Joyce Carol Oates’                                           "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

plot

The main character of Oates' story is Connie, a beautiful, self-absorbed 15-year-old girl, who is at odds with her mother—once a beauty herself–and with her dutiful, "steady", and homely older sister. Without her parents' knowledge, she spends most of her evenings picking up boys at a big boy restaurant, and one evening captures the attention of a stranger in a gold convertible covered with cryptic writing. While her parents are away at her aunt's barbecue, two men pull up in front of Connie's house and call her out. She recognizes the driver, Arnold Friend, as the man from the drive-in restaurant, and is initially charmed by the smooth-talking, charismatic stranger. He tells Connie he is 18 and has come to take her for a ride in his car with his sidekick Ellie. Connie slowly realizes that he is actually much older, and grows afraid. When she refuses to go with them, Friend becomes more forceful and threatening, saying that he will harm her family, while at the same time appealing to her vanity, saying that she is too good for them. Connie is compelled to leave with him and do what he demands of her.

Psychoanalyzing Connie in Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

“‘Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you’re so pretty?’ she would say. Connie would raise her eyebrows at these familiar old complaints and look right through her mother, into a shadowy vision of herself as she was right at that moment: she knew she was pretty and that was everything. Her mother had been pretty once too…but now her looks were gone and that was why she was always after Connie”

This habit of always needing to bolster the knowledge that she is beautiful is an indication that Connie is suffering from insecurity, or having an “unstable sense of self.” Lois Tyson describes this as “the inability to sustain a feeling of personal identity, to sustain a sense of knowing ourselves (Tyson 16). Connie’s description of her beauty being “everything” can be interpreted to mean that she would feel worthless without it, that she is nothing without her pretty face. This insecurity makes her completely vulnerable to the will of others, and is one of the things that eventually leads her to run off with Arnold Friend at the end of the story, a mysterious character whose purpose for kidnapping Connie is not clearly stated, but can be inferred easily; Connie is beautiful, and therefore desirable, for all the wrong reasons.

Connie’s insecurity about her own self-worth also falls under the category of low self-esteem. Low self-esteem is defined as “the belief that we are less worthy than other people” (Tyson 16). Especially noteworthy about this psychological disorder is that it causes the sufferer to think that they deserve whatever ending they get. “Indeed,” Tyson writes, “we often believe that we deserve to be punished by life in some way” (Tyson 16). Since Connie falls into the low self-esteem category, it is possible that she feels this way about her life. Her fractured relationships with her mother, father, and sister certainly seem to indicate that Connie is used to, and even accepts, the fact that she is completely responsible for her fate.

桃色機密

The film is a combination thriller and slight mystery in an office setting brewing with politics and intrigue within a computer industry in the mid-1990s. The main focus of the story, from which the film and book take their titles, is the issue of sexual harassment and its power structure.