Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates
"Wonderland," a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, follows the harrowing journey of Jesse Harte, a fourteen-year-old boy who becomes an orphan after discovering his family's brutal murder at the hands of his father. The narrative explores Jesse's struggle with trauma as he navigates a series of unstable living situations, including time spent with his indifferent grandfather, dysfunctional cousins, and a challenging orphanage environment. Eventually, Jesse finds himself living with the Pedersen family, whose members are characterized by their physical and emotional burdens, further complicating Jesse's quest for identity.
As Jesse matures, he pursues a career in medicine at the University of Michigan, influenced by various mentors who introduce him to differing philosophical perspectives. Despite achieving professional success as a brilliant surgeon and marrying, Jesse remains haunted by his past and an obsession with a woman named Reva Denk. The novel delves into themes of alienation, family dynamics, and the existential crises that Jesse faces, especially highlighted in his relationship with his daughter Shelley, who struggles with her own issues of aimlessness and addiction. Oates uses Jesse's story to comment on broader societal concerns while intertwining elements of surrealism and dark satire throughout the narrative.
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Wonderland by Joyce Carol Oates
First published: 1971
Type of work: Novel
Type of plot: Psychological realism
Time of plot: 1939-1971
Locale: Upstate New York; Ann Arbor, Michigan; Chicago; Wisconsin; New York City; Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Principal characters
Jesse Harte , an orphan, later Jesse VogelDr. Karl Pedersen , his adoptive fatherMary Pedersen , Dr. Pedersen’s wifeBenjamin Cady , Jesse’s college professorRoderick Perrault , Jesse’s supervising surgeonHelene Cady , Cady’s daughter, later Jesse’s wifeT. W. Monk , a student and poetShelley Vogel , Jesse and Helene’s daughterReva Denk , Jesse’s lover
The Story:
One December day, fourteen-year-old Jesse Harte comes home to find his family brutally murdered and his crazed, chronically unemployed, and spiritually desolate father coming after him with a shotgun. Jesse barely escapes through a window; his father’s subsequent suicide leaves him to make his way alone as a traumatized orphan. He first goes to live with his silent, bitter grandfather, where he takes the surname Vogel for a time. That proves to be unacceptable, so he moves on to his uncomprehending cousins, and then to an orphanage.
Eventually, he encounters and comes to live with the Pedersen family. The father, Karl, is a dogmatic morphine-addicted doctor/mystic; the mother, Mary, is an obsequious alcoholic; the son, Frederich, is a blithering piano virtuoso; and the daughter, Hilda, is an angry mathematical genius. The Pedersens are all grotesquely obese, and, with them, Jesse swells accordingly. He takes their surname and their ways and strives to become one of them. He never gives himself completely, however, to the doctor’s maniacal and philosophical egoism. In the end, after helping Mrs. Pedersen in an aborted attempt to escape, Jesse is disowned, dislocated, and, again, left homeless and nameless.
He once again becomes Jesse Vogel. He attends college at the University of Michigan, studying medicine. An excellent student, he comes under the tutelage and influence of Dr. Benjamin Cady, Dr. Roderick Perrault, and an errant scientist-poet named T. W. Monk. Each of these men espouses a distinct and limited worldview—empiricism, behaviorism, and nihilism, respectively. Cady takes a mechanistic view of human life; Perrault believes in the interchangeability of personalities and in the ethical merits of brain transplants; and Monk challenges the premise of Jesse’s career with Monk’s desire for death, disdain for creativity, and adulation of chaos. While Jesse partially adopts each philosophical outlook in turn, he ultimately proves unable to fully possess or embody any of them.
Nevertheless, he becomes a brilliant surgeon, marries Cady’s daughter Helene and fathers two daughters, Shelley and Jeanne. In time, the marriage grows unfulfilling, and Jesse becomes inexplicably obsessed with Reva Denk, a woman he encounters at a chance moment in the emergency room, where they both witness a man’s self-castration. Obsessed with Reva, Jesse decides impulsively to begin a new life with her. Once she agrees, however, he equally impulsively reverses his determination and, in a measured frenzy, decides to return at once to his wife and his home in Chicago.
Years later, Jesse and Helene’s older daughter Shelley runs away with her boyfriend Noel. Shelley taunts Jesse with long letters from various locales across the country, where she and Noel live and travel, lost in poverty, illness, aimlessness, and drug addiction. The letters are filled with probing questions, detailed reminiscences, sharp accusations, and enigmatic expressions of love. Jesse sets out in search of Shelley and finally catches up with her in Toronto, Canada, among a community of draft dodgers, where he confronts her in an effort to rescue her from her self-inflicted oblivion and bring her home. In an alternate ending published in the hardcover edition of the novel, Jesse and Shelley are floating out in a rowboat on a Toronto lake, and Shelley’s death seems imminent.
Bibliography
Cologne-Brookes, Gavin. Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005. Traces the evolution of Oates’s novels, demonstrating how she moved from abstract introspection to a more pragmatic concern with understanding personal and social problems and possibilities.
Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. Creighton discusses Wonderland in the context of Oates’s earlier novels and in tandem with Do with Me What You Will (1973). She explores the series of father figures that the novel offers and rejects, as well as its parallels to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.
Daly, Brenda. Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. Traces the development of Oates’s female characters from father-identified daughters in the 1960’s to self-identified women in the 1980’s. Chapter 3 is devoted to a discussion of Wonderland.
Friedman, Ellen G. Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Ungar, 1980. An exploration of alienation through Oates’s first nine novels. In the chapter entitled “Journey from the ’I’ to the Eye: Wonderland,” Friedman looks at the novel’s links with Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and its treatment of the individual’s relationship to the external world.
Grant, Mary Kathryn. The Tragic Vision of Joyce Carol Oates. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1978. Grant’s long essay interweaves discussion of several Oates novels and other writings into a meditation on the elements of violence and of tragedy in modern America. Her references to Wonderland bring out themes of self-mutilation, spiritual homelessness, and the alienation of urban life.
Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton, 1998. Johnson recounts the events of Oates’s life and describes how she transforms them in her fiction.
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art. New York: Ecco, 2003. Reprints twelve essays and an interview in which Oates discusses the writing life.
‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Joyce Carol Oates: Conversations, 1970-2006. Edited by Greg Johnson. New York: W. W. Norton, 2006. In this collection of reprinted interviews, Oates discusses literature, her work, and her life.
Wagner, Linda, ed. Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. A diverse anthology of seventeen reviews and eleven essays spanning the Oates oeuvre. In addition to excerpts from the other entries in this bibliography, discussions of Wonderland are found in a skeptical Newsweek review, in an essay by Robert H. Fossum exploring the themes of control and salvation, and in Joanne V. Creighton’s piece examining Oates’s women.
Waller, G. F. Dreaming America: Obsession and Transcendence in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979. Waller’s chapter on Wonderland discusses the novel as social commentary on some of the more manifest obsessions of modern American life—materialism, sex, and violence—treated with a unique mixture of surrealism and satire.