SOURCE: Smiley, Pamela. “Incest, Roman Catholicism, and Joyce Carol Oates.” College Literature 18, no. 1 (February 1991): 38-49.

In the following essay, Smiley argues that Oates's frequent depiction of exploited and abused female characters can be better understood as effects of specific cultural conditions, particularly a background of Roman Catholicism and father-daughter incest.

Common in the fiction of Joyce Carol Oates is what I call her “feminine” character: the young woman who wanders into new territory (gets on a bus, walks down a street, gets off a bus, takes a graduate class) where she meets a man who victimizes her (he beats, rapes, exploits, deserts, forgets her). The terms of her victimization are most often violent and sexual, her control minimal, and her chances of repeating the pattern good. In fact, the woman seems almost to invite victimization through her very passivity and vulnerability.

The Goddess and Other Women (1974), for example...