Childhood Dreams To Adulthood Reality
Dreams can symbolize and recreate many emotions, experiences, and wishes and turn them into a realistic world that many people have no idea they are in until they wake up the next morning. Some people may think they are just random thoughts that our brain conjured during our REM cycle, while others believe signify our deepest, darkest secrets that were confined in our unconscious mind. Freud in, “Five Lectures on Psych-Analysis” explains that dreams are a highway into knowing how the human mind functions without constrictions and alternations. However, dreams are dependent on multiple factors in the case of Connie in Oates’s story, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” such as desires. Oates expresses how society scrutinizes human behavior inevitably making individuals a product of their environment, casting the secluded and outcasted into misfortunes. One may slip in and out of the conscious mind inducing unrealistic fantasies, desires and wants. Freud’s concepts are clearly presented in the short story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” such as wish impulses, infantile sexuality, and dream interpretation.
Infantile sexuality plays a huge part in Connie’s life in this story. Not only does it revolve around sexual desires, but it also includes parental relationships that Connie desperately yearns for. She around the age of 15 concluding that she is entering the stage of puberty and getting all types of physical and emotional changes in her body. Connie is getting many different ideas about love and intimacy. The love she is experiencing with her family is not what Connie deems love, it was not “sweet enough” for her. The love that she desires comes from movies and fairy tales (Oats) and she really wishes that that sweet love will come her way if she dresses attractively so boys can like her. However, even though she acts like she doesn’t need her family’s approval, unconsciously she feels threaten that her older sister is getting all the attention of her object-choice with is her father. Freud mentions that a child chooses a parent (mother or father) that fits with their preference of a sexual partner. By doing so the child then identifies themselves with the same sex parent in order to learn how to gain the approval of their object-choice (2232). Connie is facing a dilemma since all her mother does is complain and compare her with her older sister, June. Without a “role-model” Connie must find a different person to identify herself with thus making her lean towards a fabricated society of movies/shows, fairy tales, and folklore. If constantly being stuck in daydream mode and not being able to face reality, Connie will be isolated from her thoughts and will be trapped in a state that will not help her advanced and overcome her stages of development. This will most likely lead to having fixations like constantly having someone giving her sexual pleasure to seal a void that she has been trying to fill since her childhood. In addition, having fixations like those give reasons for society to criticize and abandon those mislead people and without guidance, the cycle will repeat until the end of time.
Additionally, infantile sexuality is a product and is independent of her wishful impulses since it is about unfulfilled desires and repressed emotions. Freud explained that wishful impulses are “sharp contrast to the subject’s other wishes and which proved incompatible with the ethical and aesthetic standards of his personality… irreconcilable wish fell a victim to repression…” (2212). Throughout the story, Connie clearly presents that she is longing for fondness and affection from other people, mostly boys. However, it is possible that she was begging for parental love but decided to conceal that wish so she doesn’t seem dependent on them. So, she creates two distinct worlds, as Gillis explains,
“Home is the daylight world, a known, established order where so-called parental wisdom would seem to negate the dreams and desires of youth. Connie is, then, constantly at odds with her family, ever looking forward to her excursions to the drive-in, the night-time world, the “bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant” which she and her friend approach, “their faces pleased and expectant as if they were entering a sacred building that loomed up out of the night to give them what haven and blessing they yearned for” (p. 36). A mood of expectation pervades Connie’s night-time world. Like the light on Daisy Buchanan’s pier that promised romance to Jay Gatsby, the bright-lit hamburger joint also holds out new worlds within its “sacred” precincts: cars, music, boys, experience.” (Gillis 67)
At home, Connie believes that that was her haven, and nothing could harm her if she within the walls of her home that her family provided for her and daydream about her life. As for outside, Connie assumes that with her looks she can do whatever she wants and achieve the love she has been searching for. Connie was perfectly fine with this ordeal until Arnold Friend arrives and tears the thin line of both worlds. When she is being taken away by Arnold and Ellie, she stated that she is never going to see her mother again and she won’t ever sleep in that house either (Oates). This is crucial to understand that even though Connie’s mother emotionally tormented her younger daughter up until the point that Connie wishes that her own mother was dead (Oates), Connie still loves her without showing remote attention towards her and she thinks about her when she is in incredible danger with strangers. That is a sign that Connie is slowly releasing her repressed thoughts and being to be truthful to herself and possibly wishes that she can love her family the way she wants to without any restrictions. Connie could have fixed her family cycle of not being loved, not being paid attention to, and narcissism if only she had faced her family and tried to reform her loved one. Instead, she decided to avoid the whole situation, create a whole realm that revolves around herself and chose to copy the same traits she didn’t enjoy in a person.
