SOURCE: "The Transgressive Heroine: Joyce Carol Oates's 'Stalking'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 27, No. 1, Winter, 1990, pp. 15-20.

In the essay below, Wesley explains how Oates's fiction challenges gender ideology by describing the characterization of the protagonist of "Stalking."

Although Joyce Carol Oates has frequently been labeled a non-feminist and criticized for the passivity of her female characters, her works actively challenge restrictive gender ideology. A case in point is the Oatesian figure I will define as the transgressive heroine, whose murderous early debut is the short story "Swamps," the first story in Oates' first collection, and whose continuing truculent influence is felt in the Kalistruck heroines of The Goddess and Other Women, in the powerful women of Bellefleur, and in the wilful artist of Solstice, and who is most fully present as the protagonist of the 1972 short story "Stalking."

A previous stage in the evolution of the...