A Joyce Carol Oates Patchwork
I'm a Reference Librarian at the University of San Francisco's Gleeson Library, and I run the Joyce Carol Oates web site, Celestial Timepiece.
This immensely gifted and ambitious poet, thirty years old, in a paroxysm of domestic unhappiness, emotional crisis, and physical breakdown, gassed herself in the depths of a bitter winter in London 1963, shortly after having written a number of extraordinarily powerful poems—the very poems, white-hot, venomous, self-lacerating, that would make her posthumous fame.
“I am made, crudely, for success,” Plath stated matter-of-factly in her journal in April 1958. Yet Plath could not have foreseen that her success would be almost entirely posthumous, and ironic: for, by killing herself impulsively and dying intestate, she delivered her precious fund of work, as well as her two young children Frieda and Nicholas, into the hands of her estranged husband …
The cult of Plath insists she is a saintly martyr, but of course she is something less dramatic than this, but more valuable. The “I” of the poems is an artful construction, a tragic figure whose tragedy is classical, the result of a limited vision that believed itself the mirror held up to nature …
The immediate reaction on Twitter and in the traditional media was ironic indeed, though unsurprising: a massive stream of insults and threats. One could describe it as puritanical & punitive (in a joyous, celebratory kind of way). Ironic, too, that a parallel twitter conversation was happening on the topic of public shaming and free speech.
Lovecraft differs in degree but not in kind from racism/anti-Semitism of Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot, Jack London, Hemingway & many, many more.
The paradox with which the feminist critic or sympathizer must contend is this: that revolutionary advances in literature often fail to transcend deeply conservative and stereotypical images of women, as if, in a sense, the nineteenth century were eerily superimposed upon even the most defiantly inventive literary “visions” of the twentieth century.
So we know, we are blessed! We are very special amid so many millions drowned in the Hai River as in the great Yangtze and how many millions perished in the Revolution of no more consequence than infant girls extinguished before they can draw breath or cry.
“In my kingdom firearms would be rigged so as to fire backward. Even as the avid gun-wielder pulls the trigger he is doing his small part in eradicating a global […]
By Joyce Carol Oates New York: Dutton, 1995 181 Pages Meet Quentin P. He is a problem for his professor father and his loving mother, though of course they do […]
Ultimately, as soon as I saw her beseeching expression, the little doll’s hand seemed superfluous. It was a photographer’s contrivance, the one-thing-too-many in the picture. The first thing I did was retouch it out.
In fact, the Pulitzer Prize Jury felt that them was the “best novel of 1969” and unanimously recommended that the award be given to Oates. Nonetheless, the Pulitzer Prize Board voted to give the award to Jean Stafford instead.
Pascale Antolin writes about Deadly Girls’ Voices in the latest article from Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies. This article focuses on deadly girls’ voices in “The Banshee” and “Doll: A Romance […]
Without the stillness, thoughtfulness, and depths of art, and without the ceaseless moral rigors of art, we would have no shared culture—no collective memory.
By Joyce Carol Oates A young wife is home alone when the phone rings in “So Help Me God.” Is the strange voice flirting with her from the other end […]
“I saw the newspaper headline and felt such a sense of loss,” Oates tells TIME. Then a 25-year-old newlywed, she had moved to Michigan that year with her husband, Raymond J. Smith, to teach at the University of Detroit. “How could such a beautiful, successful and famous young woman kill herself?”
Josephene T.M. Kealey addresses the idea of “knowing” in her essay on Joyce Carol Oates’s Marya: A Life, published in Bearing Witness: Joyce Carol Oates Studies. “Joyce Carol Oates’s Preface […]
Celestial Timepiece 