Joyce Carol Oates: Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

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‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’
‘Where are you going, where have you been?’ is a story written by Joyce Carol Oates about a fifteen year old girl, Connie, who is consumed by her looks and she is in constant conflict with her mother about this. Her mother is always comparing her with her sister June who is simple but very helpful to the family. Connie’s adventures with boys led her to meet a different kind of a boy, Arnold Friend who changes the course of her life. Connie watching herself walk out of her house to meet Arnold and seeing vast lands unfamiliar to her is an imagery of her transition from childhood to adulthood or life to death CITATION Joy66 \l 1033 (Oates). The narrator also uses literary and rhetorical devices to enhance the title of the story and the following paragraphs show how the title of where are you going, where have you been.
This essay is focusing on the title to show where the characters have been and where they are going. Connie and her mother portray the title based on their beauty. Connie being where her mother has been and the mother being where Connie is going. Authority was not there, self-will and independence ruled their lives, and Connie’s resented her family and was all about herself. These changes when Arnold Friend showed up and now there is authority to follow, self- will is denied and Connie is now concerned of her family and even sacrifices herself for them to be safe.
“You think you are so pretty?” those were the words Connie’s mother would ask her daughter every time she took a look at the mirror admiring herself. She had a long hair that was just the right color, dark brown, to turn necks to her direction in the shopping malls that she and her sister accompanied by their friends went every other evening. She wore pink lipstick on her lips, walked provocatively in public and wore bracelets on her arms. She was always looking at herself on the mirrors and checking people’s faces to see their judgement of her looks. As a fifteen year old girl, Connie “knew that she was pretty and that is all that was everything’ to her CITATION Joy66 \l 1033 (Oates).
Her mother on the other hand, had aged from the old beauty days that her daughter Connie is in now, she became but ‘scuffling around the house in the old bedroom slippers’ and for this reason she was always bickering her daughter out of jealous CITATION Whe18 \l 1033 (Where Are You going, Where Have You Been?). Connie’s eyes were brown but she transited into blue eyes as Arnold Friend described her and her natural eye color was all gone. Connie’s looks was where her mother had been and the mother is where Connie will be going.
Connie’s and those around her don’t have an authority identity. Connie’s father is seldom at home, he is busy working and when he is around he is glued on the newspaper while eating dinner and heads to bed afterwards, spending no time with his family CITATION Joy66 \l 1033 (Oates). Connie loved to go out with her friends and occasionally, her best friend’s father would take them to the shopping plaza and on picking them he wouldn’t bother to ask them where and what they had been up to. This signifies that those in authority had no control or guidance whatsoever as to what the girls did which can be interpreted as lack of exercising authority as should be.
On the other side of the flip coin, in her encounter with the mysterious Arnold Friend, Connie does everything the man says as much as she tried severally to refuse what he was asking of her. He was assertive that ‘I am not coming in there but you are coming out here’ CITATION Joy66 \l 1033 (Oates) and that she did. He went ahead and warned her of using the phone and when she tried he threatened her family and she obliged. He exercised an authority over her, telling her what would happen if she displeased him. Connie went to a situation that placed her right in the middle of authority.
With lack of authority one can do so much at will without being concerned about the repercussion drawn from disrespecting an authority. Connie and her friends were in a position where they had no one to answer to, giving them much self -will and independence. They could go out and do as they saw best and even be out at eleven in the evening and her girl friend’s father bothered not to ask what they had been up to CITATION Joy66 \l 1033 (Oates). Connie washed her hair one Sunday morning to use it as an excuse not to attend a barbecue that her whole family had been invited to and all her mother could was ‘stay home alone then’. This could be interpreted that the mother went with what her daughter wanted even if it was not the right thing to do, a teenager with her character could obviously not be trusted to be left home alone.
Now Connie was in a different place as she and Arnold argued about taking her for a ride. She had tried to get to the phone and call for help when Friend insisted on her going for the ride but she became paralyzed and could not move and her knees gave in and she fell on the floor. The writer says she became hollow and filled with emptiness, her heart thumping in her chest felt like it was no longer hers and at that moment she did all Arnold asked as if she had been compelled or hypnotized being left without self-will. He threatened to hurt her family and friends if she did not cooperate with him and join him outside the house robbing her the choice to decide whether to go at will or not and the thought of her family being hurt was not bearable to her so she did as he asked. There was no more independence and will to do as she pleased in this time where she woke up from her nap CITATION Whe18 \l 1033 (Where Are You going, Where Have You Been?).
In the place where Connie had been before Arnold drove his golden jalopy convertible in front of her house, she resented her family because she felt they saw no good in her and they preferred her simple sister June who worked as a secretary in the same school Connie attended. She hated how her mother was always picking on her and comparing her with June who helped pay bills and did house chores yet her father would not come to aid her. She wished ‘her mother was dead’ CITATION Joy66 \l 1033 (Oates) so that all the bickering could come to an end. Connie lived in the shadow of her sister who was always praised and preferred by her mother and her aunts. In her tone when talking to her sister about the daughters, Connie’s mother spoke in approval of June but Connie did nothing to help in the house and tone was now of disapproval.
But things changed when Connie had an unpleasant encounter with Friend. When it was clear to her that she could not escape the ride with this boy who looked older than eighteen, she was saddened by the realization that she will never see her mother again. Connie had turned into a different route now, she once wished her mother dead but now it does not sound good to know that that Sunday morning was the last she was ever going to see her mother. The resentment had faded all together in the place she was going.
Connie was always in control of herself and she molded her life in the way she pleased. She held her dark blond hair up in a way that made her look older. She wore a blouse that could fit in different ways so that when she left home it was descent but provocative when she went out with her friends. She flirted around with boys and spent hours fantasizing and dreaming about boys she had met. Arnold brought with him the very thing she was seeking, the experience of being with a man but to Connie this came with a burden and danger she wasn&...