From Naturalistic Savagery to Humanistic Redemption: Artistic Transformations in Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Stories

An analysis of Joyce Carol Oates's artistic sensibility establishes that the writer has made a gradual and definitive shift from naturalism to humanism in the course of her extremely prolific five-decade long writing career. This paper, by examining five of Oates's representative short stories from each decade since the sixties to the present, intends to prove that the author's maturing artistic temperament, while addressing the human condition, has transitioned from harsh naturalism to redemptive humanism. Since the concise structure of the short story makes it a perfect medium for a succinct and thorough examination, and since its limited number of characters and precise chronological settings facilitate a pithy analysis, this paper opts to explore the said genre as a medium to examine Oates's evolving artistic sensibility. While this paper makes no claim that the short stories examined in this study are the only possible markers of the author's maturing creative temperament, it functions on the premise that the narratives discussed here are compelling examples of how the writer has addressed humanity over the decades while also responding to the cultural and literary transformations in postwar America. Oates herself has championed the short story as a powerful narrative medium, and in a treatise on her works by Loeb (2001, 12), the author claims, "I like the freedom and promise of the form [short story]; a single idea and mood, usually no more than two or three characters, an abbreviated space of time." Given the significance of the short story in Oates's oeuvre, this paper discusses "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" (representing the 1960s), "The Tryst" (the 1970s), "Golden Gloves" (the 1980s), and "The Hair" (the 1990s), all of which were published in her collection High Lonesome (Oates 2006), and "Mastiff' (representing the new millennium) from her latest collection Lovely, Dark, Deep (Oates 2014).Since this paper claims that the change in Oates's artistic sensibility inheres in her transition from a savage naturalistic worldview toward an egalitarian humanistic one, it is worthwhile to define both naturalism and humanism as literary concepts at this juncture. Naturalism developed during the second half of nineteenth century, partly in response to the ideals of romanticism. Influenced by the detachment and prosaicness of realism, naturalism emerged as an artistic movement which highlighted the darkness associated with human civilization. Norris (2004, 22) asserts, "Everything [in naturalism] is extraordinary, imaginative, grotesque even, with a vague note of terror quivering throughout like the vibration of an ominous and low-pitched diapason." As is universally accepted, it was Emile Zola who spearheaded literary naturalism and espoused that this form of writing engaged with elemental human emotions, often representing the human beast. Zola (1964, 10) writes, "The naturalistic novel, as we understand it today, is a real experiment that a novelist makes on man by the help of observation." Over the years, naturalism has been defined by many writers and critics, and some of the notable examples include Craig (Craig and Moreland 2000) who claims that naturalism automatically excludes teleological explanation since it excludes the libertarian, freedom, or free will that traditionally defined human beings, and Theodore Dreiser (quoted in Cowley 2004, 61) who points out that the characters of a naturalistic work are "victims of forces over which [they have] no control." The human self in works of naturalism is, therefore, an instinctive being left rudderless at the mercy of fate.Humanism, in contrast, is an older school of thought associated with European Renaissance that aimed at reviving classical sentiments through works of art and celebrating the human self for its endless potentials. Drawing on classical literary and philosophical doctrines, the humanists believed that the human self, despite its limitations, could surmount all obstacles and that human potentials were in many ways equal or even superior to divinity. …