Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been? Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory

"The music was always in the background," the narrator tells us, "like music in a church service, it was something to depend upon" (6). Music is everywhere in this story, blaring out of radios in r...

Funny how only men get to drive in the story, right? Fathers, boyfriends, rapists all get the wheel, but never a woman. The only mention of a female driver is the "crazy woman driver" (36) who left...

The first thing we learn about Connie (besides her name and her age) is that she has a "habit of craning her neck to look into mirrors or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all...

Oates has stated that she had the "Death and the Maiden" folktales in the back of her mind as she wrote this story; she even considered "Death and the Maiden" as a title. A common motif in Renaissa...

The literary critic Christina Marsden Gillis has argued that the home in the story is a metaphor for the vulnerability of a woman's body in a male-dominated society (source: Gillis, Christina Mards...