There are few subjects that touch the heart of an individual like
the transition from adolescence to adulthood. It is a subject universally
explored by artists and writers alike, as well as one personally experienced,
yet not always understood, by nearly every human being.
The implications of
cultural values on this period of transition, however, remained largely
misunderstood until the release of Oates’ landmark short story Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?
This story, published in 1966, tellingly shows the fragmentation of
family values in the face of a personally gratifying, sometimes threatening pop
culture that had just become a manifest at that moment in history.
The story’s
main character, Connie, clearly represents a new, duplicitous adolescent that
wants badly to become an adult as soon as possible. The menacing Arnold Friend
embodies the cool, dangerous, quickly shifting and never-quite-authentic mask
of pop culture that instills isolation as an important personal value where,
previously, familial piety had been the norm for most of human history.
1. Summary
The story begins with a description of Connie, an impressionable
15-year old girl who quickly demonstrates that she rejects her traditional
family role as sister and daughter in favor of a now-typical adolescent
obsession for exploring her sexuality. She revels in the fact that she is physically
attractive and uses this to create a persona that is mature and sexual, but
only when she is out with her friends - never at home.
While out, she leaves her friends to go to a restaurant with a
similarly-aged boy, spending the evening with him in his car, in an alley
nearby. Here she sees Arnold Friend for the first time, who makes a passing
remark to her that she quickly forgets about. The following Sunday, Arnold
mysteriously shows up at her home and attempts to convince her to leave her
home and go for a ride with him.
After a lengthy confrontation in which Arnold
spans the entire spectrum of rhetoric in his insincere, disjointed and jocular
manner, he becomes violently threatening and convinces her to leave the house.
It is implied that she will never see her home again after that.
2. Connie as the New, Duplicitous Generation of Adolescents
Connie is clearly described as living through two separate
identities. As Oates writes, “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for
home and one for anywhere that was not home…”, implying that Connie’s incipient
transition into adulthood is only a ruse at the moment (Oates 2). Connie is
playing dual roles in her life, both as a member of the family which she
intentionally rejects, and as a conscious woman who is prepared to explore her
sexual identity.
Despite her acting like a mature, confident woman, once Arnold shows
up outside her home and offers her a ride, she is suddenly indecisive and
childish. His forceful nature has inhibited the rise of her maturity, and she
describes her transitional indecisiveness and duplicity at the same time when
saying, “She couldn’t decide if he liked him or if he was just a jerk” (Oates
5).
When she threatens to call the police directly after this, it is an
important symbolic moment in which she transfers all of the responsibility for
her personal safety and security to an outside authority, cementing her
adolescent status through her powerlessness to stop Arnold.
An important symbol for Connie’s adult fantasy is music. In the
older kids’ restaurant as well as at her home, pop music is her only guide into
the world of adult sexuality and remains the way she understands romance in
general. When she realizes that Arnold has tuned his radio to the same station
as the one that she was listening to at home, she lowers her guard because he
seems to fall in line with the expectations that she has built up through her
exposure to pop music and culture.
Her lowering the guard is shown further when
Arnold begins distractedly singing the lines to various songs during their
confrontation outside her house. She responds by becoming increasingly nervous,
as her transition from a little girl who listens to these songs and stories
towards a woman who lives them becomes complete.
By the end of their confrontation, in the very last lines of the
story, Arnold sings sweetly about her blue eyes, despite the fact that they are
not blue. This difference of color supports the interpretation of Connie as an
archetype for the misunderstood teenager more than any other individual
character element evident in the story.
There is no Jungian archetype for the misunderstood
teenager and the concept itself is less than a century old even now. That is
why Oates uses details like the different color of the eyes in order to show
the reader that Connie should not be interpreted as a single, complex character,
but rather as an existential conflux of teenage sensibilities that represent the
American youth in general.
Urbanski writes more in depth about the interpretation of Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? as an existential allegory, but stops before
using Oates’ representation of the Connie character as the grounds for creating
a new archetype. Instead, he insists that she is, at most, a mere symbol that
represents a certain element of the new American youth culture (Urbanski 76).
3. Arnold as the Embodiment of Pop Culture Alienation
Where Connie is an innocent girl undergoing transformation, Arnold
represents the fullest and most extreme point on the spectrum of that change.
Oates describes most of his actions as being inauthentic, not genuine, or
flat-out lies, and his entire character is designed to be appealing, albeit in
an awkward and untrustworthy way.
This lack of authenticity is shown by his
laughter, which is acted out powerfully before it is made clear that, “The way
he straightened and recovered from his fit of laughing showed that it had been
all fake” (Oates 6). His hair is described as possibly being a wig, and his age
is hinted at, but never delivered. It is only made clear that he is not, as he
says, 18 years old.
These, as well as many other red flags designed to warn the reader
to be suspicious about his intentions, lead to an interpretation of Arnold as
the manifestation of the era’s cheap pop culture. His interaction with Connie is
an allegory for her own transformation from an innocent family girl to a
product of the culture that changed her.
His duplicity and unnatural nature
have led some critics to point out that he may not even be human, but rather than
being directly fantastical or a hallucinatory dream-figment created by Connie
as suggested by Coulthard, he fits best within the scope of a personified
symbol. Arnold Friend’s duplicity shows this best because it touches the heart
of Connie’s own transition and leads her to develop a sense of trust in someone
who, by her own admission, she should absolutely stay away from.