Both of those psychoanalytic concepts mentioned before introduces a major conflict that Connie is dealing with mid-way into the story; dreams. Connie’s desires are real and cannot be mistaken for anything else, but those desires manifested into nightmares wrapped in disguise. It introduces a theory that Connie was dreaming when she fell asleep under the sun day dreaming about boys while her family was away (Oats). Freud believes, “…that the analysis of dreams has shown as that the unconscious makes use of a particular symbolism, especially for representing sexual complexes… underlies our myths and fairy tales” (2223). When Connie was busy day-dreaming about boys she hasn’t noticed that she slips into a deep sleep and started to dream about fulfilling wishes that she couldn’t do because it was socially wrong.
“Connie rides home from the mall “sleepy and pleased” (823) because she has sated her appetite for cheap diversion for another night. Her “dreams” are mundane teen-age boy-girl reveries, enhanced by the hypnotic music she listens to constantly. She spends most of her waking hours “dreaming about the boys she met. But all the boys fell back and dissolved into a single face that was not even a face, but an idea, a feeling, mixed up with the urgent insistent pounding of the music” (823)—which is merely to say that Connie, like many teen-agers, is in love with love” (Coulthard 507).
Society thinks it is morally wrong for girls to be thinking about impure things such as being aroused for multiple boys, teasing boys by dressing pretty and not giving anything in return and inviting boys over when by yourself. Connie must have thought about all those scenarios while day-dreaming and it transformed into a full-fledged dream. However, something changed within her dream when she thought of the creepy boy, she met in the parking lot is the restaurant, Arnold. It is possible that Arnold is a representation of her anxiety she posses when her wishes are coming true. “Anxiety is one of the ego’s reactions in repudiation of repressed wishes that have become powerful…” (Freud 2224). So, this makes this lovely dream turn into a nightmare that is filled with terror, powerful entities, and the reality that Connie is afraid to face. Connie believes that since she has been disobedient towards the grownups and decides to rebel against society, that everyone will turn a blind eye when something horrible happens to her like Arnold attacking her.
Oates wrote this whole story based on Connie’s perspective and typically people have no idea they are in a dream/nightmare until the wake up near the climax. Like waking up before you hit the ground after falling for a while. Despite this, Connie didn’t seem to wake up after Arnold has harmed her physically and traumatized her but instead wakes up when she is following Arnold and Ellie into the “vast sunlit…land behind him” (Oates). There is no clear reason why Connie will wake up at a moment like that, but it seems like she has given up the urge to fight with her anxiety and decided for it to control her life. In the end, her desires and wishes were no match for her anxiety and society deems her reckless and prefers to cast her away instead of helping her recover.
Work Cited
Freud, Sigmund. Five Lectures on Psych-Analysis [1909]. Translated by James Strachey, 1955, PDF
Coulthard, A. R. “Joyce Carol Oates’s ‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’ As Pure Realism.” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 26, no. 4, Fall 1989, p. 505. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=7135813&site=ehost-live.
Gillis, Christina Marsden. “‘Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?’: Seduction, Space, and a Fictional Mode.” Studies in Short Fiction, vol. 18, no. 1, Winter 1981, p. 65. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=8648456&site=ehost-live.
Oats, Joyce Carol. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Celestial Timepiece, 22 Dec. 2016, celestialtimepiece.com/2015/01/21/where-are-you-going-where-have-you-been/.
