SOURCE: "The Transgressive Other in Joyce Carol Oates's Recent Fiction," in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. XXXIII, No. 4, Summer, 1992, pp. 255-62.

In the following essay, Wesley surveys Oates's later fiction to describe the function of "the transgressive other" in her narrative technique.

According to Tony Tanner [in Adultery in the Novel, 1979], "Very often the novel writes of contracts but dreams of transgressions," a paradoxical statement well illustrated in the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates. Although Oates has been thought of primarily as a realist, even a moralist, her work may often be understood with respect to its dialectic with the text, its superimposition of a narrative leveled against the text itself to decenter the social codes through which it is organized. This radical contradiction is regularly mounted by the intriguing and anti-social character that I designate as the transgressive other, who is defined by a narrative position...