SOURCE: Dessommes, Nancy Bishop. “O'Connor's Mrs. May and Oates's Connie: An Unlikely Pair of Religious Initiates.” Studies in Short Fiction 31, no. 3 (summer 1994): 433-40.

In the following essay, Dessommes finds parallels between the character of Connie from “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” and Mrs. May, the protagonist from Flannery O'Connor's “Greenleaf.”

When Joyce Carol Oates was asked in a 1969 interview whether she was like Flannery O'Connor, she responded,

I don't know. I used to think that I was influenced by O'Connor. I don't know that I am really. She is so religious, and her works have to be seen as religious works with this other rather creepy dimension in the background, whereas in my writing there is only the natural world.

(Kuehl 307)

A few weeks later, Oates was to publish collection of stories (eventually titled The Wheel of Love and Other Stories) on the theme of...