"Shadow"

Title: The Shadow of a Satyr in Oates's 'Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?', By: Easterly, Joan, Studies in Short Fiction, 00393789, September 1, 1990, Vol. 27, Issue 4
Database: MLA International Bibliography

The sinister Arnold Friend in Joyce Carol Oates's most anthologized short story has been accepted as the personification of Satan ever since Joyce M। Wegs skillfully identified his traits as being those of the Devil (59). However, a devil and a satyr cast similar shadows, and the complex allusive patterning of "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" becomes more significant when Friend is interpreted as representing a satyr, a demi-god from Greek and Roman mythology. In The Edge of Impossibility, Oates states that "the abstract parody of human life as acted out by gods, has a profound and magical value, inexplicable" (3). She further elaborates that tragedies should return to the figures of ancient Greek mythology for artistic expression that will be meaningful today:
If communal belief in God has diminished so that, as writers we can no longer presume upon it, then a redefinition of God in terms of the furthest reaches of man's hallucinations can provide us with a new basis for tragedy. The abyss will always open for us, though it begins as a pencil mark, the parody of a crack; the shapes of human beasts--centaurs and satyrs and their remarkable companions--will always be returning with nostalgia to our great cities. (8)
In "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" a satyr does come into the city, in the form of Arnold Friend. Dressed like a teenager, Friend first coaxes then intimidates fifteen-year-old Connie out of her house for a date that will clearly involve her sexual initiation. Although Wegs perceives Connie's words, "Christ, Christ" and "Who the hell do you think you are?" (Oases, "Where . . ." 34) as clues to Friend's Satanic identity, these terms may also be interpreted as mere examples of current teenage speech as well as part of Oates's realistic packaging of a story with a mythological--not a Judeo-Christian--focus. The ambiguous power this stranger has over Connie, the depth of his deceptiveness, and the danger the ensuing adventure holds for her become more understandable when Friend is viewed as the manifestation of a satyr in modern dress, the story's expanding itself in the adumbration of a myth with universal implications.
Oates emphasizes the major themes of deception and identity by ironically contrasting Connie's adolescent perception of intrigrung hints concerning Arnold Friend with the discerning reader's more sophisticated recognition of who or what he is. The theme of deception first occurs in the names. Friend assures Connie that he is her "friend," but the dropping of the two r's transforms the name into "an old fiend," the first warning that this dangerous character may have been around since antiquity. In contrast, Connie's name suggests one who is "conned," but, in typical teenage fashion, she believes she can control most situations. It is only at the story's end that Connie realizes she is a victim of a nefarious power beyond her experience. Similarly, Ellie Oscar is a parody of the name of the Greek god of mercy, Elios, yet this character's psychopathic behavior gives no hint of succor.
Many of the clues regarding Friend's appearance suggest both Satan or a satyr since the physiognomy of both beings developed from the same source: the goat god, Pan (Kaufmann 5, Merivale 13). Thus, one can hypothesize that Friend wears a wig to hide his pointed ears and horns. His feet do not go all the way down into his boots (one of which is described as bending over and twisting to a strange angle) because they are really hooves. He wears sunglasses because his eyes, "like chips of broken glass" (43) reflect direct light like those of an animal. He is short, with the muscular upper body, black hair, and long, hawklike nose often depicted on satyrs. Although he does not have a beard, his face is covered with stubble. To complete the physical details usually associated with such creatures, Friend could be hiding a satyr's hairy tail in his tight jeans "that showed his thighs and buttocks" (45) whereas a devil's long, forked appendage would be more difficult to conceal.
Connie naively assumes that Friend has merely stuffed his boots in an effort to appear taller, and she also notices three other subterfuges he has used to make himself seem younger. But these details are qualified as suppositions, emphasizing Connie's ignorance of the dangerous power Friend represents. Oates describes him "as if he were indeed wearing a wig" (46), "as if he had plastered makeup on his face" (48),"as if" his eyelashes "were . . . painted with a black tarlike material" (45). Wigs and makeup usually being associated with actors, satyrs were not only some of the earliest characters in Greek plays, but they were also the first to wear disguises (Beiber 9). In addition, Friend looks "as if he were smiling from inside a mask. His whole face was a mask" (48), another element suggestive of Greek drama. However, the irony inherent in Oates's characterization is that Friend is not a man acting like a satyr, but a satyr pretending to be a man.
Friend's superhuman ability to tell precisely what Connie's absent parents are doing and the sinister capacity for evil demonstrated by his threats to harm her family suggest a Satanic identity. However, the Devil is usually presented as interested in possessing human souls, and as deceitfully tempting his victims to their fate, which is hell. Friend, on the other hand, clearly desires a physical relationship with Connie, he threatens rather than tempts, and he wants to take her "out in the country here where it smells so nice and it's sunny" (53). His motives echo those of satyrs, notorious for their lechery, aggressive in their pursuit, and pastoral in their habitat. Friend's domain, as described in the last line of the story, is the natural setting for a satyr: "the vast sunlit reaches of the land behind him and on all sides of him--so much land that Connie had never seen before and did not recognize except to know that she was going to it" (54). Hell, the realm of the Prince of Darkness, is not usually described as sunny.
