A barbarous Eden: Joyce Carol Oates's first collection

The sheer abundance of Joyce Carol Oates's fiction has tended to forestall careful critical analysis of individual works, especially of her books published before her 1969 novel, them, which won the National Book Award in 1970 and remains her most-discussed longer work. In particular, her earliest short-story volumes have received little scrutiny, since most analysis has focused on The Wheel of Love (1970), which contains such familiar anthology staples as "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" and "How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life Over Again." Yet her first collection, By the North Gate (1963), not only investigates virtually all the important themes that characterize her dozens of subsequent books, but also contains several stories that remain among her finest. Even its weaker pieces repay close study, for they show with special clarity the philosophical and literary influences that were shaping Oates's thought and aesthetics as a very young writer, and that she would assimilate with greater skill and subtlety in her later work.

By the North Gate may be viewed as a microcosm of Joyce Carol Oates's entire career in fiction. Though at first glance it seems relatively narrow in scope--dealing mostly with dispossessed characters living in "Eden County," a setting that mythologizes the rural area in upstate New York where Oates grew up--the collection scrutinizes with dogged thoroughness the moral conditions of an unstable American reality. By the North Gate provides a carefully detailed portrait of the post-depression rural poor; it investigates women's experience in a patriarchal mid-twentieth-century culture that conformed to long-standing social, religious, and family models; and it suggests the moral vacuum at the heart of such "sacred" American institutions as the law and academe. Although the stories are not technically adventurous, since Oates was not yet experimenting with form and technique in the bold manner of her later volumes and of American writing generally in the later 1960s and early 1970s, they exhibit aesthetic predilections that would remain constant in her later career and that suggest certain major writers--especially Nietzsche, Faulkner, and Flannery O'Connor--as significant influences on her early career.

Perhaps most immediately striking is the Faulknerian mythmaking, for Eden County is clearly intended as a Northern analogue to Yoknapatawpha;(1) Oates is here staking out her own postage stamp of earth, its ironic name suggesting an allegorical microcosm of humanity in general and, in particular, of an American paradise lost, its bewildered inhabitants spilled out into a ruthless, barren world where mere survival is a kind of triumph. A major charactcristic of this modern world--and here O'Connor's influence becomes patent--is its random violence, symbolic of its loss of social cohesion or philosophical meaning. For O'Connor, however, such loss is only in the minds of her prideful, hard-headed characters, who must be moved by violent means into collisions with divine grace; in Oates's case, this dark reality becomes a potentially overwhelming convergence of forces-natural, social, psychological--against which her characters pit their human will to endure. Oates, who repudiated her inherited Catholicism as fervently as O'Connor embraced hers, has observed that "the world has no meaning; I am sadly resigned to this fact. But the world has meanings, many individual and alarming and graspable meanings, and the adventure of human beings consists in seeking out these meanings" ("The Nature of Short Fiction" xii). This suggests the basic humanistic goal (as distinct from O'connor's theological one) of Oates's fiction; and her focus upon a multiplicity of "meanings," rather than an orthodox system of belief, helps explain why the shorter forms of fiction are particularly suited to her (at this writing, she has published more than 500 stories) and why they are the most appropriate vehicle for her fragmented but powerful vision.

Examining twentieth-century America in the contexts of gender, race, and economic and social institutions, By the North Gate exhibits the influence of Nietzsche--whose philosophy was likewise expressed in fragmentary nuggets of truth--not only in its ironic vision of Christian civilization.(2) The stories also controvert other Romantic pieties--especially our received visions of nature and of human love--to which the modern world, in both Nietzsche's and Oates's views, has remained in thrall, worshiping them as false idols. The unstable, seething network of social and personal relationships dramatized in Oates's stories suggests both Nietzsche's amoral will to power and Freud's view of civilization as based upon the suppression of brutal instincts; her interviews and essays are studded with quotations from both writers.(3) Not surprisingly, Oates chose a sentence from Nietzsche as the epigraph to her first novel, With Shuddering Fall, published a year after By the North Gate:. "What is done out of love always takes place beyond good and evil" (vii).