Reflections of a Mirror

"When you go to the woods / To gather hedges / Remember the girl / Who writes on the edges" (Johnson 35). The talented Joyce Carol Oates is the author of many novels, short stories, poems, and essays, including one of her most autobiographical novels Marya: A Life (1986). Joyce was the type of girl who "not only wrote on the edges but, in a very real sense, lived there (Johnson 38). At the ripe age of 13 Joyce already had a sense of personal marginality and an adult view of herself as "an invisible woman" (Johnson 35). Joyce's character Marya is almost a mirrored image of Joyce and it would be impossible to deny that a connection exists between the creator, Joyce, and the created, Marya. Joyce's fictional character Marya was deeply influenced by a combination of Carolina's and Joyce's childhood, as well as some of Joyce's adult life, her being a victim of molestation, and her yearning for invisibility.
    "Joyce remarked that behind all her fiction lay an ‘imperishable sense of reality' derived primarily for the natural settings and economically straitened circumstances of her family background—a reality she has transcribed faithfully and sometimes obsessively in her fiction" (Johnson 10). "In 1986, when Joyce Carol Oates published Marya: A Life, she described the novel as a blending of her mother's early life and her own…In Marya, the emotional matrix of Marya's childhood is virtually identical to Carolina's" (Johnson 8). Tracing back to Joyce's maternal grandparents, we see Stephen and Elizabeth Bush who came to the United States from Budapest in 1902 (Johnson 3). The couple "had been urged to emigrate by family members already living in Buffalo, New York. The couple settled near the Black Rock section of the city, ‘a bleak waterfront area dominated by the Niagara River'" (Johnson 3).
Although conditions in New York were better than those in Hungary, immigrant life was difficult for the young couple, especially as the size of the family increased…The clash... [continues]

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