeding and sandy. Sandy grit in my mouth.
. . . The Director helped them drag me back saying Oh it was beautiful . . . it was beautiful . . .The back of my head was hurt and emptied out. Too much battered into me, I couldn't tell them apart, there were two of them but maybe two hundred or two thousand, I couldn't know.
But I couldn't talk right. The man tried to listen politely but here is what I said: ". . . rockhand, two of them, birdburrow, truck, toy, wheel, the arrow, the exit, the way out. . . "

However, "The Girl's" ending seems to betray Oates' earlier sense of horror at the rape victim's experience. Spotting "The Director" a few months later, our heroine comes to an odd reconciliation with him. Repeatedly, she asks him to tell her that there was film in the camera, that they really made a movie. He assures her that there was — "Don't you ever doubt that" — and, thus, gang-raped but not fooled, viciously attacked for the sake of a "real movie," our heroine ends her tale: "So I was saved."

The most troubling rape narrative of the many in Joyce Carol Oates' literary career is in the short story "Assault." In 1974, when feminists were setting up rape hotlines and trying to convince the public that rape was a crime of violence rather than sexual gratification, that it is not to be confused with "making love," Oates published a story in which these myths were most dramatically developed and, it would seem, supported.

But "Assault" may also have been Oates' means of exorcising the masochistic and provoking rape victim from her own consciousness.

"Assault" recalls "Pastoral Blood" in both its heroine's sense of unfinished business with a dead father and her self-precipitated rape by an African-American male. The main body of "Assault" takes place several years after Charlotte was raped at the age of fourteen. We learn, prior to seeing the rape in flashback, that she is the daughter of a famous scientist who has disappeared and probably died. She has returned to the house she grew up in to get his papers in order and prepare to sell the residence. Her parents' divorce was partially caused by the bitterness that followed her "Assault."

Oates takes great care to set the scene of Charlotte's rape. Coming home late after a trip to a fair, Charlotte pauses and — seemingly by a telepathic force — "gets herself raped."

"From the age of fourteen onward, she was to remember that pause, that half-glance over her shoulder. Why? Why had she paused? There had been no need for it, no reason. . . . she prepared herself for an experience she would never comprehend. . . .

. . . She paused, staring. She could not have been more transfixed had she called the car to her, summoning it onto this dark side road, away from the illuminated highway."

And Charlotte's desire must be masochistic indeed, for the rapist she draws to herself is no dashing young rake. Rather, he comes to her "stinking of whiskey and vomit and urgency" and slams her head "viciously" against the concrete, breaking her jaw.

She hears his name, "Carlie," repeated by his friends, but tells the police later that she did not hear his name. Oates gives a good description of the shame — "she stared at the floor. At any floor" — which might have silenced Charlotte. But there is another reason for her silence as well: it would hardly do for a "necessary" rape to land a man in prison.

During Charlotte's night home, she comes to a masochistic reveling in the memory of her attack and an almost necrophiliac idealization of the rapist: "Faceless, not white, not black, he could walk anywhere. O love, it was fists and knees and another fist inside her, painful, blundering, without personality." Charlotte must be brought to this perverse nostalgia if she is to make peace with the crime she "secret[ly]" knows she precipitated. The idea of peeling away the rotten overlay of outrage and finding the core of masochistic acceptance is conveyed through the image of Charlotte burning fruits like tangerines in a trash barrel and "brushing her bangs out of her face like cobwebs." Also, Oates deliberately confuses Charlotte's fear/wish for a returning and living father with her fear/wish for her "summoned" rapist. We do not know which "he" is referred to when Charlotte wonders if "he" is there.

The story ends with Charlotte deciding that a rape and beating is "not so different from . . . [an] act of love" and eager to "get on with her life."

Given the peculiar — and peculiarly happy — ending of "Assault," one must ask: does a belief in victim precipitation have a positive psychological value? In "A Middle-Class Education" Oates suggests that it does. The protagonist of this short story is male; he has been traumatized after witnessing a murder.