Another argument for satyr symbolism is the function of music in the story, for it always accompanies Friend as a leitmotif to his almost supernatural ability to dominate Connie. Noting that satyrs were feared in ancient myths for their power to seduce unwary women through music, Kaufmann devotes an entire chapter to "music-making, the satyr's most consistent and typical activity" (2). When Connie first glimpses Friend at the drive-in restaurant, her face is beaming with "a joy that . . . might have been the music" (37). Later, when he and Ellie arrive unannounced at her house, Connie has been listening to "hard, fast shrieking songs," and she is "bathed in a glow of slow-pulsed joy that seemed to rise mysteriously out of the music itself" (39). The music enchants Connie, and Arnold Friend uses it both to deceive and entice her. Connie resists talking to him until she realizes that he and Ellie are playing the same station that is on her radio. The music works like a charm to make Connie lower her defenses because it is familiar and reminds her of the drive-in where "the music was always in the background" (36) and of the pleasant "caresses of love" she experiences with boys she meets there, caresses that are "sweet, gentle, the way it was . . . promised in songs" (39). When Connie does not immediately agree to come for a ride, Ellie turns up the volume on the radio in an effort to influence her. Music is also an important part of Friend's camouflage, for he speaks "in a simple lilting voice, exactly as if he were reciting the words to a song" (43). At one point lyrics serve as an incantation to seduce her as Connie recognizes in Friend's words "the echo of a song from last year about a girl rushing into her boy friend's arms" (49). Eventually she realizes that "the singsong way" he talks and the way he taps "one fist against another in homage to the perpetual music behind him" (46) are only a pose, part of his teenage guise, yet she senses something supernatural about Friend vaguely associated with the music:
She had the idea that he had driven up the driveway all right but had come from nowhere before that and belonged nowhere and that everything about him and even about the music that was so familiar to her was only half-real. (46)
"Half-real" succinctly describes the satyr, half-man and half-beast, and the music that evokes intense feelings of pleasure in Connie becomes in his hands a snare and sortilege. Arnold Friend's attempting to enchant Connie is also suggested by the fact that he makes his sign in the air as if to claim her on the two occasions when he sees her, and that his words to her and Ellie are described as "part of an incantation" (53) at the end of the story. By then, Connie is the reluctant but spellbound nymph whose will is completely destroyed, a more sympathetic interpretation of Connie as an inexperienced and unprotected adolescent rather than as a sinner corrupted by Satan.
The theme of sexual initiation in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is also enhanced when the antagonist is seen as a satyr--the personification of lechery. Arnold Friend bluntly tells Connie: "I'm your lover. You don't know what that is but you will" (47). He then reassures her that the experience is "real nice and you couldn't ask for nobody better than me or more polite," but he qualifies this promise by saying, "I'm always nice at first, the first time" (47). These words point to subsequent cruelty, especially when he adds: "I'll hold you so tight you won't think you have to get away or pretend anything because you'll know you can't" (47). This foreshadowing that Connie will be repelled and disillusioned by the experience becomes more ominous when the figure of Friend is interpreted as a satyr, for the lovemaking of these creatures was historically excessive and uncontrolled as the word satyriasis suggests. "I'll show you what love is like, what it does" (53), Friend assures Connie, but his version of love, considered in the context of the satyr myths, is certain to be perverted. The "secret code" on his car, "33, 19, 17," consists of three prime numbers whose sum forms a sexual symbol commonly used by teenagers. (Jerseys printed with the words "class of " in tiny letters and the numbers "69" in bold foot-high numerals were popular with the more risque youths of the sixties.) C. Harold Hurley sees Friend's code and certain expressions in his tirade to Ellie Oscar as indicating Friend's propensity for sexual deviation (66), which would be consistent with the bestial nature of the satyr. Thus, Oates's use of imagery suggesting the satyr provides a deeper insight into Connie's fate, a repulsive mockery of the gentle, romantic lovemaking of her daydreams.
Arnold Friend's confidence in his ability to manipulate Connie also parallels the relationship of the satyr and the nymph. In Greek mythology, nymphs were inferior divinities frequently mentioned as attending a superior deity, and Friend, who speaks quietly in direct commands by the end of the story, never questions his right to Connie's subservience. When he unexpectedly arrives at her house, his words, "I ain't late, am I? Toldja I'd be out didn't I?" (40) are the first of a series of questions that confuse and intimidate her. Young, inexperienced Connie's lack of self-identity is the pivot on which the story turns and the reason she becomes Friend's prey. In the opening lines she is presented as looking into mirrors and other people's faces to define and reassure herself. "She knew she was pretty and that was everything" (34), and Friend uses her shallow self-concept to trap her: "Be nice to me, be sweet like you can because what else is there for a girl like you but to be sweet and pretty and give in . . . ?" (53). Connie helplessly allows Friend to direct her because she has no foundation upon which to base a resistance: no role models, no strong relationships with her family, no religious convictions, no values except those of popular music. Because Connie has no clear concept of herself or of what the predacious Friend represents, she allows him to define her--and for Arnold, the satyr, this means that Connie is to become a nymph.
