Who Needs a Map in Fairyland?

“Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?” by Joyce Carol Oates details the horrifying encounter of an adolescent girl named Connie with an older man named Arnold Friend. Connie, symbolic of the typical 1960s female rebel, enjoys a summer filled with late nights out with her friends and visits to a teen-populated restaurant. It is one fateful visit to this restaurant in which she collides with Arnold Friend, sending her life spiraling. As the story progresses, readers become increasingly aware of Arnold’s sexual agenda with this ‘innocent’ teenage girl. Gretchen Schulz and R.J.R Rockwood in their essay “In Fairyland without a Map: Connie’s Exploration Inward in Joyce Carol Oate’s ‘Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?’” comment that Connie’s lack of fairy tale narratives in her life has undermined “society’s…cultural obligation to provide what is needed to help the adolescent make it safely through to adulthood” (Schulz et al). Consequently, she is seduced into leaving the familiarity of her home to join Arnold Friend.

While I agree with Schulz and Rockwood that Oates alludes to a number of fairy-tales that echo all too familiar motifs, I totally oppose their position that Connie should have been guided by these tales’ morals. Instead, I believe that the defining factor of adolescence is finding oneself in the context of a wider world, while upholding a loose tether to one’s familial background. In essence, it was right that Connie was given room to develop freely without much pretext, but it was wrong for her to reject her family completely. Schulz and Rockwood assert that Connie’s passion for Rock ‘n’ Roll popular music attunes her to a culture of sex and drugs rather than counseling her on life at present, which brims with ethically challenging decisions. Where fairy tale morals may have come in handy in helping her make tough choices in her corn-maze through adolescence, it is ridiculous to think that to be a good parent of a teenager, Connie’s mother should have sat down with her daughter every night to read a selection from Grimm’s. Of course, it would have been more effective having grown up listening to these tales and understanding their morals. Still, Sleeping Beauty would not exactly be at the forefront of my mind if I were ever to come across a woman lying motionless and unresponsive in bed, perhaps EMS would provide a better narrative in this instance. Connie totally lost her way, and lost touch with core family values, evident in her strained relationship with her mother and sister. She turned to the comforts of pop music, malls, and the company of her friends to distract her from her bothersome household.

While like many teens, Connie experiences a phase of losing herself with prospects of truly finding herself in the end, the sinister revelation of the story is that succumbing too much to temptation while in this delicate period can ultimately lead to downfall. In other words, as Connie matured, any twist in the wrong direction could have had fatal consequences (cue Arnold Friend). Throughout this interpretation of the story, it is important to bear in mind that, in her own blunt way, Connie’s mother did indeed offer her daughter advice by implying that “her mind was all filled with trashy daydreams” (Oates). Connie could have taken this criticism constructively and had a productive conversation with her mother regarding her coming of age. However, because she misinterpreted this advice, regarding these words as the poison rather than the antidote, she continued basking in the glory of her counter-culture. Arnold Friend later challenges Connie’s misconception that she is already an adult, totally independent – in fact, she is still just a child without the means of defending herself under the supernatural influence of Arnold. The essay rightfully indicates that as Connie is subconsciously drawn toward Arnold’s car at the end of the story, she is internally caught in a rift between adulthood and childhood – she wants her mother to come to her aid, but at the same time she is curious to explore her sexuality with Arnold Friend.

So, the hero in this story is neither Arnold nor Connie. In fact, the classic hero, if anyone, would be Connie’s mother, the common woman on the sidelines shouting words of advice. She represents the assistive yet distant guiding force in Connie’s life, if only she came to accept it. Connie, an antagonist by contrast, is symbolic of human desire for temptation and by her mysterious disappearance with Arnold, she heralds the dark warning of heeding family wisdom when embarking on the beaten path of adolescence.

Works Cited

Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where are you going, where have you been?” New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1994. Print.

Gretchen Schulz and R. J. R. Rockwood (1980). In Fairyland, Without a Map: Connie’s Exploration Inward in Joyce Carol Oates’ ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’. Literature and Psychology. Print.