Expensive People (2 page)
Authors: Joyce Carol Oates
THE WONDERLAND QUARTET
Elaine Showalter
As a young writer, Joyce Carol Oates published four remarkable novels,
A Garden of Earthly Delights
(1967);
Expensive People
(1968),
them
(1969), and
Wonderland
(197?). They were all nominated for the National Book Award, and Oates won the award for
them
in 1970. The novels have been considered as a loosely connected saga of American class struggle in the twentieth century. Oates, in the Afterword to
Expensive People,
said that they “were conceived … as critiques of America—American culture, American values, American dreams—as well as narratives in which romantic ambitions are confronted by what must be called ‘reality’” In her Afterword to
them,
Oates described
Wonderland
'as the book that “thematically ends the informal series, moving … into the yet-uncharted, apocalyptic America of the late Vietnam War period when the idealism of antiwar sentiment had turned to cynicism and the counterculture fantasy… had self-destructed.”
It makes sense to call these novels the Wonderland Quartet, not only to emphasize their historical connection, but also to suggest that they share elements of the surreal and hallucinatory vision that Oates had highly valued in her favorite childhood book,
Alice in Wonderland.
Reprinting the series in modern paperback editions nearly forty years after their composition allows us a new perspective on their collective meaning and illuminates their place in Oates's overall career. In the mid-1960s, Oates saw herself as a social realist devoted to chronicling
the lives of her parents' generation in the Depression, and writing about the marginal and powerless inhabitants of towns like Lockport, New York, where she grew up, and cities like Detroit, where she lived from 1962 to 1967. “Moving to Detroit … changed my life completely,” she has said. “Living in Detroit, enduring the extraordinary racial tensions of that city… made me want to write directly about the serious social concerns of our time.”
*
But rereading the Wonderland Quartet from the distance of a new century, we can see that aesthetic, private, domestic, apolitical, and psychological issues mix with or even dominate Oates's political and public concerns. Alongside class and racial tensions, Oates also dramatizes more coded and perhaps more impassioned preoccupations with the destiny of women, the creative freedom of the woman writer, and the function of art itself. Paradoxically, all four novels use male narrators, the male point of view, or masculine themes—territory many women writers, from Jane Austen on, had deliberately avoided. Moreover, Oates clearly identifies with the longing, frustration, and energy of these male figures; we could even call the series “portraits of the woman artist as a young man.”
To portray female experience and sexuality, Oates revived the Female Gothic. In the classic eighteenth-century Gothic novel, a young heroine encountered a powerful male, who represented the oppressive but sexually thrilling patriarchal system that imprisoned her in a haunted castle or convent. But the modern Female Gothic is a parable of women writers' fantasies, desires, and nightmares about creativity vs. procreativity—the anxieties of giving birth to stories instead of babies, in a society that viewed female artistic ambition and sexuality as unnatural and deviant. The obsession with monsters and freaks, in the work of Southern Gothic writers like Flannery O'Connor and Carson McCullers, was a metaphor for this anxiety, and the mother's body, rather than the haunted castle, is the place of imprisonment, since it represents the fate of women who give in to their sexual desires.
In the classic American fiction Oates admired—Faulkner, Hemingway, Poe—men too are in flight from the engulfing maternal body, which symbolizes the biological opposite of self-determination, intellect,
and adventure. But men have agency, control, the means of escape; while women seem powerless and paralyzed by their biology, their poverty, and their passivity. Oates's heroines in the 1960s, like Gothic heroines in the eighteenth century, are dependent on men to rescue, even abduct, them and carry them away.
The America Oates grew up in resembled these fictional worlds. Born June 16, 1938, in a working-class Catholic family, Oates was raised on a small farm in rural Millersport, New York. Lockport (pop. 25,000), where she was bussed to school in the 1950s, was an industrial town, bisected by the Erie Barge Canal and its many metal bridges over seething dark water, recurring images in her fiction of sexual temptation and danger. As a child, she read American classics, but neither in her reading nor in her life would she have encountered strong professional women, or daring women writers. As Arnold Friend tells the teenage Connie in Oates's 1966 short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” all a girl can do is “be sweet and pretty and give in.”
