The Dangerous Garden of Joyce Carol Oates’s Short Stories
p. 177-186
Texte intégral
1When one thinks of the fictional work of Joyce Carol Oates, garden scenes are not what usually first come to mind. Indeed, Oates has forged a place for herself as a chronicler of the life of the mind, as a writer with a powerful gift to evoke the emotional resonance of interpersonal relationships. Though she has claimed to treat settings as carefully as she does her characters, the settings of her fiction are often not the most memorable part. At a time when environmental concerns increasingly invade every aspect of our public lives, Oates’s fiction reminds us that the overwhelming anxiety of the individual is centered around his own personal well-being. Her characters are struggling to create themselves within society, their relationships to the non-human world around them may appear secondary.
2However, for an author keenly interested in liminal states that vascillate between the graspable and ungraspable, “states of mind [that] are real enough—emotions, moods, shifting obsessions, beliefs—though immeasurable1”—gardens, liminal realms by definition2, would seem to be a fitting backdrop to her stories. Gardens, it turns out, do occasionally play an important role in Oates’s fiction. The gardens she depicts, however, are not the well-tended pastoral paradises of flowers, fruit and vegetables the term tends to call to mind. Oates’s gardens, rather, are previously tended spaces that have been abandoned and allowed to become wild. In this way, they stand for the disordered mental states of their proprietors. The unkempt gardens of the three stories discussed in this paper—“Pumpkin-Head”, “Run Kiss Daddy” and “The Temple”—are porous liminal spaces that serve as a poor line of defense against the violent tendencies of the outside world. In each of these three examples, the sinister intrudes on the life of the protagonist by way of the garden space as in a contemporary adaptation of the evil lurking in the garden of Eden, and, as in the Biblical garden, it is each time invited in by the protagonist himself3.
3Another Oatesian garden, the walled garden in the novel Bellefleur, is presided over by a statue of Hebe, the Greek goddess of youth. Her influence, however, cannot ward off sinister intrusion into this most protected of garden spaces. The garden as representative of an earthly paradise, of benevolent nature as a willing partner in a pastoral middle landscape, must, in Oates’s fiction, naturally give way to the more destructive tendencies of the world that are to be integrated into her protagonists’ experiences if they are to evolve and survive. Indeed, in each of these stories, the protagonists are mature adults who must come to terms with and accept painful episodes in their pasts, episodes that unexpectedly resurface in their untended gardens. A reading of Oates’s non-fiction writing about Nature as a complement to a discussion of the roles of unkempt gardens in her stories will reveal the myth of the garden giving way to the myth of all-powerful Nature, emphasizing her conception of the aleatory nature of man’s existence.
Unkempt gardens: gateway to the sinister
“Pumpkin-Head”
4“In late March there’d been a sleet storm through north central New Jersey. Her husband had died several days before.” The story opens with the establishment of a link between the husband’s death and a violent act of nature, though the connection is quickly retracted in the sentence that follows: “There was no connection, she knew.” The paragraph continues with the description of a curious natural phenomenon experienced by the protagonist in the months since her husband’s passing which she describes as “a curious glisten to the air” observed at twilight from “the doorway of her house, or outside”. The spatial location of the protagonist, together with her perception of the curious temporal phenomenon as “the crossing-over time”, emphasizes the notion of liminality in relation to the main character. She is described as occupying this liminal “garden” realm, outside the house though still on the property, “for long minutes” while she wonders about the import of “the strange glisten to the air4”.
5“Pumpkin-Head” recounts the sexual assault of the widow-protagonist, Hadley, in her own home by Anton, a disgraced molecular biology post-doc who works part time at the co-op where she shops. It is by way of the garden, “her husband’s garden that had not been cultivated this year but allowed to grow wild5”, that Anton is able to gradually worm his way into Hadley’s home. The delivery of “several bags of peat moss that were too heavy and cumbersome for Hadley to remove from the trunk of her car by herself6” becomes the pretext for his first visit to her house. Upon his second visit, prompted by an impulsive invitation from Hadley herself who confesses to being “anxious that he should like her, and admire her7”, though Hadley meets him outside, Anton makes his way around the house, through the garden with its “alarming profusion of weeds”, fixing the “lopsided garden gate8” along his way, all the while pointing out other things he can fix for her, until, finding themselves in front of a burnt out garage floodlight, Hadley had “no choice except to invite Anton Kruppe inside, for just a while9”.
