Naturalism In Oates's Them

Joyce Carol Gates is a productive woman writer in the United States. Despite the controversial critical responses to her works, them, which won her the National Book Award in 1970, has received widespread positive comments.My thesis analyzes naturalism in them, which contains three chapters. Chapter one makes a brief introduction to Oates and her novel them, pointing out that them is a naturalistic novel despite the fact that many critics deny the naturalistic feature in the novel.Chapter two analyzes the naturalistic theme in them. The first part of this chapter deals with the tragic vision permeated in the novel, explaining how the characters are shifted into different degree of nihilists under the poverty-stricken and violent environment. The second part is concerned with another important theme in the novel: violence. In this part, the root and function of the violence are explored. Violence has become a way of life for the poverty-stricken slum-dwellers and has assumed the function of determinism that can change the fate of the characters forever.The third chapter explores naturalism in terms of artistic strategies. There are three parts in the chapter. The first part is concerned with the detached narrative strategy, which is typical in the early naturalistic works and is characterized by a narrative distance between the narrator and the characters. This part explains in details various devices used by Oates to maintain narrative distance. The second part elaborates how Oates creates a verbal ambience of depressing and violent to support the naturalistic theme. The third part analyzes the images abounding in them and explains how these images have supported and deepened the naturalistic theme.