The Journey from the "I" to the "Eye": Joyce Carol Oates' Wonderland

THE JOURNEY FROM THE "I" TO THE "EYE": JOYCE CAROL OATES' WONDERLAND Ellen G. Friedman* One of the aspects of Joyce Carol Oates' fiction to which critics have not yet given proper attention is her preoccupation with the idea that the individual must find, acknowledge, and become reconciled to his place in the world. Although this idea is not new, it is radical in the light of the quintessential American notion of autonomy and freedom that is part of the mythos of American culture and is exalted in the classic American romances. This preoccupation is evident in her criticism as well as in her fiction. In "The Myth of the Isolated Artist" she writes, "in surrendering one's isolation, one does not surrender his own uniqueness; he only surrenders his isolation."1 In an essay on Sylvia Plath, she asks, "why does it never occur to romantic poets that they exist as much by right in the universe as any other creature? . . ."2 In Oates, the individual is always viewed in the perspective of the larger world. Her fiction repeatedly documents the necessity for recognizing the limits that are imposed by life in the world. As Oates drives her characters into a recognition of the boundaries of the real, the ideal is collapsed into the actual; the hope for freedom is converted into a hope for initiation; autonomy is relinquished for community; and the isolation self is confronted with its otherness. Oates' novel Wonderland is an ambitious exploration of this theme.3 Like Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which strongly influenced the theme, structure, and imagery of the novel, Oates' Wonderland is a book about proportions.4 Like Alice, Jesse Harte, the novel's protagonist, undergoes a series of metamorphic transformations in which he grows larger and larger. After he is orphaned—Jesse is the only surviving member of his family after his father murders the entire Harte family and then commits suicide—he becomes in succession an obese adolescent (physically enlarged), a cold, brilliant scientist (mentally enlarged), and a vampirish husband and father (psychically enlarged). In order to escape her father's engulfing domination, Jesse's younger daughter, Shelley (her name suggests "shell"), tries to grow smaller and smaller; she attempts to extinguish her selfhood, to free herself of it, by methodically dreaming over her past and "erasing" it. 'Ellen C Friedman is an Assistant Professor of English at Trenton State College. 38Ellen G. Friedman Jesse's narcissistic self-aggrandizement and Shelley's nihilism are deluded attempts to escape the impinging external world by substituting the self for the world.5 Jesse and Shelley suffer from a distorted sense of self; they presume the absolute primacy of self. Their refusal to acknowledge the world leads them to opposite routes of narcissism and nihilism. In Civilization and its Discontents Freud wrote that "a great part of the struggle of mankind centres mainly round the single expedient . . . solution between [the] individual claims and those of the civilized community. . . ."e The question of proportion between self and world is the major question of the book. It is encapsulated in the idea of homeostasis, the controlling metaphor of Wonderland.7 As Alice emerges from the rabbit hole correctly proportioned, the final Jesse shrinks from an uebermensch to an ordinary, self-questioning being who, in the ordeal of rescuing Shelley from death, in the act of expressing love through this rescue, learns that he cannot be selfcontained , that the overflow of self to other is an imperative of life. He achieves homeostasis which, in this novel, signifies the precarious but necessary equilibrium between the self and the world. In the same way that Alice's voyage through her dream worlds is the voyage of a typical Victorian imagination through a landscape which symbolizes Victorian culture, Jesse's voyage in Wonderland is the voyage of a representative American through the symbolic landscape of American culture.8 In Through the Looking Glass, the landscape alters each time Alice makes a move across the chessboard of her dream world. In Oates' novel, the chessboard is American history from December 14, 1939 to April, 1971, encompassing the Depression, World War II, Kennedy's assassination, the Viet Nam...