Today we share the fourth of six pieces of public writing selected for publication from an assignment in ENGL 801 “Graduate Studies in English” — and the first selection from Section A of ENGL 801, taught this fall by Cameron Leader-Picone: a piece of public scholarship (700-1,000 words) which tailors an academic paper and its scholarly intervention of 10-12 pages for a general-interest audience.
Read more about the assignment and the first publication, “Mina Harker is More Than Just a Love Interest” by Destiny Munns (MA ’25), in the post from December 7, and enjoy the subsequent posts: “Resting in Peace: Why Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Keeps Sharon Tate Away from the Action” by Mike McCoy (MA ’25) and “What Happens to Childless Mothers?” by Beth Jones (MA ’25). Watch for the final two posts from this fall’s ENGL 801 students after the holidays. For now, on to “The ‘Pretty’ Trap” by Aimee Lamoureux (MA ’25)!
— Karin Westman, Professor and Department Head / Instructor for ENGL 801 ZA (Fall 2023)
Like many other readers of American lit, I first read Joyce Carol Oates’s famous short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” in high school, when I was around the same age as Connie, the protagonist of the story. I was the age at which, like Connie, all I really cared about was being pretty. As an adult, I am thankful that I wasn’t particularly pretty at fifteen, with my chubby cheeks and puppy fat and glasses. What I didn’t know then, but know now, at thirty, is that female beauty is something of a trap.
Oates knows all about the traps that are set for girls and women, the snares that we must navigate to make it through the world. In fact, for much of her career, Oates has attempted to resist falling into the traps that the literary establishment has tried to set by pigeonholing her as a specific kind of writer, as a “woman writer” or a “feminist writer.” While Oates undoubtedly does not shy away from addressing “women’s issues” in her work, writing unabashedly about girls and women, and the prevalence of sexual violence against them, she has also resisted being defined in such limiting terms. Oates has stated that “A woman who writes is a writer by her own definition, but she is a woman writer by others’ definitions.”
The question of definitions is a question that is central to one of her most famous stories. In “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Oates poses the question of who gets to be the definer, and who gets to be the object defined. And the answer, unsurprisingly, is that the power of definition, the power to define one’s own self, still lies largely outside of women’s hands.
Connie’s newfound youthful beauty allows her to pretend that she has attained some level of status, power, and control, particularly over the males in her life. Connie “knew she was pretty, and that was everything.” However, over the course of the story, Oates reveals just how hollow this illusion of power really is.
Female beauty is a double-edged sword. As Connie soon realizes, being pretty is a trap. Like an animal whose too-bright coloring draws the attention of the predator, Connie’s beauty doesn’t grant her true power – instead, it makes her vulnerable to the unwanted sexual aggression of a more powerful male. Arnold Friend, the powerful and dangerous male figure, has singled her out precisely because of her beauty. Were she more plain, she would have never drawn the attention of a man like Friend, who admits he “took a special interest in her” because she is “such a pretty girl.”
Friend has singled her out not only because she is beautiful, but because he feels completely entitled to her beauty. He tells her, “You had to wash your hair and you washed it for me. It’s nice and shining and all for me.” How repulsive, how narcissistic, Friend is, to think that Connie’s innocent act of washing her hair was done solely to please him, to make her more palatable to his male eye. But on some level, wasn’t it?
That is another trap of female beauty – those that fall in line with it, always, on some level, must acquiesce to standards onto which the definition of beauty is mapped. In this system, the true power still lies with the male, on whose gaze this entire economy rests. For female beauty to grant its holder any sort of power, there has to be a viewer — someone to look at and appreciate the beauty. Women are always performing their beauty for the male gaze. Without his appreciation for the female form, without his looking, without his being the subject that recognizes and uses the object of his desire, female beauty holds no real power.
As much as the multi-million dollar marketing machine of the beauty industry tries to convince us that adhering to beauty routines, waxing, wearing makeup and pretty clothing are all part of hallowed acts of “self-care” and serve only to boost our own self-confidence and make us, as individual women, feel good about ourselves, on some level we all must know that is crap. The logic does not hold. We feel good about ourselves because we have fallen in line, more or less, with the standards of beauty that we, as women, are expected to uphold, in order to be pleasing to the male eye. And those standards of beauty are always defined by somebody else. Any subsequent boost in self-confidence we feel is simply the result of the positive feedback we receive when we are perceived to be “beautiful,” the one attribute all women are expected to strive for.
The trippy, dreamlike detachment with which Oates writes about Connie’s encounter with Arnold Friend gives the reader plenty of leeway to interpret this particular interaction. Is he a mad serial killer? A monster? A devil? Simply a dream concocted by Connie’s own sex-addled imagination?
Whichever way one chooses to interpret this encounter, however, all women are aware of the threads of truth that run through this familiar narrative of unwanted, aggressive male attention. Maybe he doesn’t arrive at your house, but most of us have experienced an Arnold Friend of some degree. On the subway. On the street. In a bar, or at a party. He looks at you, and determines that the clothes you wear, the way your hair looks, that friendly smile you gave him, that all that work you put into performing the right kind of beauty was all for him, and him alone, and he is entitled to it. Women get used to shaking these encounters off, hopefully with minimal drama. But if you are not so lucky, then you have to be prepared for the questions. And there are always questions. What were you wearing? How did your hair look? What kind of signals were you giving off? What did such a pretty young girl like you do to deserve it?.
Works Cited
Oates, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction, Rutgers University Press, 1994, pp. 25–48.
Showalter, Elaine. “Introduction.” Joyce Carol Oates: A Study of the Short Fiction, Rutgers University Press, 1994, pp. 3–20.
— Aimee Lamoureux (MA ’25)
K-State English 
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