3/11

Joyce Carol Oates: The Girl with the Blackened Eye

     The main character of the story is the narrator, who recalls an incident that happened to her when she was fifteen years old.  She was abducted, raped, and beaten.  In the beginning, she talks about the black eye she had when the man had beat her and how nobody, who saw, wanted to be involved.  At first she was scared of him, but in the story she talks about how she submit to him to keep him happy. "You learned to be weak to please him for you did not want to displease him in even the smallest things." pg 208  Somehow, she knew that if she kept him happy she made live through this ordeal or be killed quickly.  

    

     Before the incident we learn that she liked to wear tightly fitted clothes and kept her hair in a mane.  But after her hair to messy to do anything with and had to be cut.  We also see that as a young girl she is easily trusting because she carelessly speaks to a man she doesn't know just because he reminds her of her father.  She should already know, not to speak and be careful around strangers.  While being chained to the bed she had a vivid dream of saying good-bye to her family, which shows shes prepared to die.  She compares personality to flame and said it could be extinguished at any moment.  She describes what he did to her but she says it was not done to her but her body.  Both examples show she probably withdrew from herself, an unconscious defense mechanism that prepared her for the worst.  "When you give up the struggle, there's a kind of love.", she submitted to him in hopes of living.  And even when granted to escape with the red-haired woman, she couldn't because she was to afraid to break his trust, which she seemed to value more than her own life and the life of this woman, probably because he already said he'd let her go.

     "When the found me, my hair was wild and tangled like a broom sage.  It couldn't be combed through, had to be cut from my head in clumps."  This detail tells me after this gruesome encounter she had become a different person.  When she talked of the pale-yellow butterflies and the jays, perhaps she compares herself and the other women as the butterflies and the him as the jays because the jays swooped in and ate the butterflies.  When she talks about seeing her mom at that store where they picked up the red-hair woman, maybe that alludes to her family moving on without her.  When she speaks of gangrene and her body rotting, she probably feels she died or wanted to die because of what he did to her.