SOURCE: Kozikowski, Stan. “The Wishes and Dreams Our Hearts Make in Oates's ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’.” Journal of the Short Story in English, no. 33 (autumn 1999): 89-103.

In the following essay, Kozikowski investigates Oates's use of the Cinderella motif in “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”

Joyce Carol Oates's story remains prominent among those short fictions most anthologized in American college texts—an achievement no doubt attributable to its enduring, wide-ranging appeal.¹ Aside from having been made into Tom Cole's screenplay and Joyce Chopra's much-admired film Smooth Talk, the twice-award winning story has recently become the subject of a well-resourced casebook edited by Elaine Showalter; and it remains a fixture, even featured, in such first-line texts as Abcarian and Klotz's Literature; Barnet, Berman, Burto, and Cain's re-edition of Literature; Hans P. Guth and Gabriele L. Rico's Discovering Literature; Lee Jacobus's Literature; Kirzner and...