A Study Guide for Joyce Carol Oates's "Stalking"
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A Study Guide for Joyce Carol Oates's "Stalking" - Gale
11
Stalking
Joyce Carol Oates
1972
Introduction
In 1972 American author Joyce Carol Oates published the short story Stalking
in the North American Review. The story later appeared in her collection of short stories Marriages and Infidelities, published initially in 1968 but reissued with new material in 1972. Stalking
tells the story of Gretchen, a thirteen-year-old girl who roams her suburban community hunting her Invisible Adversary. Gretchen is not a very attractive character. She is angry, spiteful, and antisocial. During her journey she commits vandalism and theft. She chooses to make herself physically unattractive. Oates, though, portrays Gretchen in part as a victim of her environment. Her mother neglects her, and her father is frequently away, perhaps on business trips. The story is set in modern suburbia, and its implication is that the hunt for the Invisible Adversary is Gretchen's effort to fill the void in her life that the bland comforts of suburbia supply, or perhaps to hunt down a more authentic version of herself. In this way the short story is a critique of modern suburban society. Stalking
should not be confused with another short story by Oates, The Stalker.
Stalking
is one of many short stories and novels Oates has written, and she is one of the most prolific authors in American literary history, perhaps in literary history anywhere. During her college years she wrote a number of novels that, she says, she happily discarded. She published her first novel in 1964, and for a number of years she published two new novels a year—for a total of nearly sixty. Additionally, she published twenty-nine collections of short stories, fifteen collections of poetry, more than a dozen nonfiction books and collections of essays, and more than twenty plays. She edited or compiled twenty-two books, and her journal grew to four thousand single-spaced pages. Joyce Carol Oates has been a dominating voice in American fiction for nearly half a century. Her fiction is often disturbing, with themes of rape, pedophilia, incest, broken homes, victimization, and violence. Her varied settings include