Where Are You Going Where Have You Been

The character in “where are you going, where have you been?” Connie is affected by the role she plays in modern society. Fifteen year old Connie has the confusing, often exterior behavior typical of those girls who are facing the difficult transition from girlhood to womanhood in the 1960s. She is caught between her roles as daughter, friend, sister, and object of sexual desire, uncertain of which represents her real self. The sixties were the age of youth, young people wanted change. The changes affected education, values, lifestyles, and entertainment. Many of the revolutionary ideas which began in the sixties affected this main character Connie who just wanted to fit in her society. “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home.” Connie acted differently when she was at home then when she was with her friends. As society expected, Connie wanted to be just a typical teenager who would do her best to impress boys with her looks, until eventually she impressed the wrong one. Connie never learned how to be careful in the way she portrayed herself. She was blinded by the fact that she was beautiful. Most girls in the sixties wanted to be attractive and noticed, but for Connie that was everything she had, attention. She had the wrong type of attention that eventually leads her to the wrong man. Because girls in the sixties were expected to be outstanding, Connie thought that she could fit in her role of a typical teenager of which was presented by her sexual desires. Her self-importance also leads her to exclude herself from her own family. When her family goes to a barbeque that day she was kidnapped, she decides not to go with them. “She wasn’t interested, rolling her eyes to let her mother know what she thought of it.” This self-importance eventually gave Arnold friend an easy path into her life because Connie tried so hard to be someone she really wasn’t that she forgot she had a family. This behavior that