Domestic Violence, Child Agency, and the Adolescent Perspective in Joyce Carol Oates's Freaky Green Eyes

A prolific, highly visible, and award-winning author, Joyce Carol Oates is best known for writing novels and stories for an adult audience, and most critical attention paid to her fiction has focused on her books for adults.¹ Critics have given little notice to her children's books and young adult fiction, including her engaging and timely 2003 young adult novel Freaky Green Eyes, despite the fact that in many of her young adult novels, she revisits several of the same themes she has explored elsewhere.² For instance, in Freaky Green Eyes, Oates addresses a concern that readers of her novels have seen her write about previously: domestic violence.³ This novel is not, of course, her first foray into young adult fiction (her well-known Big Mouth and Ugly Girl, published in 2002, was her first young adult novel), nor is it the only one featuring an adolescent as a first-person narrator (as in her 1968 novel Expensive People). In Freaky Green Eyes, however, readers are presented with vivid descriptions of domestic violence and details of multiple gruesome murders from the perspective of an adolescent narrator who is both a victim of and witness to the terrible abuse perpetrated by her father.

Freaky Green Eyes merits critical consideration because it raises provocative questions about child agency through the character of Franky Pierson, the novel's teenage narrator. Child agency has, in recent years, become a central concern for many working in the field of children's literature, a point Richard Flynn makes clear in his piece "Questions of Agency," acknowledging how "questions about young people's agency and claims to subjectivity in the midst of a culture that more often than not objectifies them" play key roles in our understanding of the ways children's literature represents childhood and adolescence (107). Freaky Green Eyes centers on fifteen-year-old Franky, herself a victim of abuse at the hands of her father, who witnesses his escalating abuse of her mother and its resulting tragedies. By writing this book for a young adult audience, Oates brings to the forefront important questions about adolescent agency and identity. Franky, scared and traumatized by what she's endured and witnessed, at first remains quiet about her mother's abuse but later proves instrumental in bringing her father to justice. In this article, I will analyze Freaky Green Eyes through the lens of child agency in order to enable a richer understanding of the nuances of child action, as well as allowing us to address this novel in a way that acknowledges the psychological costs of oppression.⁴

Although Oates uses a real case as a starting point for this novel (reimagining, as Oates herself acknowledges, arguably one of the biggest domestic violence stories in recent history: the O. J. Simpson case), she changes many of the details to better adapt them to the story she wants to tell and to keep the story timely for a contemporary audience.⁵ One noteworthy change she makes is to write Reid Pierson, the former athlete turned sports commentator who serves as the book's villain, as a white male. By switching the race of the perpetrator—and, as his victims are also white, thus addressing intraracial violence—Oates avoids giving the novel what she refers to in an interview with David Germain as a "racial angle" (65). She thus eliminates one aspect of the debate surrounding the case, avoiding the controversy sparked by many different camps about how race factored into the O. J. Simpson case and investigation. By making these changes, Oates is able to focus instead on what interests her most: the celebrity dimension of the case and her concerns about the twenty-first-century American cultural treatment of domestic abuse. These dual concerns become crystallized toward the end of the novel by the degree of resolution Oates provides for her characters. Freaky Green Eyes ends with the murder of Franky's mother, Krista Pierson, somewhat resolved. Reid Pierson, her husband and killer, is not only eventually found...