SOURCE: Cunningham, Frank R. “The Enclosure of Identity in the Earlier Stories.” In American Women Writing Fiction: Memory, Identity, Family, Space, edited by Mickey Pearlman, pp. 9-28. Lexington: The University Press of Kentucky, 1989.

In the following essay, Cunningham examines the themes of self-enclosure and identity in Oates's first five volumes of short stories.

“Halfway through the decade, something went terribly wrong. The most useful image I have today is of a man in a quagmire, looking into a tear in the sky.”

—John Cheever¹

Joyce Carol Oates was in her late teenage years in upper New York State in the mid-fifties when John Cheever sensed the onset of the postwar dissolution of value and coherence since noted by so many men and women writing in America. Perhaps it was this sense of almost overwhelming social and international forces that seemed to minimize our human stature, to displace and...