Tormented by the memory, Seeley lives in constant fear and suffers insomnia. At a party he listens to a self-confident woman named Grace talk about how the truly innocent, i.e., those who aren't self-destructive, are safe regardless of how violent the world appears. ". . . people let you alone if you mind your own business. It's just frightened, hesitant people . . . women who imagine things . . . and then of course something does happen to them. . . . Some people are born victims . . . They invite trouble."

Soon after this bestowal of wisdom, our hero overcomes his paralyzing fears, realizing with both excitement and relief that "Grace was right, she has the right idea, they do leave you alone most of the time . . ." Thus, Oates appears to suggest that a belief in a kind of ultimate justice — a world in which the abused court abuse — enables us to function without terror.

Terror is what any reader vicariously experiences when reading Joyce Carol Oates's powerful treatment of a gang rape in Son of the Morning, a novel published in 1978, four years after The Goddess And Other Women.

Fifteen-year-old Elsa Vickery is on her way home when she is surrounded by a group of unfamiliar males.

One of the men held her by the hair, and another squeezed her arms again where it already hurt, and still another, a boy bent forward to touch her breast — how could he dare do such a thing, in front of everyone! She tried to throw herself backward. She tried to break free. Dear God, she cried in silence, dear God please don't let, dear God please — She stumbled against someone's legs and nearly fell. But they wouldn't let her fall. Beery whiskeyish breaths were hot against her face. Why were they laughing? Why did they want to hurt her? She couldn't believe it was happening and her mind stood off a little from it, astonished, feeling nothing. But then she came back to herself and nothing had changed. The boy had pushed against her, speaking in a light sly taunting teasing drunken voice, saying words she had never heard before but understood, somehow, understood at once: she stared at him in amazement and saw he was hardly more than her own age, and there was a smudge — or was it a birthmark — three or four marks on his cheek — and then her knees buckled.
Dear God –
Oh please –
An arm jammed itself beneath her chin, hard. Pressed itself against her throat, hard. She choked and gagged and tried to scream. There was a taste of grit, salt — one of them put his hand over her mouth.
At last behind that hand, she began to scream.

Equally sensitive to the victim's plight is Oates's wrenching description of the frightened and humiliated girl's journey home.

She got unsteadily to her feet and something ran down her legs, the insides of her legs. Her head swam. She touched herself — her underpants were gone. Her skirt was ripped. Something wet and warm ran down the insides of her legs, unloosed, free. She stood in one place for a while, not daring to move. It was blood, she knew it was blood. That blood. . . .
She held her right hand up and saw that it was wet with something dark. It was sticky. The fingers darkly stained: blood. It was that kind of blood. She heard herself whimpering; she was so ashamed, everyone would know, everyone would see. The back of her skirt would be stained. . . .
The back of her head hurt where it had struck against the ground. There was a torn, raw, throbbing sensation between her legs and in the pit of her belly. Her breasts ached. She staggered, her head swam, she almost fell, she knew she was being silly and everyone would laugh. Where were her underpants — ! And the back of her legs would be stained. . . .
They had yanked at her, snatched at her, crowding and jostling one another. Between her legs it had hurt very, very badly: did they know?
She had screamed for them to stop but no one heard.
Now she screamed again. "Mamma! Mamma! Daddy!"
But what could she tell them or anyone, how could she explain? — her underpants gone, her clothing ripped, her belly and legs smeared with her own sour-smelling blood?

The aftermath of this horror is heartbreaking as Oates tells how Elsa, pregnant because of a brutal attack, is banished from school because she "might distract the other students" and endures an isolated "disgrace." The girl comes "to know that look of wanting-to-get-away very well" and to recognize "the false smiles [of those who] could barely stand to be in the same room with her."

The case seems like a classic feminist pamphlet example of the necessity for abortion — except that Elsa does not want an abortion. Her father is portrayed sympathetically: his outrage at his daughter's rape is not based on a sense of property violation that has sometimes been attributed to “patriarchal” men but on compassion for the child he loves. His failing is that he never asks his daughter what she wants. She wants to carry to term.

