The World Of Alienation: A Critical Study Of Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland

Joyce Carol Oates is a distinguished female writer in America who has received several nominations for the Nobel Prize for Literature. As a representative work of Joyce Carol Oates, Wonderland has always been acclaimed as a "watershed novel", pointing to its significance of milestone for Oates’s writing. Oates’s works increasingly concerns herself with people’s inner world and the conflicts between a state of being of the individual and the social environment from the minute she starts to create Wonderland.By using the alienation theory of Erich Fromm, the thesis tries to expose the extreme focus of Wonderland on the alienated destiny of characters. For Fromm, man experiences himself as an alien by a mode of experience. The alienation phenomenon is embodied in that man has the conflicts with itself, with its species, with its social environment or with its faith. The thesis presents the detailed analysis of characters’ psychological alienation from the angels mentioned above.The thesis consists of five chapters.Introduction is the first chapter. This chapter incorporates the brief introduction to Joyce Carol Oates and her works, the content and literature review of the novel Wonderland. The aims of studying Wonderland from the view of alienation are also covered.The second chapter interprets the origin and development of Alienation theory.The third chapter includes two parts. It analyzes the universal alienation phenomena of main characters in Wonderland. The first part gives a detailed analysis for the alienation of the main male characters from four aspects such as the alienation from the social environment, from his family members, from himself, and from God. The second part mainly analyzes the alienation of women from their family life and themselves. Their spiritual repression brought by their unhappy family life makes them tend towards a self-division state. Finally, the stifling physical and mental torture results in women’s self- lost status.The fourth chapter focuses on the characters’ desperate struggles against alienation. In front of alienation, the main characters in the novel react against the alienation through withdrawal into their own space and inventing hopes. But the chances of success are slim.The final part is the conclusion. The analysis above indicates that Oates extremely pays close attention to people’s psychological needs and state of spirit, and shows the mental state of Americans in the capitalist society:emptiness, loneliness, disillusionment.