Yet by the time she graduated from high school, Oates had determined to be a writer, and she found her own path almost unaided. As a brilliant undergraduate at Syracuse University, and as a graduate student in English at the University of Wisconsin, she met hardly any female professors. At Wisconsin, she met another graduate student, Raymond Smith; they married in 1961, and she followed him to Beaumont, Texas, where he had a teaching position. After a year, the couple moved to Detroit, where Ray had a job at Wayne State. Oates was also teaching at the Jesuit-run University of Detroit, where she and a nun were the only female faculty in the English department.
Oates had begun to publish fiction as an undergraduate, but her first real successes came in 1963, when she published her first collection of short stories, and in 1964, when Vanguard Press brought out her novel
With Shuddering Fall.
Sylvia Plath's
The Bell Jar
and Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique
also appeared in 1963, harbingers of a decade of feminist questioning and activism. But for Oates, the women's liberation movement was not yet important; for her, career and marriage signified freedom and mobility, and the 1960s were the years of her “romance with Detroit… romance with novel writing itself” (Afterword,
Expensive People).
GARDEN OF EARTHLY DELIGHTS
(1967)
A Garden of Earthly Delights,
ironically named for the Hieronymus Bosch triptych, has three parts, each named for a man to whom the central figure, Clara Walpole, is related as daughter, lover, and mother. Ostensibly the novel is Clara's story, but as a poor and uneducated girl, Clara has few choices, and although Oates has given the child Clara versions of some of her experience, particularly her elementary schooling, the male characters have much more scope for action and drama. In part I, the most naturalistic part of the novel, Carleton Walpole is a migrant fruit picker, with vague aspirations to a more meaningful and dignified life, but trapped by an adolescent marriage and many children. His heroes are boxers, like Jack Dempsey who prove their manhood by stoic endurance: “The more punches a man takes, the closer he is to the end.” Angry and discouraged, Carleton is disgusted by his pregnant wife, Pearl, a “sallow-faced sullen woman with hair she never washed, and her underarms stale and sour, body soft as a rotted watermelon.” In his mind, women have no real will, but can only fight against nature not to let go of their youth and beauty; “when a woman does, that's the end. Like letting a garden go to weeds.”
Although his delicate, blond daughter Clara is pretty and intelligent, she can envision no routes out of her environment but stealing and sex; the pregnant female bodies that repel Carleton are her un-escapable destiny. As a little girl, she dreams of becoming a teacher, but the teacher calls her “white trash.” As a young teenager, she tells Lowry, a mysterious blond man with a sharp profile like the jack of spades, “I don't know what I want, but I want it!” In her powerlessness, Clara gambles on Lowry because he provides an immediate means of escape, even though she has no plan or destination.
Part II is named for Lowry, although he remains a shadowy and enigmatic character. A drifter and a loner, Lowry likes “just to be in motion”; he likes his car, and the act of driving. But he “don't stay in one place long.” He takes Clara along as his passenger, helps her find a room and a job in his hometown of Tintern, New York (a version of Lock-port), and eventually takes her virginity, in a scene where Clara, although willing, “felt as if he had gone after her with a knife.” Although Clara knows by this point that she doesn't want to get married (“You just end up having babies”), she falls back into the ancient scenario; she
becomes pregnant, Lowry leaves, and she is forced to deploy her resources of female sexuality, beauty, and cunning in order to survive.
In her most self-determining act, Clara seduces a prosperous married businessman, Curt Revere, and persuades him that he has fathered her child. “Today she changed the way her life was going and it was no accident.” In another sign of Clara's partial taking of control, Revere teaches her to drive and buys her a car. Clara finally has wheels but nowhere to go, and she imagines that her infant son, Swan, will grow up to live out her fantasies: “He's going by train and by airplane / All around the world,” she croons to the sleeping baby.
But Swan too is doomed. In part III we meet Swan as a teenager, bookish and intense, an artist manque, but ultimately a failure who seeks manhood and control in a gun, and destroys himself. Clara's fate is to watch endlessly as her fantasies play in their most elemental form on television: “She seemed to like best programs that showed men fighting, swinging from ropes, shooting guns and driving fast cars, killing the enemy again and again until the dying gasps of evil men were only a certain familiar rhythm away from the opening blasts of the commercials which changed only gradually over the years.” While this passage from the original text of the novel is overtly satirical about the mindless violence and repetition of television, it is also a terse and tragic image of Clara's helpless identification with male combat, vengeance, and death.
