Free The Confusion Of Being Connie: Giggle The Pain Away Essay Sample

Character: Connie

Plot Summary: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” chronicles a short segment of Connie’s life in which she is conflicted between leaving her home and staying obedient to her parents.
Setting: Unknown time and location. Most likely 1950s America.
Connie, a young fifteen year old girl and the protagonist of “Where are You Going, Where Have You Been?”, seemingly obsessed with her own appearance and well-being, exemplified by her incessant comparison and analysis of other people, fits the daydreamer archetype in that she, in seeming to be self-centered and narcissistic actually observes and learns from the people she sees. She is always anxious to meet new people and explore the horizons that were never clear to her inside her own home. She, slightly self-centered in the fact that, when with friends, “she feels good to be able to ignore him” (Oates 1), a boy around their age that she and her friends encountered at a social gathering. Because she finds power in the ability to ignore people and choose whom to be with as she chooses when she is free from the confines of her own home, she internalizes the ability to indirectly evade people who do not suit her own mental state. As with other visionaries, Connie relies heavily on a muse, similar to her own face and those of others to help her understand and become one with her surroundings. Connie’s muse, her inspiration is music as it represents something “that makes everything so good, something to depend on” (Oates 1) when she is faced with the problem of authority and oppression in her own home. Connie is able to perceive the world through only images and sounds, faces and music, the only things that comfort her as she perfects the habit of “glancing into mirrors or checking other people’s faces to make sure hers is alright” (Oates 1) and then make sense of it all, dreaming and wishing for some far away daydream of “a single idea, single feeling” (Oates 2) that seems just out of her reach.
In addition to being a daydreamer, unfortunately, Connie is a slave not only to her family, which praises her older sister, June, over her, but also to herself. As she is a daydreamer, she is stuck inside her own shell, constantly trying to make sense of the world, though often to no avail other than being able to distinguish herself from others and a sort of melted reality that “comes from nowhere and belongs nowhere, but is only half real to her, though so familiar” (Oates 5). Her escape is that of friends, but even they cannot truly help her come out of the shell she has subconsciously created. She is a slave to her own inner thinking and can do nothing about it other than observe other people through a lens she cannot see herself through. In addition to using music as a tool to create a false sense of happiness that she is content with, she also escapes into music, often turning on the radio to “drown out the silence” (Oates 2). Little does she know, there is no place that can fully accommodate her because, as Arnold Friend stated when analyzing her, “the place she comes from isn’t there anymore and where you had in mind to go to was cancelled” (Oates 7). She is oppressed not only by disapproving parents, but also the pressure of being herself, someone who is not accepted other than someone who is meant to be “sweet and pretty and give in” (Oates 7). Often, she is forced to hide the other part, the other side of her existence because “everything about her had two sides, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home” (Oates 1) only because she cannot express herself in the way she wishes she could, partially due to the fact that she has little to no sense of self identity.

Works Cited

Oates, Joyce C. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” Epoch Magazine. N.p. 1966. Print. Republished. “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” University of Minnesota Duluth. N.d. Web. 18 March 2015.