Perhaps the reason Elsa wants to have the rapist's baby is that, in the fantasies of the naïve teenager, having it gives her a means of revenge against her attacker. That fantasized revenge is based on a father's natural and normal desire for access to his child.

And if, afterward, he came for her — came to claim the baby?
No.
She would stare coldly at him and turn aside as if not recognizing him. She would say: "I don't know you. I've never set eyes on you." He might plead with her, and say how sorry he was how sorry, sorry, in a voice like her brother's whine when he'd broken something in the kitchen, coming in so staggering-drunk, but she would hardly listen, and she would not look at him at all. "I don't know you. I've never set eyes on you," she would say coldly.

Revenge against a sexual attacker is acted out, albeit in a hesitant, semi-conscious manner, in Marya: A Life.

The moth-eaten cliché calling a book "long-awaited" may seem bizarre when applied to the monumentally prolific Joyce Carol Oates. But one puzzling aspect of Oates's career was the lack of the early autobiographical novel we expect from authors in our confessional era.

Marya: A Life, published in 1986, is Oates' autobiographical novel. While Marya is, of course, not Joyce Carol Oates (any more than Isadora Wing is Erica Jong or the "Henry Miller" of his novels is Henry Miller the author), the similarities between Oates and her heroine are many and unabashed.

Marya tells the story of an intelligent, creative girl who, like Oates, grew up in a poor family in rural New York. Her literary talent leads Marya away from her humble beginnings to the world of the university and, later, to success as a writer.

The sexual molestation scenes depicted in Marya are quite a departure from the rapes in With Shuddering Fall, them, and "Assault." As was true in A Garden of Earthly Delights and Son of The Morning, Oates never suggests that the victim either desires or enjoys or deserves her violation. However, unlike Clara in Garden but like Elsa in Son of the Morning, Marya feels no compensatory "joy" afterward.

Oates is both realistic and restrained as she describes Marya's violation by her older cousin Lee.

. . . it happened so swiftly in such choking half-sobbing confusion, a matter of seconds, scrambling and twisting — wrestling? tickling? was it one of the rough tickling games? — in the front seat of the blue Buick — and that was all.
"Now don't you tell, you," Lee whispered, panting, frightened, giving her a little shove as if he wanted her away from him at once.
Marya's greatest astonishment arose from the fact that he had allowed her, a girl, to see the most secret part of his body. And it frightened her that he was frightened; she'd never seen a boy his age in such a state. Face flushed, hands trembling — he might, if he wanted, actually hurt her quite a bit.

Marya not only despises her tormentor but, as already noted, avenges herself against him. Oddly, however, the mood Oates establishes for Marya's "accidental" retaliation parallels the mood of Charlotte's "waiting" for her "necessary" rape: finding her cousin working beneath his car, "Marya stood studying the jack. . . . 'How does this thing work?' she asked. But she knew enough not to touch it not even lightly, experimentally, with her thumb."

Then "suddenly everything buckled and gave way — the car crashed down, Lee screamed in shock and pain" and, though Marya calls for help, and is eventually relieved to find that her cousin will recover from his injuries, she first looks down at his bloodied, unconscious body with a sense of triumph, thinking "How do you like it now pig pig pig pig pig."

Female masochism and submission are nowhere to be found in Oates's powerful, groundbreaking Foxfire. However, even here, Oates did not leave behind her fascination with victimization because, in order to escape being victims, the young women of the Foxfire gang become victimizers — of men.

Set in the 1950s, the novel is about a group of working-class high school females who form a girls' gang — with a difference: it is not an auxiliary to a boys' gang. Rather, they are united in a consciousness which is both proto- or quasi-feminist and baby-talk Marxist. The male characters in the novel conform relentlessly to the "men are such beasts" teaching of some mother/daughter and “girl talk” traditions — but the Foxfire girls do not slink away in shame and content themselves with private anti-male griping.

