Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Joyce Carol Oates’ short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, like many of the other short stories we have read, is about a young girl transitioning into a woman. However unlike some of the other stories, Oates’ story of transition into womanhood is much darker and is painful for the reader to read and experience.

The story starts with a general discretion of the daily life of Connie, a fifteen year old girl exploring her sexuality as a woman. Connie hates her life at home where “[she] wishes her mother was dead and she herself was dead and it was all over.” In order to escape the prison of her home, she frequently goes out with her friend to the movies and a drive in restaurant, where they meet up with boys. The story draws a clear distinction between Connie’s life at home and away from home.

“Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head; her mouth, which was pale and smirking most of the time, but bright and pink on these evenings out; her laugh, which was cynical and drawling at home . . but high-pitched and nervous anywhere else . . .”

Clearly Oates is depicting Connie living a dual life. At home she is attempting to maintain her childhood in front of her family and, outside of the house at the shopping plaza, she experiments with her growing womanhood. However this balance cannot last and, Connie’s childhood is shattered when her lifestyle outside her house comes home with her.

                One Sunday when Connie’s family is away at a barbeque, Arnold Friend, a boy who she saw while out, comes to her house to get her. From her first encounter with Arnold, Connie realizes that there is something strange about him. Oates depicts him as having shaggy hair, a style not popular with most boys, and using expressions that went out of date the year before. His unusual appearance and demeanor give the reader an uneasy feeling and seem to foreshadow a traumatic event.

                When Arnold appears in the driveway, Connie goes to question him. She leans out the halfway out the doorway, inquiring as to why he is here. The fact that Connie is halfway in the house and halfway out of it indicates she is unsure of how to act in the situation. Should she attempt to act as a woman, as she does while she is out? Or should she maintain her identity as a child, as she does in her home? In the end she just stays perched in the doorway, forcing Arnold Friend to determine in which direction she falls to.

                After a short bout of flirting between Connie and Arnold, the situation becomes tense when Connie realized Arnold is much older than herself. At this point, she demands that he leave. However, this only seems to make him more aggressive and he proceeds to come closer to the door of the house. This causes Connie to withdraw into the house, into her childlike persona. After several tense exchanges, Connie continues to back farther into the house until she finally reaches for the phone to call for help. Then something happens, which is not entirely clear but, the lines “Arnold Friend was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness” seem to indicate a rape scene. During this scene, “She cried out, she cried for her mother” showing that she was trying to grasp out for her last bits of childhood.

                After the rape scene, it appears that Connie has lost all sense of her childhood. With barely any urging, Arnold convinces her to leave the house and “out into the sunlight where [he] waited.” In these final lines of the story Connie leaves the house, and her childhood, behind and steps out into the adult world, which Arnold Friend has forced her into.