6Though Hadley seems to make a conscious effort to like Anton, from the very beginning, descriptions of him tend towards the negative, alternately evoking such mythical creatures associated with death as a pumpkin-carrying headless horseman—not only does he arrive with a jack-o-lantern over his head, but his “large boots” are “like a horse’s hooves10”—or a vampire—“his clumsy wet kiss on her cheek that had seemed to sting her, and to thrill her, like the brush of a bat’s wings” and he was born in Eastern Europe “in what was now called Bosnia11”.
7Hadley is one of a group of widow-protagonists created by the author in the wake of her own husband’s unexpected death who struggle with the feeling that they somehow deserve punishment for remaining alive and for the death duties they are required to execute12. Hadley is described as “a widow who had caused her husband to be burnt to ashes and was unrepentant, unpunished13”. It seems as though Hadley deliberately puts herself in danger in response to her survivor’s guilt. Not only does Anton wriggle his way in to her intimate environment by way of her husband’s unkempt garden, but as the text progresses and his behavior becomes more aggressive and directly threatening, he is repeatedly compared in nightmare fashion to various garden implements come to life: his receding hairline resembles the shape of a hand trowel14 and his awkward manner of movement makes him seem scarecrow-like15. His link to the garden is further reinforced by a pumpkin seed that sticks to his hair throughout the encounter16 and two descriptive elements that evoke the notion of compost: as he begins his assault, his body gives off “a sweaty-garbagey smell” and he bites at her lips “like a suddenly ravenous rodent17”.
8It is by way of the garden that the encounter with evil occurs and once felt, the mark is permanent. At the story’s close, though Anton has left the house, it is not at all clear that Hadley is free of him: “On the roadway there were headlights. An unmoving vehicle […]. Headlights on the roadway, where his vehicle was parked18.”
“Run Kiss Daddy”
9In “Run Kiss Daddy”, the newly remarried Reno spends time at his newly acquired Paraquarry Lake vacation property with his new wife and her two young children. Much emphasis is placed on everything “new” in his life which foregrounds the notions of liminality and transition in the current phase of their lives that is presented as a delicate time in which much could possibly go wrong: “With this new family vulnerable as a small creature cupped in the palm of a hand—he didn’t want to take any risks19.” Furthermore, the constant insistence on the “new” throughout the text makes it all the more impossible to forget the existence of the past.
10There is no cultivated garden plot on the new camp property although “the decaying compost20” begun by the new wife would indicate future plans for one. Rather, the garden space is represented by the ruins of a terrace adjoining the property’s A-frame house. The story narrates a day that Reno spends excavating the ruins of an old brick terrace that he plans to rebuild with flagstones bought at a local garden supply store. His digging unearths much more than he bargained for, creating doubt in the reader about his own morality, and inciting him to invite the sinister into the midst of his idyllic little family.
11From the start, the reality of excavating “the old, crumbled-brick terrace a previous owner had left amid a tangle of weeds, pebbles, and broken glass” is much less glamorous than the promise held by the idea of “the exciting new terrace overlooking the lake”. Out-of-doors, Reno and the children are prey from the start to the June Kittatinny Mountains elements, namely “the mild June air too humid for much exertion” and “mosquitoes and gnats. Despite the repellent21”. The idea that digging can unearth unexpected surprises is introduced early on when the four-year-old Devra recoils from an unearthed beetle and is deeply frightened by the experience. Upon another occasion, “little Devra” is “stung by yellow jackets that erupted out […] of a hive in the earth that Reno had disturbed with his shovel22”. As the afternoon shades into early evening, Reno unearths a broken urn inside a barrel underneath a large rock. Just before discovering the contents of the urn, he is surprised by “a scuttling snake amid the debris” announcing the eruption of evil power and chaos from below the ground. As his Biblical precursors in the garden of Eden, he cannot face down temptation: “He stooped to peer more closely even as the cautionary words came: Maybe no. Maybe not a good idea23.” He proceeds to discover the bones of a little girl among the remains of the urn, the skeleton in pieces and appearing to have been dismembered.
