The Wheel of Love by Joyce Carol Oates

First published: 1970

Type of work: Short stories

Form and Content

The Wheel of Love is a collection of short stories that have to do with the complex nature of love in a degenerate society. Although nearly every story includes at least one relationship between a man and woman, romantic love is not the focus. Violence, adultery, religious vocations, and academia are part of the external setting, contributing to a confusing, empty inner life for individuals. Characters seem almost like sleepwalkers, unable to control their own actions yet acutely aware of the emptiness of their daily routines, their relationships and behaviors dictated by a society that has ceased to hold any meaning for the individual.

A prevalent theme in these stories is that of women being trapped in the terror of love and in a patriarchal system of relationships that seems to have changed little since the previous generation. All efforts by younger women to “break out” of the oppressive system seem to land them right back in the same circumstances of their mothers and the women before them. In “Unmailed, Unwritten Letters,” a young woman confesses her confusion and disappointment with life in letters that the reader assumes she will not actually write or send to her husband, lover, lover’s child, lover’s wife, and editor of the newspaper. “Accomplished Desires” is a disturbing story about how young Dorie moves in with the scholarly Arbers and then smoothly becomes the third Mrs. Mark Arber when the second, Pulitizer Prize-winning poet Barbara Scott, commits suicide. The women in this story suffer painfully in silence because, as the reader is told, Mr. Arber hates disruptions. Sharon, a young widow in “What is the Connection Between Men and Women,” searches for her elusive identity by moving to five different apartments after her husband dies, and still, when she makes eye contact with a stranger in the street who reminds her of her husband, she knows immediately that they have formed a mysterious bond and that he now “owns her.”

The difficult relationship between fathers and daughters is also explored in this collection. The stories “Demons,” “The Assailant,” and “The Heavy Sorrow of the Body” all contain a grown daughter who is present at the death of her father. The emotions are complex because each daughter feels strangely connected with a father to whom she was never emotionally close, as if to break the bounds of patriarchy a daughter must identify with men, look at the world “without comment or shame,” and become “no longer a woman,” as Nina does in “The Heavy Sorrow of the Body.” Yet the death of the father, perhaps the ultimate symbol of a patriarchal culture in the life of each daughter, is significant. Like the legendary phoenix, each daughter rises, either successfully or unsuccessfully, out of the ashes of her father’s death.

Oates also makes use of a theme that is common in contemporary fiction—that of things not being what they seem. The terror of the familiar suddenly being transformed into something unfamiliar is found in many of these stories, including the well-known “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” in which Arnold Friend, a supposed criminal who pretends to be a teenager, chooses fifteen-year-old Connie as his next victim. At first, his clothes, manner, and slang are all familiar to Connie as the trappings of her teenage crowd. With dawning terror, however, she realizes that he is not a teenager; he is a “fiend” rather than a “friend,” as his name implies. In “Convalescing,” amnesiac David Scott is in the awkward position of trying to familiarize himself with the life he cannot remember, including his love for his wife and her extramarital affair. “I’m older than you think. . . . I’m not the way you think,” is what Pauline, a sculptor in “Bodies” tries to tell Anthony, a disturbed young man who keeps following her because he cannot stop looking at her face. He eventually slashes his throat at her feet, leading to her mental breakdown. “An Interior Monologue” offers the thoughts of a young man who is fascinated by his best friend’s wife and the “normal” life that she and his friend lead as a couple.

Another recurrent theme in contemporary fiction is the plight of the individual against society. The society in Oates’s stories reflects the turbulent late 1960’s, with conflicts between races, classes, and generations. Oates often uses a person with artistic inclinations to represent the vulnerable individual in a cruel world, and some stories seem to suggest that a sensitive soul cannot survive in today’s world. The two most common “escapes” for the individual are insanity or death. “In the Region of Ice” gives an example of a young, artistic soul, Allen Weinstein, who cannot be saved by Sister Irene, his college literature instructor, who is torn between her role as a representative of the cold world of academia and as a human being. In “How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again,” a young, artistically inclined girl from a wealthy family recounts her foray into the criminal world, culminating in her beating at the House of Correction and her eventual return home. Both “The Wheel of Love” and “Matter and Energy” focus on the sorrow and anger that family members experience when an individual seems to “choose” insanity or suicide as an alternative to real life.

