SOURCE: Wesley, Marilyn C. “The Transgressive Heroine: Joyce Carol Oates's ‘Stalking’.” Studies in Short Fiction 27, no 1 (winter 1999): 15-20.

In the following essay, Wesley examines Oates's transgressive heroine in the short story “Stalking” and the ways in which the figure defies restrictive gender ideology.

Although Joyce Carol Oates has frequently been labeled a non-feminist and criticized for the passivity of her female characters,¹ her works actively challenge restrictive gender ideology. A case in point is the Oatesian figure I will define as the transgressive heroine, whose murderous early debut is the short story “Swamps,” the first story in Oates's first collection, and whose continuing truculent influence is felt in the Kalistruck heroines of The Goddess and Other Women, in the powerful women of Bellefleur, and in the wilful artist of Solstice, and who is most fully present as the protagonist of the 1972 short story “Stalking.”

A previous stage in...