INTRODUCTION
Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates

PART I. Anxious Authorship in the 1960s: Daughters Leaving Home

1. Not Strictly Parallel: The Sacrificial Plots of Daughters and Sons in With Shuddering Fall
2. Yeats's Daughter: Images of "Leda and the Swan" in the Trilogy of the 1960s
3."The Central Nervous System of America": The Writer in/as the Crowd in Wonderland

PART 2. Dialogic Authorship in the 1970s: Marriages and Infidelities

4. Marriage as Novel: Beyond the Conventions of Romance and Law in Do With Me What You Will
5. Wedding a (Woman) Writer's Voices: Dis-membering the "I" in The Assassins, Re-membering "Us" in Childwold
6. Self-Narrating Woman: Marriage as Emancipatory Metaphor in Unholy Loves

PART 3. Communal Authorship in the 1980s: The (M)other in Us

7. Daughters of the American Revolution: "Idiosyncratic" Narrators in Three Postmodern Novels
8. Porous Boundaries: Daughters, Families, and the Body Politic in Realistic Novels of the 1980s
9. How Does "I" Speak for "We"?: Violence and Representation in Foxfire, Confessions of a Girl Gang

CONCLUSION
Where Has Joyce Carol Oates Been, Where Is She Going?

Dust-Jacket Blurb

Joyce Carol Oates's authorial voice is lavishly diverse. In her works she divides herself into many voices, many persons. This up-to-date examination of Oates's novels argues that the father-identified daughters in her early novels have become, in the novels of the 1980s, self-authoring women who seek alliances with their culturally devalued mothers. Oates's struggle to resist and transform male-defined literary conventions is often mirrored by the struggles of her female characters to resist and transform social conventions.

For example, during the 1960s as Oates attempted to leave a male-defined house of fiction—beginning with With Shuddering Fall, her first novel, and continuing through Wonderland—her female characters tried repeatedly in the social realm to leave the houses of seductive or incestuous fathers. During the 1970s, as Oates became a more transgressive writer, her female characters began to define themselves, not as characters in a male author's plot but as authors of their own lives. During this decade Oates developed a more democratic conception of authorship. She no longer represented authorial voice as isolated and autonomous but as multivocal, as divided into all her characters, whether male or female. These changes are evident in such women-centered novels as Do With Me What You Will, The Assassins, Childwold, and Unholy Loves.

During the 1960s [sic] Oates began to redefine authorship in feminist communal terms—as mothered, as well as fathered. She began also to acknowledge her literary foremothers, particularly in the postmodern novels—Bellefleur, A Bloodsmoor Romance, and Mysteries of Winterthurn, in which many of her characters sought alliances with their devalued mothers and sisters. The daughter's quest for community, redefined in feminist terms, also surfaces in such realistic novels as Angel of Light, Marya: A Life, You Must Remember This, Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My Heart, and Foxfire: Confessions of a Girl Gang.

Excerpt

. . . in 1986 Bonnie Zimmerman, in "Feminist Fiction and the Postmodern Challenge," describes Oates as "hostile to feminism," despite the fact that her fiction exhibits features that Zimmerman identifies as characteristic of feminist postmodern fiction . . . . Gayle Greene also omitted Oates from her 1991 study of women novelists, Changing the Story: Women Writers and the Tradition, simply by declaring that Oates is "not feminist." Remarking on Oates's "troubled relationship" with "normative feminism," Henry Louis Gates suggests that feminists reject Oates's fiction because she "insists on exploring the nature of female masochism." An equally plausible explanation for Oates's exclusion is, I think, competition among women. Oates depicts such competion in Solstice (1985) despite the fact that, as Rebecca Sinkler comments in a review of the novel, "The soft underbelly of feminist thought has promoted the idea that if women rule the world, cooperation, supportiveness, even love would replace patriarchal imperatives like competition, dominance and brute force."