Many of the stories in this collection portray children as the innocent victims of a society in which values are up for grabs. On a symbolic level, children seem to represent the individual, innocent soul born into a world that is indifferent to its needs. The best example of such a portrayal is “Wild Saturday,” in which young Buchanan is promised a trip to the zoo by his divorced father but, as usual, spends the day in the apartment of his father’s girlfriend, Sonya, lying in the dark bedroom with Sonya’s sniffling son, Peter, while the adults party in the other room. After things get out of hand and the police arrive, Buchanan lies to his mother and insists, through his tears, that he went to the zoo. There is violence against children, or at least the suggestion of it, in this story as well as in “Four Summers,” “I Was In Love,” “Boy and Girl,” and “You.” As their training for life, the children are offered only neglect, indifference, and empty promises by their parents, and if they survive childhood, they seem to be destined to repeat the same meaningless lives of their parents.

Context

For almost three decades, Oates has continually produced highly acclaimed fiction, poetry, drama, and essays. She has been the recipient of many awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship and the National Book Award. Nearly every story in The Wheel of Love has won an award. Oates received the O. Henry Award for “In the Region of Ice,” which went on to win an Academy Award as a short film.

Sensitivity to women’s issues has been a hallmark in Oates’s writing. Many of her stories lend themselves to feminist readings. In Understanding Joyce Carol Oates, Greg Johnson wrote that the story “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?” is a description of “a young and sexually attractive girl’s enslavement within a conventional, male-dominated sexual relationship.” Other stories in this collection, specifically “You,” “Four Summers,” “Accomplished Desires,” “Demons,” and “Shame,” also portray a cycle of young women repeating the previous generation of women’s servitude to men.

Oates has continued to thrive as a writer, despite critical charges leveled against her. The two most common criticisms, Oates believes, are based not on her writings but on the fact that she is a serious and prolific woman working in a profession dominated by men. The prevailing, and perhaps traditionally more feminine, practice in fiction is to write stories of a more personal and domestic nature. Oates, however, in the tradition of prolific Victorian novelists such as Charles Dickens, Joseph Conrad, and Anthony Trollope, is concerned with the role of men and women in the society of her own time. It has also been suggested that professional jealousy is behind the criticism (by mostly male critics) of Oates’s tremendous literary output.

Oates has been compared to American writer Flannery O’Connor and, like O’Connor, has been questioned about the violence in her writing, with the suggestion that such violence is not “lady-like.” She addressed this question by writing an article called “Why Is Your Writing So Violent?” for The New York Times Book Review. In it, she labeled the question insulting, ignorant, and sexist. Oates is a serious writer who is concerned with the moral and social conditions of her generation in a profession that has too few women role models.

Bibliography

Bellamy, Joe David. “Joyce Carol Oates.” In The New Fiction Interviews with Innovative American Writers. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1974. Contains comments by Oates on her writing style and several of her stories.

Bender, Eileen T. “Conclusion: Missing Views, ‘Last Days.’ ” In Joyce Carol Oates, Artist in Residence. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987. Examines “In a Region of Ice” and “Last Days.”

Grant, Mary Kathryn. The Tragic Vision of Joyce Carol Oates. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978. Discusses Oates’s focus on violence and tragedy in her fiction.

Oates, Joyce Carol. (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities. New York: E. P. Dutton, 1988. These essays discuss writing by women, both Oates’s and others’.

Phillips, Robert. “Joyce Carol Oates.” The Paris Review 20, no. 73 (Spring, 1978): 198-226. Oates comments on her literary interests and personal experiences, and responds to criticism of her work.