Gothic Style In Joyce Carol Oates's Short Stories

Joyce Carol Oates, known as one of the most remarkable female writers in contemporary America, is prolific with a great many novels, short stories, poems and plays. Her works are of substantial hybrid, covering realism, naturalism, modernism, etc, and document the panorama of contemporary America with distinctive perspective and great insight. Since the introduction of her novel them into China, many scholars have been bent on exploring her works, chiefly concerning feminism, violence and narratology, whereas the apparent Gothic style displayed in her works has not drawn enough attention. As a matter of fact, Gothic style has gone through many development stages. Those incipient Gothic novels were mainly concerned with horrible settings, astonishing violence, along with pervasive curses and revenge. It enjoyed a prosperous resurging in Victorian period and evolved into a number of subordinates. Contemporary Gothic practices owe heavily to Freudian theory in human psyche, portraying the inner activities and making attempts to tap the ethnic extremes. It is obvious, however, that the deeper the Gothic research goes, the more indeterminable the definition of Gothic style becomes. The perception, in other words, of what ought to be labeled as Gothic is becoming increasingly unclear. Despite the vagueness of Gothic style in contemporary context, one point remains clear:Gothic style is a way of creating, a channel to release imagination; it aims to construct certain atmosphere evoking in the reader feelings of dread, fear and anxiety.Oates has applied Gothic style in writing as early as 1960s and gradually established her unique position in this mode. Normally, it is not an easy task to be original and creative in a traditional writing style, but what Oates has achieved proves her success and uniqueness. This essay centers on the Gothic style in Oates's short stories, concluding the features as well as further discussing the themes mainly concerned in these stories. Arranged in three chapters, this thesis introduces in the first chapter the origin and new development of this style as well as the manifestation of Gothic in Oates's short stories; the second chapter circles around the frequent themes explored in her Gothic short stories; distinctive characteristics of her Gothic short stories are displayed in the third chapter, including extensive intertextuality, open ending and psychological realism. Oates's Gothic short stories are rich in suspense, but what enormously contributes to her achievement lies in the dramatization of female repressed emotion and violence, the disorientation and identity crisis of human beings in contemporary society, and their bewilderment and agony in the attempt to understand themselves as well as the environment. Equipped with brilliant writing techniques, Oates has made her own contribution, which is marked by considerable scope and depth, to the course of Gothic style.