Where Are You Going Where Have You Been Literary Analysis

A Normal Theft of Innocence Growing up every person in the world loses the purity they were once born with and the moment when one realizes that not everything in the world is the way it was thought to be, the world crumbles into pieces, but how does it happen? Joyce Carol Oates portrays an amazing detailed moment of theft of chastity, or at least what is left of it, in "Where Are You Going, Where have You Been?" With symbolic imagery, major bibliomancy, and extreme personal conflict Oates easily manages to get her point across of the complete loss of innocence. A constant image that is brought to the reader’s creative thoughts is colors. The “convertible jalopy painted gold” (Lit 326) when Connie was with Eddie, the “open jalopy, painted a bright gold that caught the sunlight opaquely” (Lit 327) when Arnold Friend was barely arriving, and “the bright green blouse” (Lit 331) that Connie was wearing on that Sunday morning are meaningful details that Oates meant to emphasize. Gold generally means success, triumph,
She realized that the “trashy day dreams” were just what her sister June thought they were, erotic and not filled with love at all. “Oates employs psychological realism within the framework of experimentation” (Miller, P) where Connie realizes that her love and sexual life was not what she thought. She was about to experience what sexuality was in the harsh world and she recognized it when Friend says, “I’m always nice at first, the first time… and I’ll come inside you where it’s all secret and you’ll give in” (Lit 329) “she put her hands against her ears as if she’d heard something terrible, something not meant for her,” if she was really the “experienced woman” she thought she was, why would that have terrified her? She was not ready to be that sexual woman but she was being forced to be it in these terrible