Is Connie In Joyce Carol Oates Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

Joyce Carol Oates’ “Where Are You Going, Where Have you been?” is a coming-of-age short story that depicts the virtually invisible barrier between adolescence and adulthood. Connie is a feisty fifteen-year-old girl that doesn’t intend to ride in the backseat for the duration of her younger years, unlike her older sister June, who her mother tends to favor throughout most of the story. Her mother causes most of the friction in the house between the two, mainly because “[e]verything about [Connie] had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home” (Oates 552). One critical attribute Oates gives Connie is her undeniable infatuation to sexual curiosity and her willingness to explore. Oates paints Connie identical to average
fifteen\-year-old girls in America and writes about the side of underage girls that was for anywhere but home.
To begin with, Connie acts as her fellow friends do: hanging out at the mall, watching movies, gawking at boys and dreaming of the day that they can be considered adults. As any underdeveloped woman, she is guilt free and eager to receive what the world has to offer to a beautiful girl such as herself. Connie is standing exactly where she should be, but a smidgen behind where she yearns to be. Noticing her strikingly good looks, she knows she can have attention from the boys that will never compare to the attention she is usually missing at home. The attention that only boys can give inside a realm she has never delved into before. She tries to enjoy life to the fullest and she manages to fill her plate with more than she can handle. Connie attracts some attention from a “lover” that she didn’t picture existing. Sadly, Connie falls prey to “drastic acts with drastic consequences, severed connections, doomed love, destructive sex, fear, evil, madness – but not much guilt” (Kalpakian 583). Equally as important, Connie seems to always be at the will of someone else, specifically a man with a car.
Whether the man is her father or some basic, ordinary boy she met while she was out, her being whisked away by a man with a vehicle stands for her freedom. One of the first scenes in the film version of Oates’ story, Smooth Talk, is of Connie and her two friends hitching a ride from a stranger, but with Connie sitting in the bed of the truck. She is physically separated from her friends and is clearly a free-spirited girl. Later on, Connie and her father are conversing and she mentions that she can’t wait to be old enough to drive, literally showing her “means of escape from what she sees as the impossibly staid and dull existence of her suburban mom” (Dickinson 586-587). Connie feels as if she can’t wait to be able to have the independence she thinks is associated with driving herself instead of relying on someone to chauffeur her around town. In addition to her always riding in the passenger seat, every car ride in chronological order grows in intensity leading up to her interaction with Arnold. Each time she gets in the shotgun seat with a boy, the following events mature into a sight she hasn’t seen before. Every ride inches Connie closer and closer to the sexual freedom she imagines, but she could never dream of the doors Arnold opens for
her.
To most, Arnold Friend is the lowest scum on earth, but to others he is the maturation messiah that Connie has been searching for. Friend is viewed as the devil, the wolf, the pied piper, or other equally distrusted fictional figures. Conversely, Friend is seen more as a person who has been sent to free Connie from her childhood chains. After all, we only see the Arnold portrait painted by frightened, naïve Connie’s mind. Friend is “a manifestation of her own desires [.] [H]e frees her from the limitations of a fifteen-year-old girl, assisting her maturation by stripping her of her childlike vision” (Tierce and Crafton 582). Not only does Friend carry Connie over into the new land of sexual understanding, but he steals her juvenile time from her. Everyone differs in opinion and take their position on one side of the fence or the other. Friend is an idol to younger people and is seen as a cool person that the youth look up to. After her encounter with Friend, Connie is now on the adult side of the figurative screen door. Friend stripped her of her innocent customs that she was dying to break free of before she met him. Connie eventually understood what Friend was there for and realized that her prayers had been answered, but she was now unsure if this was truly the answer she prayed for any more.
As a result, Connie’s transformation is exceedingly easy to relate to and is also one we are able to follow. She was once a sweet-faced fifteen-year-old who was simply curious about what was hiding in her and what emotions certain boys could stir up inside her. Connie’s sexual curiosities have been pent up and she was combing through candidates that she thought could join her journey, all the time ignoring the consequences and risks that were associated with this dive into maturity. She is tired of the timed adrenaline rush that her previous encounters give her and feels like she wants the full impact. Ultimately, she crosses paths with Friend and her life is altered exactly how she wished, without the option to reverse and revise her future. Connie is going where she reasons she wants to be, on the adult side of the thin line of life. The delicately sketched boundary between childhood and adulthood is a line that some people don’t have to fortune of choosing when they jump across. Connie sealed her fate and is now left with her consequences. Figuratively speaking, Connie began by standing at the slender screen door and was eventually sucked through to the other side, still clinging onto the untouched life she formerly led.