How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life over Again by Joyce Carol Oates
"How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life over Again" by Joyce Carol Oates explores the complex emotional landscape of a young girl from an affluent family who turns to crime as a means of escape. The narrative unfolds through the lens of the protagonist's reflections, triggered by an English class assignment, leading her to confront the psychological turmoil that led to her arrest for shoplifting. The story contrasts her family's comfortable, yet emotionally distant existence with the harsh realities of life in a Detroit ghetto, where she becomes entwined with individuals who embody the struggles of survival and exploitation.
Oates poignantly highlights the disconnect between the girl and her parents, emphasizing their inability to understand her inner life and alienation. The protagonist's journey reveals a tension between societal expectations and personal identity, as she navigates the suffocating norms of her upper-middle-class upbringing. Ultimately, the narrative culminates in her return home, where she grapples with the lingering emptiness of materialism and the search for genuine connection. This story serves as a profound commentary on the effects of privilege, alienation, and the quest for meaning in a world often defined by superficial values.
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How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life over Again by Joyce Carol Oates
First published: 1969
Type of plot: Psychological
Time of work: 1968
Locale: Detroit suburbs
Principal Characters:
"the Girl" , the sixteen-year-old narrator and protagonistHer father , a physicianHer mother Clarita , her female companionSimon , her thirty-five-year-old boyfriend and pimp
The Story
"How I Contemplated the World from the Detroit House of Correction and Began My Life over Again" probes the case of a young girl from a "good" family who turns to crime. The opening lines of the story perfectly identify its content: "Notes for an essay for an English class at Baldwin County Day School; poking around in debris; disgust and curiosity; a revelation of the meaning of life; a happy ending." The narrator uses the occasion of a school essay to examine the psychological "debris" of her recent life—the emotional turbulence and confusion that led to a stay in the Detroit House of Correction.
The narrator's search for the meaning of her delinquency begins as she mentally revisits Branden's, the large and luxurious department store where she was arrested for shoplifting. The store's plushness and material glitter serve as an immediate symbol of the comfortable, insulated, middle-class existence of her parents against which the narrator rebels. With no logical transition, the girl's notes move readers from the store's interior to the parents' sumptuous home (with "a small library"), where the astounded parents confront her for stealing a pair of gloves. The narrator knows that "there is a connection" between her bridge-playing mother and her physician father (doctor of the slightly ill), and between them and the manager of the store, his doctor, her brother, and the family's maid. She knows that her "salvation" is bound up in these relationships, but their meaning is a painful blur.
The narrator's next notes highlight the tragic alienation between daughter and family. The mother wonders why her daughter is "so strange"; perpetually in motion, she has no clue to the girl's inner life, her secret obsession: "I wanted to steal but not to buy." A status seeker like the mother, the father is equally oblivious to the girl's needs. He is off reading a paper at a medical convention in Los Angeles at the moment the daughter is arrested for shoplifting. The father would agree with the ironic, impersonal note sent home from school, that though the girl made off with a copy of Pageant Magazine for no reason and swiped a roll of Lifesavers, she was "in no need of saving her life." The parents' evasion of responsibility leads them to conclude that their daughter's problems are attributable solely to "a slight physiological modification known only to a gynecologist." The girl hardly remembers her brother, who has been sent to a preparatory school in Maine.
Further notes establish that the atmosphere of affluence that intoxicates her parents nauseates and suffocates the girl. The neighborhood is heavy with conspicuous symbols of upper-middle-class success, yet its rigidly conformist social patterns leave no room for individuality or spontaneous emotional expression. Things appear to matter more than people; the people are mere adornments, attachments like pools, garages, or automatic sprinklers. It is her unarticulated desire to escape this "airproof, breathproof," environment that leads the girl to become a truant from school and to become involved in a social milieu diametrically opposed to her own: a Detroit ghetto where, in a sense, she is befriended by a street-hardened girl named Clarita. There, she meets Simon, a desperate, exploitative man who becomes her lover and pimp. Simon prefers a needle in the arm to the girl's embrace, and he turns her into a prostitute. If Sioux Drive was heavy with material possessions, this environment is heavy with fear and pain, climaxing in the girl's prostitution and then a brutal beating by female inmates of the house of correction. The girl perceives her attackers to be avenging themselves for the cumulative social injustices in their lives.
Out of the hospital, the girl, in her final notes, tells of her return to her safe and comfortable home. Her vow never to leave home again, her declaration that "I love everything here," has a desperately false ring to it. Despite the temporary capitulation to a world that is unreal and plastic as ever to her, she weeps in her living room over the falseness and emptiness of lives that seek salvation through material acquisitions, that look "for God in gold and beige carpeting" or in "the beauty of chandeliers and the miracle of a clean polished gleaming toaster and faucets that run both hot and cold water."
Bibliography
Bender, Eileen Teper. Joyce Carol Oates: Artist in Residence. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987.
Bloom, Harold, ed. Modern Critical Views: Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Chelsea House, 1987.
Cologne-Brookes, Gavin. Dark Eyes on America: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.
Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years. New York: Twayne, 1992.
Daly, Brenda O. Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996.
Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton, 1998.
Johnson, Greg. Understanding Joyce Carol Oates. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1987.
Wagner-Martin, Linda, ed. Critical Essays on Joyce Carol Oates. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1979.