them: Joyce Carol Oates’s unflinching depiction of the urban poor
In the epigram to “them,†Joyce Carol Oates quotes John Webster from “The White Devil,†as saying, “. . . because we are poor/Shall we be vicious?†The question echoes through this complicated, impassioned, and masterful novel.
“them†focuses on Loretta, her son Jules and daughter Maureen. They are impoverished white people. They survive poverty but are warped by it.
The novel begins on a note of optimism. It is 1937 when we meet Loretta, a 16-year-old girl enjoying the budding of her sexuality. She maintains a sense of excitement and hope despite her tiring work in a dry cleaners and the depressing deprivation of her slum dwelling.
In short order, the sort of terrifying realistic violence for which Oates’ fiction is known works to burst the bubble of Loretta’s teenaged hopefulness. The young man she invited into her bed is shot and killed by her brother. Wandering the streets for aid, she finds police officer Howard Wendell. He attacks her but the rape scene is depicted by Oates in a romantic manner. In the next chapter they are married.
The book concentrates on Loretta and her two oldest children, Jules (of uncertain paternity) and Maureen. Oates understands the special attractions of city life even for the poor and underlines them when Loretta goes to live with Howard’s mother in the country. Oates writes that Loretta missed, “the lovely dirty city with its municipal buildings of fake marble and its department stores and elevators. . . . Loretta wept for her lost city and its dirty air.â€
“them†is reminiscent of the best of Theodore Dreiser’s works as it takes a naturalistic approach is demonstrating how characters and choices are shaped by environment. We see Maureen believing she is rebelling against her mother’s life while inadvertently duplicating it. Oates’ powerful and poetic prose describes the process: “Maureen felt a certain hardness come over her, as if something invisible were blessing her, as if a shell were shaping itself out of her skin.†We also see Jules falling into criminality in his desperate ambition to rise out of poverty.
Oates makes many astute observations on poverty in America but they flow so naturally from the narrative that there is never a whiff of preaching in this novel. She takes a poke at the assumption that poverty is the unfortunate province of racial minorities in America when she has someone ask Jules, “Are you one of the poor people?†and he replies, “I’m one of the poor people.†The questioner presses, “But you’re not black. Are you very poor?†Jules answers, “You can’t get much poorer†and the baffled questioner muses, “I thought poor people . . . were mainly black.†Oates makes an equally astute comment on the sort of slumming common in the 1960s when Jules meets “a girl of about twenty, dressed in the familiar slovenly style of the neighborhood, a shapeless dress and bare legs and sandals. But, like the rest of the students who played at being poor, she had good teeth: being poor stopped at teeth.â€
The winner of a National Book Award, “them†features fascinating characters in a powerful novel by one of America’s most brilliant writers.
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November 14th, 2008 at 3:00 am
Oates is quite a topic in herself.
She’s more or less readable, once you get past the part about her not living on this planet, and being insane.
Another example of a “brilliant” feminist, who, if male, would be delivering pizza.
November 14th, 2008 at 3:33 am
panic said,
Oates is quite a topic in herself.
She’s more or less readable, once you get past the part about her not living on this planet, and being insane.
Another example of a “brilliant†feminist, who, if male, would be delivering pizza
(Denise) If you see Oates as a “feminist,” you’ve simply got to read my essay “From Masochistic Provocation to Violent Retaliation: The Rape Victim in Joyce Carol Oates.” She has often been flagrant in her depiction of the female victim who was “asking for it.”