The dangerous implications of this relationship become clear in the light of classical myths, for these half-animals were brutal in their pursuit of feminine prey. "Satyrs habitually raped nymphs, their companions of the woodlands" (2) states Kaufmann; the satyr "raped more often than he seduced and inevitably evoked fear and rejection from women" (14). Certainly Connie becomes terrified of Friend, and the extreme fear that destroys what is left of her will and leaves her screaming into the dial tone of the telephone suggests the "panic" that is the spell of the demi-god Pan who led the satyrs. Satyrs also pursued women in pairs, and Ellie Oscar, Arnold's forty-year-old sidekick whose baby face is lined with broken bloodveins suggesting the satyr's devotion to Dionysus, expresses the violence that is an undercurrent in Friend's character. Ellie speaks only twice, casually asking both times if Friend wants Connie's telephone ripped out. Friend rejects his offers, but Ellie's apparent indifference becomes threatening when Friend has to tell him to put away an unnamed weapon. Satyrs are not usually considered dangerous creatures since music is their most potent weapon. Several critics have noted, however, that these two men probably killed the old woman who lived down the road from Connie, and the threats to Connie's family are direct. Connie's suspicion that Friend may harm her is suggested by her eerie sensation of "something Arnold Friend was stabbing her with again and again with no tenderness" (52), and she realizes by the end of the story that she will never see her mother again or sleep in her own bed. The image of Friend as a savage, insatiable, feral creature is reinforced by the shadow of the satyr in him, and this, along with the menacing presence of Ellie, implies that he is a predator who will kill his prey.
Other interpretations of the story's symbolism are also supported and strengthened when Friend is seen as Oates's reincarnation of a satyr. From a feminist point of view, Connie then becomes the stereotypical passive, submissive, emotional, ignorant female--the nymph--the extreme of feminine sensuality, dependence, and intemperance. From a psychological standpoint, the arguments that Friend represents the unconscious are substantiated by the half-beast satyr's symbolism of the animal, uncontrolled, irrational side of human nature (Kaufmann 11). If, as critics have noted, he is the personification of the adolescent Connie's unconscious erotic feelings, then the lecherous satyr, whose music makes men and women mad with desire, is a more obvious and appropriate image than the Devil, who is interested in all excesses. When Arnold's seemingly inexplicable power over Connie is seen as the extraordinary power of a supernatural being, then he becomes representative of the mysterious and dangerous forces present in our world since antiquity that prey on those who are vulnerable.
Joyce Carol Oates herself once described Friend as "a fantastic figure: he is Death, he is the `elf-Knight' of the ballads, he is the Imagination, he is a Dream, he is a Lover, a Demon, and all that" (Knott 19). The satyr, too, is a figure of fantasy, powerful enough to represent, Death and, like the elf-Knight, a magical being who can take on human disguise. Half-man and half-animal, this wild creature symbolizes the freedom of Imagination as opposed to the discipline of culture and intellect. He is surely the fabulous embodiment of a Dream. The satyr also traditionally personifies the insatiable and ungoverned Lover, but his appearance' semi-divine status, and evil intentions combine to suggest the Demon as well. The interpretations of Arnold Friend are complex and diverse, a tribute to Oates's skill in creating allusive patterns, but the shadow of a satyr, flute in hand, lurks behind them all. WORKS CITED
Bastian, Katherine. Joyce Carol Oates's Short Stories: Between Tradition and Innovation. Bern: Verlag Peter Lang, 1983.
Bieber, Margarete. The History of the Greek and Roman Theater. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1961.
Hurley, C. Harold. "Cracking the Secret Code in Oates's `Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'" Studies in Short Fiction, 24 (1987): 62-66.
Kaufmann, Lynn Frier. The Noble Savage. Satyrs and Satyr Families in Renaissance Art. Ann Arbor: UMI Research P, 1984.
Knott, John R., Jr. and Christopher R. Keaske, eds. Mirrors: An Introduction to Literature. 2nd ed. San Francisco: Canfield, 1975.
Merivale, Patricia. Pan the Goat-God. His Myth in Modern Times. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1969.
Oates, Joyce Carol. The Edge of Impossibility: Tragic Forms in Literature. NY: Vanguard, 1972.
---. The Wheel of Love and Other Stories. NY: Vanguard, 1970.
---. "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" In Wheel of Love.
Wegs, Joyce M. "`Don't You Know Who I Am?': The Grotesque in Oates's `Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?'" Journal of Narrative Technique, 5 (Jan 1975): 66-72. Rpt. in Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Ed: Linda W. Wagner. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979. 87-92.
~~~~~~~~
by JOAN EASTERLY
Copyright of Studies in Short Fiction is the property of Newberry College and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
View: Citation HTML Full Text PDF Full Text
2 of 3 Result List Refine Search Print E-mail Save Export Add to folder
Top of Page
EBSCO Support Site
Privacy Policy
Terms of Use
Copyright
© 2007 EBSCO Industries, Inc. All rights reserved.