Marriages and Infidelities: Short Stories by Carol Joyce Oates
First edition
AuthorJoyce Carol Oates
CountryUnited States
LanguageEnglish
PublisherVanguard Press
Publication date
1972
Media typePrint (hardback)
Pages497
ISBN978-0814907184

Marriages and Infidelities is a collection of 25 works of short fiction by Joyce Carol Oates published by Vanguard Press in 1972.[1]

The volume is the fourth of Oates’s fourth collection of short stories.[2]

Stories

Journal and date of original publication provided after each title.[3][4]

Reception

Literary critic William Abrahams, in Saturday Review, regards the collection as evidence placing Oates "among the most remarkable writers of her generation" and "a master" of the short story form. Abrahams praises the work for its "emotional effectiveness and intellectual credibility."[5]

Critic Michael Wood in The New York Times finds the stories in the collection "full of melodrama and yet curiously dull," evidence of a writer "racking her brains for action, wanting to write even in the absence of anything to write about." Wood reports that there are several good stories in the volume - with special mention for "Problems of Adjustment in Survivors of Natural/Unnatural Disasters" - and offers this caveat:

But the successes make the failures seem self-indulgent…Oates is groping, then, for themes and forms in far too much of this book. But even her groping is worth looking at, reveals returning preoccupations that will surely blossom into better work.[6]

Critical appraisal

Joyce Carol Oates's fourth collection of short stories is remarkable because of two aspects. First, some stories have the same titles as short stories or novellas by earlier writers: "The Metamorphosis" hints at Franz Kafka's short story "Die Verwandlung", "The Lady with the Pet Dog" at Anton Chekhov's novella "Die Dame mit dem Hündchen," "The Turn of the Screw" at Henry James's novella of the same title, and "The Dead" at the last short story of James Joyce's Dubliners.[7] Oates has explained: "These stories are meant to be autonomous stories, yet they are also testaments of my love and extreme devotion to these other writers; I imagine a kind of spiritual 'marriage' between myself and them ...."[8]

Secondly, although the title suggests stories about marriages, about the traditional form of man-woman relationship and about its problems, Oates also uses the term "marriage" as a metaphor, as she has stated:

I believe we achieve our salvation, or our ruin, by the marriages we contract. I conceived of a book of marriages. Some are conventional marriages of men and women, others are marriages in another sense - with a phase of art, with something that transcends the limitations of the ego. But because people are mortal, most of the marriages they go into are mistakes of some kind, misreadings of themselves. I thought by putting together a sequence of marriages, one might see how this one succeeds and that one fails. And how this one leads to some meaning beyond the self.[9]

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Johnson, 1994 p. 218-221: Selected Bibliography, Primary Works
  2. ↑ Abrahams, 1972
  3. ↑ Oates, 1972 in Acknowledgements, opposite copyright page.
  4. ↑ Lercangee, 1986 pp.7-47, Short Stories and Tales
  5. ↑ Abrahams, 1972
  6. ↑ Wood, 1972
  7. ↑ Severin, Hermann (1986). The Image of the Intellectual in the Short Stories of Joyce Carol Oates. Frankfurt am Main, Bern, New York: Peter Lang. p. 69. ISBN 3-8204-9623-8.
  8. ↑ Bellamy, Joe David. "The Dark Lady of American Letters: An Interview with Joyce Carol Oates". Atlantic, CCXXIX, No. 2 (Feb., 1972): 64.
  9. ↑ Clemons, Walter. "Joyce Carol Oates: Love and Violence". Newsweek LXXX (Dec. 11, 1972): 77.

Sources

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