You Must Remember This by Joyce Carol Oates

First published: 1987

Type of plot: Family

Time of work: 1946-1956

Locale: Port Oriskany, New York, a fictitious city

Principal Characters:

• Enid Maria Stevick, a delicate and scholarly adolescent girl who has an obsessive affair with her half-uncle Felix
• Felix Stevick, a former prizefighter, now trading in real estate, whose passionate affair with his young niece is the central action of the novel
• Warren Stevick, Enid’s brother, a Korean War veteran, now a peace activist
• Lyle Stevick, the bookish, anxious father of Enid and Warren, half-brother of Felix

The Novel

You Must Remember This is a chronicle of the Stevick family from 1946 to 1956. The primary movement in the novel involves the love affair between Enid Maria Stevick and her half-uncle Felix. The novel also deals with many other love relationships of Stevick family members.

The novel begins with a shocking description of Enid’s attempt to commit suicide by ingesting an overdose of aspirin. The story then moves back to an earlier time in the family history, the time that led to the suicide attempt. Enid’s preoccupation with death as a child is clear as she looks at a picture of a boy who tried to escape from a Nazi death camp. Oates describes the poverty of the Stevick family and the neighborhood in which they live, an area in which the air is polluted by chemicals from nearby factories. There is an emphasis on sex and violence in their lives.

The first and only time that Enid sees her Uncle Felix box occurs when Lyle Stevick takes his children to a boxing match. Enid is the youngest child of the Stevick family in attendance. Although she is shocked and almost overwhelmed by the blood and violence of what she sees and wonders why people would want to hurt each other like that, she is impressed at seeing her uncle in a new way. Felix seems a person that Enid does not know, and she wonders if he would know her.

One senses the sexual undercurrent between Enid and Felix from the beginning. On the beach near the summer cottage of Geraldine and Neal O’Banan, the sister and brother-in-law of Enid, Felix offers to give fourteen-year-old Enid a boxing lesson. The “boxing lesson” becomes more sexual in nature as it continues. Felix is snake-quick in his movements, which leave Enid frustrated because she cannot return his blows. After a while, Enid springs at her uncle in a frenzy, and Felix sees that he has gone too far. Love and hate are often closely connected in the relationship of Felix and Enid.

The day after the boxing lesson, Felix offers to take Enid for a drive. They visit the vast old Hotel Rideau, which Felix has purchased. Felix and Enid begin to play a game of hide and seek, which ends with the drunken Felix attacking his niece.

Felix apologizes the next day, but his attack awakens in Enid her latent adolescent passion for her uncle. Felix realizes immediately that he has made a terrible mistake. Since Enid is the daughter of his half-brother Lyle, the attraction is even incestuous. Felix pleads with Enid to keep silent and to forget his attack on her. Enid’s passion has been aroused, however, and she will not end her affair with her uncle. When Felix tries to end their relationship, Enid, in a romantic gesture, attempts suicide by carefully ingesting forty-seven aspirin tablets. Partly from guilt and fear and partly because Enid’s strong will to die attracts him, Felix recommences their surreptitious love affair after Enid leaves the hospital. The intense feelings of the lovers contrast sharply with the drab, conventional world of the other Stevick family members.

The furtive romance of Enid and Felix goes on, in motels far enough from Port Oriskany that no one will identify them. Felix gives drinks of vodka and wine to his niece to “loosen her up.” Their clandestine affair continues, with Felix at first being careful not to make any mistakes during their encounters. Oates details the blood, pain, violence, and anger that accompany Enid’s loss of virginity in this love-hate relationship.

Felix is out of town often, involved in real-estate transactions. Enid continues attending high school, developing a circle of friends. Felix sees Enid occasionally, but a traumatic experience for him occurs when he glimpses Enid outside her school at lunch time with a circle of friends, male as well as female. Possessively, jealously, he carries her away from her school, and they make love in his car. In his jealousy and passion, Felix fails to take precautions, and Enid finds herself pregnant. Felix arranges for her to have an abortion. The blood, pain, resentment, and guilt that Catholic Enid feels at her abortion are convincingly described.

Felix loses his youth in the course of the novel as Enid loses her attraction for death. The novel ends as the former lovers go their separate ways. Felix is hospitalized after being severely beaten by the father of Jo-Jo Pearl, the young man, now deceased, for whom Felix was a mentor in boxing. After Felix recovers, he telephones Enid to say that he is going to be married and will move away from Port Oriskany. Enid also will leave Port Oriskany, to study music at the Wescott School in Rochester,

The Characters

Enid Stevick, the central character in You Must Remember This, is another of Oates’s intelligent, talented young scholar heroines. Enid is by turns cold and fragile; like Connie in the story “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?,” Enid has two sides to her personality. There is Enid Stevick, shy, intelligent, Roman Catholic, a model student, always receiving high grades. The other side of Enid is “Angel-face,” the daring, conniving, sensual side. “Angel-face,” with the encouragement of some older girls, is a shoplifter, and, repeating “Why not?” about the affair, propels Enid into the passionate but destructive relationship with her handsome young Uncle Felix.