12The idea of digging in the area is initially linked for Reno to a romantic boyhood enthusiasm for the possibility of discovering artifacts from the Lenni Lenape Indians such as arrowheads and bones. However, read as a metaphor for the new family project, the new terrace project takes on an especially sinister flavor. What secrets may be lurking beneath the happy facade? As with the garden terrace, in Reno’s life the old must be “excavated” to make room for the new. The story is thus interspersed with reflections on Reno’s old life with his first wife, first children and first Paraquarry Lake camp. As the sinister makeshift grave is unearthed in the garden excavation, the hint of something sinister in Reno’s past is also revealed:
“Reno was whispering to himself words meant to console— Oh God. Help me, God. God! As his surprise ebbed Reno began to be badly frightened. He was thinking that these might be the bones of his daughter—his first daughter; the little girl had died, her death had been accidental, but he and her mother had hurriedly buried her…
But no: ridiculous. This was another time, not that time.
This was another campsite. This was another part of Paraquarry Lake. This was another time in a father’s life.
His daughter was alive. Somewhere in California, a living girl. He was not to blame. He had never hurt her. She would outlive him24.”
13Does this reaction hint at a sinister secret of a dead child in Reno’s past? Or is it purely fantasy resulting from a father’s prolonged separation from his children? The mystery deepens when Reno decides not to report “this terrible discovery” to the Paraquarry police, wondering “what would be the consequences?” of such an action25. This question strikes the reader as odd for a character who has nothing to hide.
14The fact that he gives the glass-bead necklace found with the remains of the dead girl to his new wife’s little daughter creates a disturbing link between past and present and seems to give concrete expression to his disturbing obsession with the little girls in his life. Though he has both a son and a daughter from his first marriage, it is his daughter that occupies his thoughts: “But the daughter. Reno’s daughter26.” Likewise, between his new wife’s son and daughter: “Especially little Devra captivated him—he stared at her in amazement, the child was so small—tiny rib cage, collarbone, wrists—after her bath, the white-blond hair thin as feathers against her delicate skull27.” Indeed, the new girl seems to “have so totally supplanted Reno’s memory of his own daughter at that age28”.
15In this context, the final two-sentence paragraph cannot but leave the reader with an uneasy feeling: “Around the child’s slender neck the blue glass beads glittered, gleamed. All that summer at Paraquarry Lake, Reno would marvel he’d never seen anything more beautiful29.” What happens at the end of the summer? Will something happen to the child? Or, could Oates simply be reaffirming the cyclical nature of life by emphasising change, decomposition and renewal? The beautiful glass beads found among the “no-color30” remains of the dead might be read as a symbol of life’s ability to go on in spite of the existence of past failures and gruesome events: “It was amazing, you might interpret it as a sign—the thin little chain hadn’t broken in the earth31.”
16Oates’s predilection for the possibility of multiple interpretations is once again evident in this short story. However, whether one chooses to read it as a thriller providing clues to the sinister behavior past and present of the protagonist or as a reaffirmation of the perseverant nature of living organisms, the fact remains that it is once again through the liminal garden space that the notion of evil gains entry into the family’s intimate space.
“The Temple”
17In “The Temple”, the unnamed female protagonist makes a discovery of a similar kind “at the bottom of the old garden”. Responding to a “vexing, mysterious sound!” she has been hearing intermittently for the past two months, “a faint mewing cry followed by a muffled scratching”, the woman makes her way “into the lush tangle of vegetation that had been her mother’s garden of thirty years before”, to “the very bottom of the garden32”, and, using her mother’s cobweb-festooned garden implements “out of the old garage”, begins to dig. The unkempt, wild nature of the formerly tended garden space is further emphasized by the description of the “sinewy weeds and vines, chicory, wild mustard, tall grasses” as “jungle-like vegetation” and the fact that the earth “was rich with compost, very dark, moist33”. Her digging uncovers “a number of scattered bones”, including a skull, from a child-sized skeleton34. As in “Run Kiss Daddy”, the project is arduous and excavation-like, complete with beetles and maimed earthworms attesting to the latent violence in the act of driving a shovel into the earth with one’s foot.
