Joyce Carol Oates Takes on the (Largely Male) Western Literary Canon

No author in my lifetime has been more prolific and been more recognized than Joyce Carol Oates. She has been nominated for (but never won) several Pulitzer Prizes and many National Book Awards. She has written and published in nearly every imaginable genre, and she has mastered most of them. Yet she is seldom taught in university programs, aside from her well-known short-story, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?", which was made into a movie (Smooth Talk) starring Laura Dern.

Despite her brilliance and critical acclaim, it remains doubtful that she will ever become a significant part of the Western Canon.

The American Prospect takes a look at her recent short story collection, Wild Nights!, and how it reflects her feelings about her place in the history of literature.

In a 1981 New York Times essay confronting readers who wondered, time and time again, why her work was "so violent," Joyce Carol Oates took scabrous exception to the idea that female writers must confine themselves to traditionally female topics and models: "The territory of the female artist should be the subjective, the domestic. ... Her models should not be Shakespeare or Dostoyevsky but one or another woman writer." But Oates also illustrates a certain ambivalence to the canonical and male models she cites as her own, including Faulkner and the Greek dramatists. Oates doesn't seem to have any problem with a canon per se, or even a canon with a singular focus on the traditionally male topics of "[w]ar, rape, murder and the more colorful minor crimes"; the trouble is that the Western canon almost by definition excludes her because of her gender.

Now, at 70, Oates has reached the age where many writers become preoccupied with their place in the firmament. Up until her latest book of short stories, Wild Nights!, her fiction hadn't focused on writerly concern with literary immortality, instead carrying on the project of her entire life: publishing a book or three a year of varied quality (her 2004 novel, The Falls, I found almost impossible to get through, and the thrillers written under the pseudonym Lauren Kelly are overwrought and empty; whereas 1999's Broke Heart Blues ranks up there with We Were the Mulvaneys) but unvarying themes -- yes, tragic violence and its aftermath, but also the loss of innocence, the possibility of redemption, and the unending pathologies of the nuclear family.

Wild Nights!, on the other hand, engages straightforwardly with canonization, serving up simultaneous homage and nose-tweaking to four members of the male tradition (Edger Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Henry James, and Ernest Hemingway) and one member of the female (Emily Dickinson -- the title comes from a Dickinson poem). Each story in Wild Nights! tells of a famous writer's last days -- or, in some cases, life after death. Oates inhabits the dead writers' styles and obsessions, producing five more-or-less successful mash-ups that express an ambivalence about the mostly male canon while also stubbornly lodging her in it, if only as the mischievous eyes behind the mask.

Read the rest.

Be sure to read until the end -- the final paragraph gets at the heart of this collection of stories.

Tags: Joyce Carol Oates, Western Literary Canon, literature, authors, Wild Nights!, short stories, Poe, Hemingway, James, Twain, Dickinson, books