In 2002, Oates expanded this passage, along with rewriting more than three-quarters of the rest of the book. Among the changes, she restored some of the language that had been thought too obscene in 1967 and added details about Clara trying to copy the styles of movie stars, so that she more emphatically takes on the characteristic of the iconic Blonde, the vehicle and victim of American cultural fantasies, about whom Oates would write throughout her career with great compassion.
(1968)
Published at the height of the counterculture and antiwar movement,
Expensive People,
Oates has recalled in her Afterword to the book, was received by critics “as an expression of the radical discontent… of a generation of young and idealistic Americans confronted by an America
of their elders … steeped in political hypocrisy.” Set in “Fern-wood,” an imaginary Detroit suburb, the novel is Oates's most playful and experimental black comedy of the '60s, and is linked to the other Wonderland novels more by its fascination with place, identity, and power than by its political concerns. The people of the story are “expensive,” rather than rich; their luxury comes at the cost of their children, servants, and rejected past.
Expensive People
is narrated by Richard Everett, an obese, half-crazed adolescent living at “4500 Labyrinth Drive,” who is obsessed with his mother, the glamorous novelist Natashya Romanov, whom he calls “Nada”—nothing. Although she claims to be an aristocratic Russian emigre, Nada is actually a self-reinvented figure from a working-class family in upstate New York. Oates foregrounds some of the parallels between Nada and herself; Nada is considering plots and titles for the very first-person novel we are reading; and her embedded short story, “The Molesters,” is one that Oates published the same year in the
Quarterly Review of Literature.
Oates's biographer, Greg Johnson, suggests that
Expensive People
is partly her dark autobiographical “dialog with herself about the prospect of motherhood.”
*
As Oates herself remarked, “not even Nabokov could have conceived of the bizarre idea of writing a novel from the point of view of one's own (unborn, unconceived) child, thereby presenting some valid, if comic, reasons, for it remaining unborn and unconceived.”t Richard is an angry and neglected son who comes to feel that he is only a “minor character” in his mother's life.
Oates's concern, however, is as much with the conflict of creativity and procreativity for the woman writer as with actual motherhood, and her dialogue is as much with Nabokov and the aesthetic school of fiction as with herself. Throughout the 1960s and early '70s, Nabokov was the novelist Oates most frequently invoked as the epitome of the pure aesthetician who writes with no purpose but delight in language. While living in Detroit, she has said, she “was galvanized to believe that the writing of a novel should be more than purely private, domestic, or even, contrary to the reigning Nabokovian imperatives of the day, apolitical and aesthetic” (Afterword to
A Garden of Earthly Delights).
In
The Anxiety of Influence,
Harold Bloom has argued that strong artists repress the writers who most tempt them to imitation, and perhaps Oates herself was unaware of her attraction to Nabokov's art. Her hint that “the most immediate model for the novel's peculiar tone was evidently Thomas Nashe's
The Unfortunate Traveler…
my narrator alludes to
'that other unfortunate traveler
from whom I have stolen so much,' “ is misleading if not a deliberate leg-pull. In her Afterword, she does kindly tip-off the eager reader-detective that she herself in re-reading Nashe “can see only occasional and glancing similarities.” In fact, Richard Everett often sounds like the perverse narrator of Nabokov's
Lolita,
Humbert Humbert, in his unfortunate travels across the United States.
Along with false clues, Nabokovian chess games, fake historical notes, mock-English houses and mock-English prep schools, and themes of bingeing and purging (one character eats himself to death), the novel features puns and literary parodies, especially an extended one of the
Partisan Review,
called
The Transamerican Quarterly.
The editor of this journal, a “professional intellectual” named Moe Malinsky who is brought to Fernwood by the Village Great Books Discussion Club, is a greedy snob and hypocrite, who brags of meeting Princess Margaret and fighting Norman Mailer, and stuffs himself on the canapes while condemning the suburban lifestyle. Oates's comments on the
Review,
via Richard, are merciless: “the magazine gives you a general frontal headache,” with its articles on Soviet economic growth and the decline of American art. Nabokovian literary games and labyrinths may be apolitical, Oates seems to suggest, but they are much more interesting than socialist realism.
