On The Violent Writing Of Oates' Full-length Novels

Joyce Carol Oates,a contemporary American writer is famous for her wide range of materials and prolific works of high quality.As a writer with a strong sense of social responsibility,Oates exposes the superficial prosperity of contemporary American society and presents the various forms of violence bothering the contemporary Americans to the readers.However,frequent description of violence makes her works controversial.In her works,discovering the theme of violence is the most important component.In her early works,Oates focuses on the structural violence in American society,that is to say,criminal acts caused by the unequal distribution of social resources,and tries to trace its social roots.And in her middle and later literary creation,Oates shifts her attention to the hidden harm resulting from the social culture and indicates that the rampant spread of instrumental reason and consumer culture coming with the industrialization have jointly nibbled the living space of modern people away.In the cultural violence,sports violence is a unique form of violence to which Oates pays special attention.In her opinion,to the contemporary Americans who have been suffering from both structural and cultural violence,boxing is a perfect,reasonable and legitimate way to lead off emotion,to let out the passion,to recover the true self.In her full-length novels,Oates has own uniqueness in the violence description.First of all,she often surveys violence from a microscopic perspective of daily life.Violence incidents always take place in common places of daily life such as in family and school,and are commonly seen in daily intimate relationships.Secondly,her violence description always accompanied with the genre of initiation story,that's because,Oates pays close attention to the mental state of the weak groups who are vulnerable to violence such as teenagers and children.The combination of initiation story and violence description is conducive to present the inner world of the victimsof violence and explore ways of self-redemption for the victims.And finally,Oates skillfully uses symbolism to associate the images like “water” and “fire” with violent phenomena,which is fulfilled with mysticism.Even if the connotation of “violence” in her works presents a dynamic trend,Oates never sticks to writing about violence itself.She explores the dark side of family life and adolescent psychology in American society by means of violence,which is intended to speak for the victims of violence.On the one hand,through realistic and objective description of violence,Oates wishes to create a “shock” effect to readers,which makes her works with heart-shaking and thought-provoking power;on the other hand,Oates draws the characters' irrational state from the violent plot,combines it with individual inherent instinct,desire and passion,expresses her praises for human sensibility and expresses the resistance to capitalist instrumental reason and contemporary industrial civilization.In addition,Oates insists that art shall have the functions of morality and inspiration.Her violence description aims to let readers realize the cruelty of reality and provide the possibility assumption to relieve and reduce the disastrous consequences of violence.