Rather, the Foxfire gang forms after a shy girl named Rita is sexually fondled by a male teacher. Led by Legs Sadovsky, a bright, athletic, confident man-hater, the gang of girls paint his car with the message: "I AM N—– LIPS BUTTINGER IM A DIRTY OLD MAN MMMMMM GIRLS!!! I TEACH MATH & TICKLE T— IM BUTTINGER I EAT P—-." (By the anti-black racism with which they humiliate a white person, Oates shows that, while the Foxfire girls may appear ahead of their time in some respects, they are also part of it.)

When Maddy Wirtz goes to her Uncle Wimpy's store after hours to buy a typewriter, Uncle Wimpy takes the opportunity to attempt a sexual assault — and finds himself the target of Foxfire. Maddy's gang sisters have correctly anticipated Uncle Wimpy's move; they bust down the window of his store and beat the astonished malefactor — while Maddy takes the promised typewriter.

A similar scenario will be repeated many times as Foxfire supports itself through its own version of "hooking" in which a Foxfire girl makes herself pretty and then waits around for a man to approach her. When he propositions her, the Foxfire gang pounces and robs him. The novel indicates that none of Foxfire's male victims reports the robbery to the police since it would mean explaining the sexual reason he was initially with the girl and admitting that he had been overpowered by females.

The gang collapses with what the Foxfire sisters call the "Final Solution" to their financial problems (the title's irony is Oates', not the gang's, even though its members consider themselves sophisticated and the events take place after WWII). They plan to kidnap and ransom a wealthy man and then live off the proceeds.

The kidnapping goes badly, and bloodily, afoul when the victim — who had previously appeared just another lust-driven male — displays courage under the threat of death. The gang had failed to reckon with the possibility of a victim’s extreme bravery.

Oates genuinely likes the young women of Foxfire but she gives them no seal of approval: the gang comes to an ignoble end because of their own short-sighted faith in violence to solve their problems.

Ultimately, what can we conclude about the victim of violence, especially sexual violence, as interpreted by Joyce Carol Oates? Much of what Oates has written about Sylvia Plath — whom she sees as an adherent of the individualistic philosophy antithetical to her own — can, strangely enough, be applied to Oates.

Oates asserts that it is vital to read Plath because "it is a kind of elegant 'dreaming-back'" into the philosophy of egoism. Plath was one of several "visionary" artists, Oates believes, whose function was to "force up into consciousness the most perverse and terrifying possibilities of the epoch." Oates writes that, had Plath's career not been prematurely ended by her suicide, "she might have cleansed her[self] of those impurities of her era she had absorbed." One of the chief flaws of Plath's poetry, in Oates's view, is that it "approaches but never crosses over the threshold of an active, healthy attack upon obvious evils and injustices."

From "Pastoral Blood" through "Assault," Joyce Carol Oates's fiction brought violator and deserving/desirous violated ever closer together, not in gentleness, but in increasing brutality. In these works, Oates has "dreamt-back" through our culture's most perverse and terrifying myths of victim-precipitation — and "dreamt-forward" into the most “vicious and demented” possible interpretations of her own philosophy of communal consciousness.
Having cleansed herself of the image of the masochistic female victim in its multitudinous guises, she was able to write the rape scene in Son of the Morning, one which portrayed a female victim as really and truly a victim. Then she could pen Marya, a novel in which a victim strikes back. Both of these depictions demanded an implicit recognition of the limitations of Joyce Carol Oates's own world-view, and a realization of how the consciousness of one individual may be truly "separate and distinct" — and at odds — with another's.

Finally, the healthy and robust Oates could, in middle age, write Foxfire, a novel which, in striking contrast to Plath's poetry, crosses over the threshold of an active, healthy — though fatally flawed (the gang's, not the book's) — attack upon evils and injustices.