18However, the three-page sketch does not hint at any sinister effects on the protagonist’s life as a result of her disturbing discovery. Rather, the reverence with which she treats the bones is presented as a satisfactory conclusion. The child, buried decades ago on the family’s property in a makeshift “unmarked” grave, will no longer be “unacknowledged” and “unknown35”. However, it can still be said that the garden is the portal through which the encounter with the sinister takes place and must subsequently be dealt with. Living with the bones displayed in her bedroom, the most private of spaces in a home, symbolizes the notion that it is not possible to un-know information that has once been uncovered. Furthermore, though the protagonist appears to be at peace with the situation at the story’s close, an element of unease is created for the reader who knows the woman to know she is acting outside of societal norms as she takes care to wrap the remains in a velvet cloth before carrying them up to her house: “For no one must see. No one must know36.”
Oates’s concept of nature
19The unkempt garden spaces of these short stories clearly represent the disordered personal lives of Oates’s characters. What more perfect symbol than the garden—so beautiful when lovingly tended, so ugly and unruly when abandoned—to represent the inner turmoil of protagonists dealing with loss, guilt and loneliness. Oates’s vision is further complicated, however, by the personal views on nature she has expressed in several essays. “Until the age of twelve or thirteen”, she writes in a 1995 essay entitled “They All Just Went Away”, “my most intense, happiest hours were spent tramping desolate fields, woods, and creek banks near my family’s farmhouse in Millersport, New York37”. However, when Oates takes time out to observe and reflect on her natural surroundings what she sees is not a pleasant space that can be tamed into an orderly garden, but rather an indubitable force unconcerned with the sufferings and considerations of man. Her recollections of nature are almost always tinged with melancholy. Thinking back to the abandoned houses that seemed to dominate the rural setting of her girlhood, she focuses on how quickly nature reasserts dominance once people leave a place: “How swiftly, in a single season, a human habitation can turn wild38.” When not melancholy, Oates’s nature memories are downright terrifying. In an earlier essay, “Against Nature”, Oates devotes a half-page to “early Nature memories” all three of which represent encounters with the uncomfortable, gruesome side of natural life: leeches sucking her blood, the discovery of a friend’s dead dog, and the sight of a rabies-infected raccoon tearing at its own belly39. Oates does not see beneficent nature, rather, she sees the workings of an impersonal evolutionary process which she describes as “a blind, purposeless, ceaseless evolutionary process that yields no ‘products’—only temporary strategies against extinction40”. In “Against Nature,” she presents Nature as the nemesis of the writer, constantly eluding him, because the tools of his trade, namely words, are unequal to the task of representing “a presence”, “a genuine force”, a dimension in which “human language has no resonance”. “Nothing to be said about it expresses it”, she writes, “nothing touches it, it’s an absolute against which nothing human can be measured41”. “Man”, Oates laments in a 1974 journal entry, “the creature who deludes himself in regard to nature. He imagines he likes it, even loves it. But he loves only a relationship with nature—a benign one—relationship with nature in which he has control42”. Elsewhere, in a recent essay about returning to the region of her childhood, Oates writes about the sight of “falling water, turbulent water, dark frothy water churning as if it were alive” which prompts the reflection that “in the midst of city-life, at the very noon-tide of day-life, there is the primary, primitive vein of elemental life in which human identity is vanished, as if it had never been43”. The force with which nature asserts itself when unimpeded is hinted at in “Pumpkin-Head” when Hadley observes her late husband’s garden: though it had only not been cultivated one year, it had already sprouted an “alarming profusion of weeds44”. In “Run Kiss Daddy” and “The Temple”, the discovery of bones in the gardens points to the cyclical nature of life and the fragility of the individual as a biological organism.
20An opposition is clearly discernable in Oates’s stories between tended garden spaces—microcosms of the “middle landscape” described by Leo Marx in The Machine in the Garden—and untended spaces representing both abandonment and the force of nature. The American pastoral ideal as described by Marx is embodied in the concept of the middle landscape, a cultural conception mixing social and natural impulses to the effect that it is acceptable for man to use his knowledge to modify nature to a point that he can “commune” more comfortably with it, “an abstract embodiment of the concept of mediation between the extremes of primitivism and what may be called ‘overcivilization’45”. In the nineteenth century, Marx explains, the locomotive, considered to be a powerful and efficient machine, became the symbol of America’s pastoral ideal; it represented man’s progress in bringing out the powers latent in the environment. Oates’s gardens, however, might be thought of as anti-pastoral in that they are formerly modified, tended spaces that Nature is in the process of reclaiming, and as such they represent its wild, untameable quality. They deconstruct pastoral space through counterforces encroaching from both sides: the latent violent tendencies of civilized man on the one hand and the forceful advance of nature on the other. In this way, Oates’s gardens represent mediated spaces functioning as traps due to the differing perceptions they explore between expectation and reality in this liminal realm.
