SOURCE: "Catatonia and Femininity in Oates's Do with Me What You Will," in International Journal of Women's Studies, Vol. 6, No. 3, May/June, 1983, pp. 208-15.

In the following essay, Stout discusses the motif of passivity in Do with Me What You Will as a key element of stereotypical femininity.

Despite her involvement with women characters and the unsparing accuracy with which she has depicted their lives, Joyce Carol Oates is not generally regarded as a feminist writer. One of her more thoroughgoing critics has observed that Oates actually "appears impervious to feminist and liberationist ideas." That appearance derives, in part, from Oates's stance vis a vis historic time and from her tone in speaking out of that stance. Poised at the threshold of social change, she chooses to look back at the gloomy interior or sideways at others poised on that threshold. She does not map out visionary vistas...