Oates has written an eloquent consideration of the condition of the "woman writer" or as she put it in an essay of the same name, (Woman) Writer. See (Woman) Writer, Oates, Joyce Carol, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1988, pp. 22-32.
Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates, edited by Milazzo, Lee, University Press Of Mississippi, Jackson, Mississippi, 1989, p. 107.
Ibid., p. 130.
Do With Me What You Will, p. 280.
Newsweek, Oates, Joyce Carol, Feb. 24, 1992, p.60.
The Profane Art, Oates, Joyce Carol, (Persea Books, 1983), p. 60.
Understanding Joyce Carol Oates, Johnson, Greg, (University of South Carolina Press, 1987), p. 9.
New Heaven, New Earth, Oates, Joyce Carol, (The Vanguard Press, 1974), p. 118-9.
By the North Gate, Oates, Joyce Carol, (Fawcett Crest, 1963), p. 92.
(Woman) Writer, Oates, Joyce Carol, (E.P. Dutton, 1989), p. 317.
Ibid.
By the North Gate, Oates, Joyce Carol, (Fawcett Crest, 1963), p. 93.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 94.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 96.
Ibid., p. 100.
Ibid., p. 101.
Ibid., p. 102.
With Shuddering Fall, Oates, Joyce Carol (The Vanguard Press, 1964), p. 247.
A Garden Of Earthly Delights, Oates, Joyce Carol, (The Vanguard Press, New York, 1966), p. 67.
Ibid., p. 68.
Ibid., p. 189.
Ibid., p. 190.
Ibid., p. 192.
them, Oates, Joyce Carol, (The Vanguard Press, 1969), pp. 49-50.
Ibid, p. 218.
Ibid., p. 299.
Expensive People, Oates, Joyce Carol, (The Vanguard Press, 1968), 194.
Ibid., p. 193-211.
Ibid., p. 208.
Ibid., p. 210.
Understanding Joyce Carol Oates, Johnson, Greg, (University of South Carolina Press, 1987), p. 61.
Joyce Carol Oates, Friedman, Ellen G., (Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., New York, 1980.
Against Our Will, Brownmiller, Susan, (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1975), pp. 276-277.
Ibid., p. 277.
The Wheel of Love, Oates, Joyce Carol, (The Vanguard Press, 1970), dust jacket.
Understanding Joyce Carol Oates, Johnson, Greg, (University of South Carolina Press, 1987), p. 99.
(Woman) Writer, Oates, Joyce Carol, (E.P. Dutton, 1989), p. 321.
The Wheel of Love, Oates, Joyce Carol (The Vanguard Press, 1970), p. 431.
Ibid., p. 429.
Ibid., p. 438.
Ibid., p. 440.
Ibid., p. 94.
Ibid., p. 534-5.
The Goddess and Other Women, Oates, Joyce Carol, (The Vanguard Press, Inc., New York, 1974), p. 120.
Ibid., p. 121.
Ibid., p. 11.
Ibid., p. 11.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 14.
Ibid., p. 13.
Ibid., p. 14.
Ibid., p. 451-2
Ibid., 452.
Ibid., 452.
Ibid., 449.
Ibid., p. 455.
Ibid., p. 455.
Ibid., p. 460-1.
A Sentimental Education and Other Stories, Oates, Joyce Carol, p. 85-6.
Ibid., p. 90.
Son of the Morning, Oates, Joyce Carol, Vanguard Press, New York,1978, pp. 27-28.
Ibid., pp. 38-40.
Ibid., p. 66.
Ibid., p. 59.
Ibid., p. 68.
Ibid., p. 67.
Ibid., p. 66.
Marya: A Life, Oates, Joyce Carol, (E. P. Dutton, 1986), p. 35.
Ibid., p. 42.
Ibid., p. 39.
Ibid., p. 39.
Foxfire, Oates, Joyce Carol, (Dutton, 1993), p. 31.
New Heaven, New Earth, Oates, Joyce Carol, (The Vanguard Press, 1974), p. 124.
Ibid. p. 7.
Ibid.
Ibid., p. 117.
Ibid., p. 118-9.