Counteracting myth of benevolent nature
21The vision of the middle landscape that emerges from Oates’s fiction has a slightly different focus than the traditional pastoral ideal described by Marx. Rather than presenting the point of equilibrium as a decision to be left to man’s making, she presents it as a state in which man awakens to his place in an enigmatic interconnected mystical world. Marx tracks the development of the American pastoral middle landscape ideal, explaining that “on the whole”, eighteenth and nineteenth century “Americans were unsentimental about unmodified nature. […] the wilderness was precious to most Americans chiefly for what could be made of it—a terrain of rural peace and happiness46”. The descriptions and roles of Oates’s garden environments, however, focus on the insignificance of the individual when faced with Nature’s force. If there is to be any mediation between Man and Nature, for Oates it must come from the individual’s recognition of his inter connected relationship with the world. In 1972, Oates had a “mystical vision” in which she experienced her body as a tall column of light and heat and was prompted to reflect: “In this fantastical structure the ‘I’ is deluded as to its sovereignty, let alone its autonomy in the (outside) world; the most astonishing secret is that the ‘I’ doesn’t exist!—but it behaves as if it does, as if it were one and not many47.”
***
22The relationship between Man and Nature as dramatized in these stories through the interactions of the protagonists with their gardens seems to show an anti-pastoral vision in the sense that it presents Nature as the dominant force. Oates’s Nature is natura naturans48; she emphasizes its active, self-causing qualities. It is Nature, through its mesmerizing power and timelessness, that can both destroy and outlive Man. The message of Oates’s writing ultimately expounds an altered conception of the pastoral middle landscape as described by Leo Marx. Whereas in traditional American pastoral thinking nature is there to be used to make man’s life more comfortable, Oates’s middle landscape is a place in which nature reigns supreme, a fact man must acknowledge if he is to live his life harmoniously with it. The myth of a pastoral Eden gives way to a conception of all-powerful Nature whose wildness (represented in these stories by sinister elements working into the characters’ lives) man is powerless to counteract and can only learn to accept, not to master (represented by the speed with with nature begins to take over an abandoned garden space). “Human tragedy”, writes Oates, “is a matter of particulars, and will vanish; but the chorus of nature, of the natural universe, will not vanish, and its slow, sure, deadly vision constitutes an ironic consciousness of the way the world is49”.
Bibliographie
Johnson Greg, “A Barbarous Eden: Joyce Carol Oates’s First Collection”, Studies in Short Fiction, 30.1, Winter 1993, p. 1-14.
Johnson Greg (ed.), The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982, New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 2007.
Marx Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Oxford, University Press, 2000 [1964].
Oates Joyce Carol, “Afterword: Reflections on the Grotesque”, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, New York, Dutton, 1994, p. 303-307.
Oates Joyce Carol, “Against Nature”, (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1988, p. 66-76.
Oates Joyce Carol, “Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again”, Smithsonian, March 2010, p. 74-89.
Oates Joyce Carol, “Pumpkin-Head”, Sourland: Stories, New York, HarperCollins, 2010, p. 3-21.
Oates Joyce Carol, “Run Kiss Daddy”, in Oates Joyce Carol (dir.), New Jersey Noir, New York, Akashic Books, 2011, p. 257-274.
Oates Joyce Carol, “The Temple”, in Oates Joyce Carol (dir.), American Gothic Tales, New York, Plume, 1996, p. 346-348.
Oates Joyce Carol, “They All Just Went Away”, in Oates Joyce Carol et Atwan Robert (dir.), The Best American Essays of the Century, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000, p. 553-563.
Notes de bas de page
1Oates Joyce Carol, “Afterword: Reflections on the Grotesque”, Haunted: Tales of the Grotesque, New York, Dutton, 1994, p. 307.
2The Oxford American English Dictionary defines “garden” as “a piece of ground, often near a house, used for growing flowers, fruit, or vegetables”.
3Along these lines, the stories’ three victims (female, children, or both) can be read as ironic commentary on the misogyny of the Eden myth.