Arnold Friend’s duplicity shows an inherent dualism of personality
that Oates is using to describe pop culture as a whole, which was, in the
1960’s, still a new and widely misunderstood phenomenon. Arnold’s constant
singsong chatter and wide use of out-of-fashion slang make this connection
clear. Weinberger creates a beat generation stereotype of Arnold as a character
when he writes, “[He] represented a false and overconfident male sexual
stereotype that completed Connie’s innocence and transition” (12), which is
fully supported by Oates’ description of his clothing and passive/aggressive
mannerisms.
Arnold’s dual nature is explored up to the point of him no longer
having a traditionally-defined identity like Connie - he seems to know
everyone, yet nobody knows him and he has no family and distances himself from
his less-charming, music-obsessed friend Ellie as much as possible.
These details
justify the interpretation of Arnold as a force of isolation for Connie. His
flashy car and use of rhetoric, as well as music, serve to give him an almost
demonic sense of power within the narrative of the story.
Oates makes the duplicitous nature of Arnold clear when writing that
“His whole face was a mask” in such a way as to totally hide his own identity
and, instead, put in its place a collective urban fantasy that we now know as
pop culture (Oates 9).
That fantasy is one that Connie reluctantly shares,
despite not understanding her complicity. It is one that she partakes in only
because of her desire for the separation from her family that would allow her
to take on the mature, sexual identity that she thinks she wants. Once the
opportunity finally comes, she gets scared and tacitly refuses to leave with
Arnold.
However, at the end of the confrontation, she accepts that she cannot
call the police and must take responsibility for her own decision to leave with
this dangerous stranger. She realizes that the transition from fantasy to
reality has to be made, and can only be made in this way.
4. Arnold Friend - Bringing the Culture of Isolation to Connie’s
Home
During the confrontation outside Connie’s house that shows most of
the character development that takes place within the story, Arnold uses every
trick he knows to get her to leave the house and go with him. Arnold has been
described as a devil figure by multiple critics, in particular Joan Easterly,
whose fantastic interpretation of the text goes as far as to suggest that his
boots did not fit properly because he had hooves instead of feet (Easterly 540).
While this interpretation is certainly colorful, it does not fit in with the
conflicting nature of Connie’s reluctance to go out with him. It is more
appropriate to define his falseness as stemming from the identities that he
puts on: the songs he sings clips of, and the out-of-fashion sayings he
variously spits out and scrawls onto his golden car. These elements are the
ones that secure the foundation of this interpretation and lend credibility to
the awkwardness of his personal isolation and desire to reach out to, kidnap
and own Connie.
Arnold’s identity as a symbol
for the teenage-fantasy pop culture is made most apparent through Connie’s
identification of him through music. Oates makes music the focal point of her
attraction to him, stating that, “listening to the music from her radio and
[Arnold’s] blend together” is what made her keep talking to him in the first
place (Oates 6).
In doing so, Oates also points out and predicts a trend that
was only beginning in the 1960’s and continues to this day: the alienation of
disaffected youth that finds identity and expression through pop culture forms.
It is precisely this sense of disenfranchisement from the values of the
traditional American nuclear family culture prevalent in the 1950’s that
creates people like Arnold Friend, who is suitably dressed in the garb of a
1950’s greaser - the original prototype.
The culture of isolation comes in when Connie is forced to choose
between her two identities: one in which she plays the role of a daughter and
sister in a family, and her newfound sexual identity that she is not prepared
for, but eagerly wants to accept nonetheless. In order to accept this new role
and to transition fully into adulthood, she must leave her family, abandon the
roles that they have constructed for her, and adopt a new role as the companion
and lover of an obviously false stranger.
It is through Arnold’s falseness that her oncoming isolation becomes
clear, and, as Urbanksi points out, “Arnold Friend as a character need not
actually exist outside of Connie’s mind; everything he stands for needs only be
represented by a figment of her imagination.” (10) Taking his falseness as far
as to declare him not physically real seems an unnecessary step. The fact that
his interest in Connie has nothing to do with helping her identify herself as a
member of any particular society, however, shows clearly enough that he is
pointing her towards isolation as a defining characteristic of her new
identity.
5. Conclusion: Oates’ Predictions Come True
In the time since the publication of Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?, many of these themes, as
foreseen explicitly by Oates, have indeed become true for generations after
generations of disenfranchised youth. The urge for young girls to identify
themselves sexually at younger and younger ages and their use of whatever
rebellious music is in fashion at the time continues to move towards
increasingly extreme measures.
Whether speaking of punk’s “Blank Generation” of
the 1980’s or any pop culture phenomenon invented today, the onward march as
predicted by Oates in this story continues to grow as society calibrates itself
towards isolation and away from family values. A single look at any television
program released in the last several decades shows an inversion of the
traditional merits of family in favor of lonesome self-branded identity.
As
Walker points out, pop culture media using the channels of music, television
and film only portray families as being complicated sources of conflict for
main characters with selfish desires - not a single wholesome, functional
family is ever portrayed in a positive light (Walker 69).
The catering of media channels to adolescent values of independence
has bred this isolating, anti-family cultural effect. What was originally
conceived as a young persons’ independence has long been twisted into a totally
dependent cultural isolation in which their own, false identities can be put on
and used when convenient. This convenient false identity is never shown more clearly
than with Arnold Friend.
Despite consistently being described as unreliable,
untrustworthy, dangerous and even threatening, he remains attractive enough to
convince Connie to leave her home and go with him into the new world of
adulthood that he spreads before her. It is made implicitly clear that she is
leaving her family forever, but Oates does not mention for what, other than the
“vast, sunlit reaches of land” that surround her (Oates 10).
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