Expensive People Read Free

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).
A 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,