4Oates Joyce Carol, “Pumpkin-Head”, Sourland: Stories, New York, HarperCollins, 2010, p. 3.
5Ibid., p. 10.
6Ibid., p. 7.
7Ibid., p. 14.
8Ibid., p. 10.
9Ibid., p. 11.
10Idem.
11Ibid., p. 5.
12“Pumpkin-Head” is one of a trio of stories in the 2010 collection Sourland which disturbingly depict widows who are subjected to shocking ordeals of physical violation. Each story was first published in the two-year period following the death of Oates’s husband: “Pumpkin-Head” (The New Yorker, January 2009), “Probate” (Salmagundi, Fall 2010), and “Sourland” (Boulevard, Fall 2009).
13Oates Joyce Carol, “Pumpkin-Head”, op. cit., p. 9.
14Ibid., p. 12 and 18.
15Ibid., p. 4, 17 and 20.
16Ibid., p. 12 and 16.
17Ibid., p. 18.
18Ibid., p. 21.
19Oates Joyce Carol, “Run Kiss Daddy”, in Oates Joyce Carol (dir.), New Jersey Noir, New York, Akashic Books, 2011, p. 267.
20Ibid., p. 268.
21Ibid., p. 258.
22Ibid., p. 268.
23Ibid., p. 270.
24Ibid., p. 272.
25Ibid., p. 273.
26Ibid., p. 265.
27Ibid., p. 266.
28Ibid., p. 267.
29Ibid., p. 274.
30Ibid., p. 272.
31Ibid., p. 273.
32Oates Joyce Carol, “The Temple”, in Oates Joyce Carol (dir.), American Gothic Tales, New York, Plume, 1996, p. 346.
33Ibid., p. 347.
34Ibid., p. 348.
35Idem.
36Idem.
37Oates Joyce Carol, “They All Just Went Away”, in Oates Joyce Carol and Atwan Robert (ed.), The Best American Essays of the Century, New York, Houghton Mifflin Company, 2000, p. 553. First published in The New Yorker in 1995.
38Ibid., p. 559.
39Oates Joyce Carol, “Against Nature”, (Woman) Writer: Occasions and Opportunities, New York, E. P. Dutton, 1988, p. 69. “Against Nature” was originally published in Antaeus in 1986.
40Oates Joyce Carol, “They All Just Went Away”, op. cit., p. 555.
41Oates Joyce Carol, “Against Nature”, op. cit., p. 68.
42Johnson Greg (ed.), The Journal of Joyce Carol Oates: 1973-1982, New York, HarperCollins Publishers, 2007, p. 41.
43Oates Joyce Carol, “Joyce Carol Oates Goes Home Again”, Smithsonian, March 2010, p. 80.
44Oates Joyce Carol, “Pumpkin-Head”, op. cit., p. 10.
45Marx Leo, The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America, Oxford, University Press, 2000 [1964], p. 139-140.
46Ibid., p. 141-142.
47Oates Joyce Carol, “Against Nature”, op. cit., p. 75.
48Natura naturans: meaning “Nature naturing”, or more loosely, “nature doing what nature does”. As opposed to natura naturata: meaning “Nature natured”, or “Nature already created”.
49Cited in Johnson Greg, “A Barbarous Eden: Joyce Carol Oates’s First Collection”, Studies in Short Fiction, 30.1, Winter 1993, p. 9.
Auteur
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Tanya Tromble
Membre du laboratoire CIRPaLL à l’université d’Angers. Elle a soutenu une thèse intitulée Interminable Enigma : Joyce Carol Oates’s Reimagining of Detective Fiction à l’université de Provence en 2010. Elle travaille depuis plusieurs années sur l’œuvre de Oates et s’est notamment intéressée à la présence du gothique, à l’utilisation de la parodie et aux jeux métafictionnels aussi bien dans les romans que dans les nouvelles. Elle a publié sur des aspects divers de l’œuvre de Oates – le policier, l’épistolaire, la violence, le gothique, la religion, les adolescents, le 11 septembre, le figure de l’homme – et également sur les écrits de Flannery O’Connor, Patrick McGrath et Willa Cather. Elle fait partie des comités de lecture de plusieurs revues scientifiques : Bearing Witness : Joyce Carol Oates Studies, Résonances et Journal of the Short Story in English.
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