In the short story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been”, Joyce Carol Oates uses caked on facades and personalities to show how faking who you are, will only hurt you in the end. Connie is an average fifteen year old, who does not have a real sense of herself. Instead of trying to find what she likes, she becomes a new person as soon as she steps foot out of the house. Oates explains that “everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home: her walk, which could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her head” (Oates 1). Connie never left the house without a full face of makeup, and an attitude of someone much older just because she knew it would impress boys. Nothing about her was really her.
Similarly, Arnold Friend was presented as a picturesque teenage boy for Connie to fawn over, but it was quickly revealed that he was even more fake than Connie. But was he really? Yes, he made himself appear taller and used slang that was clearly not natural for him, but he wore makeup just like Connie, and talked the way he thought she wanted him to talk just like she did for all her boyfriends. In “Don’t You Know Who I Am?”, Wegs discusses that Friend is actually more truthful than Connie, “What is frightening about Arnold is that he voices, and makes explicit her own sexual desires...Connie’s reaction is one of horror: ‘People don’t talk like that, you’re crazy’” (Wegs 4). The brutal honesty that Friend exposes to Connie is the scariest part about him, not his wig or makeup.
By the end of the story, Arnold Friend has stripped Connie of her happy, beautiful facade and she is left with “just a pounding, living thing inside this body that wasn’t really hers either” (Oates 9). Connie no longer has a purpose to pretend she is happy, she has no reason to fight for her life; she realizes without her second personality that she uses out of the house she really has no personality at all so is willing to walk away with Arnold Friend. Friend, on the other hand, “is far more than a grotesque portrait of a psychopathic killer masquerading as a teenager; he also has all the traditional sinister traits of that arch-deceiver and source of grotesque terror, the devil” (Wegs 3). Arnold’s real personality is not nonexistent like Connie’s, his is one of pure evil. He knows exactly what he wants. He manipulates girls who have no sense of identity, and who seem so extremely confident that their naivety is their weakest point for not only do they briefly trust strangers, but they trust themselves: this fake personality they have depended on for so long but can be taken away so easily. Connie thought she could withstand any boy, any remark of her mother, any comment by her jealous sister, but Arnold seems to take away her confidence within minutes and she hands herself over.
WAYGWHYB is a story that grotesquely reveals how the common tendency of girls to “fake it til they make it” leaves no real person to rely on. Connie is stripped of her confidence not only because Arnold catches her without her makeup or “out of house” clothes on, but because he does not act like every single other piece of Connie’s predictable life. He catches her off guard and thus finds her weakest point: her family. While she acts like she does not care for her family and that they are just jealous of her because she is pretty, her family is the final straw for Connie to let go of her facade. She normally would have just gone to the mall and planned to go hang out with boys later, but once Arnold leaves Connie with just a soulless body she does not have an answer to where she was going or where she has been.
Works Cited
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 2002. Print.
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, 1995. Print.
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