Critical Essay | Critical Essay by Cara Chell

SOURCE: "Un-Tricking the Eye: Joyce Carol Oates and the Feminist Ghost Story," in The Arizona Quarterly, Vol. 41, No. 1, 1985, pp. 5-23.

In the essay below, Chell examines Mysteries of Winterthurn for the diverse ways that Oates uses conventions of the ghost story to indicate feminist concerns.

Joyce Carol Oates has matured into writing feminist fiction. She says (or has said) she isn't doing that: "I am very sympathetic with most of the aims of feminism, but cannot write feminist literature because it is too narrow, too limited." However, while some critics may have defined feminist literature narrowly (insisting on only sympathetic female—not sympathetic male—characters, for example), feminist literature covers as breathtaking a range as feminists, or as women, do themselves. Joyce Carol Oates is writing it. Her discussions of being a "(woman) writer" include recognition of the difficulties specific to a female writer. She is continually "insulted" by...
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