Felix Stevick is the most vibrant character in the novel. He is an extremely attractive former prizefighter. Felix is an outsider, troubled by his illegitimate birth and the suicide of his father. Felix exercises an instinct for self-destructive violence. This impulse to self-destructive behavior in Felix is what attracts him to Enid after her attempted suicide and leads him to continue their obsessive, incestuous affair. Felix is attractive but lonely and alienated, seeing himself an outsider except in the prizefight ring or in his lover’s arms.

Warren Stevick is the brother of Enid, the only male in a family of three sisters. He served in the Korean War and was seriously wounded. During his struggle to survive, Warren had an epiphany. Always helpful and considerate of others, he realized that his mission in the future must be to help others. In his idealistic political journey, he becomes a pacifist, then serves on an unsuccessful Adlai Stevenson presidential campaign, and finally works for Children’s Aid in a Philadelphia slum neighborhood. In his contacts with his favorite sister, Enid, he makes perceptive statements applying to the central themes of the book.

Lyle Stevick is the bookish head of the Stevick family, father to Enid, Warren, and their two sisters. Lyle has a dead-end job as the owner of a secondhand furniture store. He worries about government corruption and fears enemy bombs; his main obsession is building a backyard bomb shelter. His worries typify, although in a ludicrous fashion, the worries of many people in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s.

Critical Context

You Must Remember This preserves lower-class American life as it existed in the United States in the 1950’s. Oates describes vividly and in detail the New York State setting of her childhood. The author writes that, in her mind, she traverses Port Oriskany’s streets and ponders its buildings, houses, vacant lots, and, most of all, the canal that runs through it as it did through her birthplace, Lockport, New York. The canal, in Enid’s fevered imagination, as in Oates’s own, seems an object of utter beauty.

The novel is perhaps the most personal of the author’s novels. Oates once wrote that the contours of Enid Stevick’s soul very much resemble her own. The novel is also the history of an era the author loved. It focuses on certain selected aspects of American life, most notably politics (the antipodes of the Red Scare and the early pioneering antinuclear arms movement represented by Warren Stevick). In addition to politics, Oates evokes remembrances of popular culture in the 1950’s, primarily music and Hollywood films. She includes the names of popular songs with suggestive and evocative titles such as “Stormy Weather” and “These Foolish Things.” She mentions the names of film and television stars. She identifies the cars people drove (Felix is always driving a shiny new car) and remembers the professional prizefighting that vast numbers of Americans watched weekly on television and the great champions who were in their prime in that era. Oates knows much about boxing; in 1987, she published a nonfiction book, On Boxing, which showed her expertise in that area.

Enid is of a background similar to that of the author. Oates was a teenager in the 1950’s, as Enid is. Even in stature, the slim frame of Enid resembles the build of the author. Yet except in its setting and in a few of its specific incidents, the novel is not autobiographical. The setting, the fictitious city of Port Oriskany, New York, is an amalgam of two cities: Buffalo, the first large city in the experience of the author, and Lockport, the city of her birth and the home of her paternal grandmother. Oates attended sixth grade and all of junior high school in Lockport, and the city consequently is suffused with the extravagant dreams of early adolescence, such as the dreams of Enid Stevick. Adolescent dreams tie in with the working title of the novel, “The Green Island.” The greenness suffusing the novel is the greenness of nostalgia, of romance, of innocence.

In this novel, Oates turned back to the realistic novel after a quartet of experimental novels, including mystery, a romance, and a tale of Gothic horror. One sees the influence of Emily Dickinson in Enid’s preoccupation with death and of D. H. Lawrence in the description of the passionate love between Felix and Enid. The irrational nature of intense feeling is beautifully depicted here. As Warren Stevick tells Enid near the end of the novel, love carries with it no knowledge.

Bibliography

Creighton, Joanne V. Joyce Carol Oates: Novels of the Middle Years. New York: Twayne, 1992. Creighton presents the first critical study of the novels Oates published between 1977 and 1990, including the mystery novels published under the name of Rosamund Smith. She offers an insightful analysis of You Must Remember This.

Daly, Brenda. Lavish Self-Divisions: The Novels of Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996. An excellent study that argues that the “father-identified daughters in her early novels have become, in the novels of the 1980s, self-authoring women who seek alliances with their culturally devalued mothers.” Offers a perceptive reading of the evolution of feminist elements in Oates’s work.

Johnson, Greg. Invisible Writer: A Biography of Joyce Carol Oates. New York: Dutton, 1998. An illuminating look at the novelist once dubbed “the dark lady of American letters.” Drawing on Oates’s private letters and journals, as well as interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, Johnson offers a definitive study of one of America’s most gifted novelists. Includes a careful reading of You Must Remember This.

Milazzo, Lee, ed. Conversations with Joyce Carol Oates. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1989. Part of the Literary Conversation series, this volume has seventeen pages containing references to You Must Remember This. The author also responds to the frequent criticism of the violence in her writing. Essential for a student of Oates, especially of You Must Remember This, the book contains an introduction, bibliography, chronology, and index.

Updike, John. “What You Deserve Is What You Get.” The New Yorker 63 (December 28, 1987): 119-123. This thoughtful, insightful essay by one of Oates’s most well-respected contemporaries offers perceptive comments, both positive and otherwise, about the novel, which he calls “exceedingly fine.”

Wesley, Marilyn C. Refusal and Transgression in Joyce Carol Oates’s Fiction. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1993. An interesting study spanning the spectrum of Oates’s work. Includes a helpful bibliography and index.