The Dead (Oates short story)
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| "The Dead" | |
|---|---|
| Short story by Joyce Carol Oates | |
| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publication | |
| Published in | McCall's |
| Publication date | July 1971 |
"The Dead" is a short story by Joyce Carol Oates originally published in McCall's (July 1971), and first collected in Marriages and Infidelities (1972) by Vanguard Press.[1] McCall's re-titled the story "The Death of Dreams" in its periodical, but its original title of "The Dead" was restored in the collection at Oates's request.[2]
The story is a reworking of the 1914 short story by James Joyce.[3] Oates's treatment is one of a number of works in Marriages and Infidelities that derive their narrative frameworks and themes from selected short fiction by Henry James, Anton Chekov and Franz Kafka.[4]
"The Dead" established Oates as a writer in the feminist literary tradition.[5][6][7]
"The Dead" is told from a third-person point-of-view, with Ilena, 29-years-old when the story opens, as the focal character.
Ilena is a recent divorcee living in Buffalo, New York and teaching literature courses part-time at a Catholic university when the story opens. Set in the late 1960s, the political turmoil in America is at its height. She comes from a well-to-do and well-connected family, but is disaffected from most of her relatives, but like them, remains socially conservative. In order to cope, she self-medicates with prescription sedatives and stimulants on a daily basis mixed with alcohol. She is gaining a measure of fame with her novel Death Dance, a feminist work concerning a suicide club and female college students.
Ilena is carrying on an affair with one of her male colleagues, Gordon. Her husband suspects as much and expresses his disgust. Her lover is married with children, and they conduct their trysts in her campus office. They commiserate with one another about their unsatisfactory domestic affairs. Ilena suffers from the dilemma, unable to live happily with one man in her life, nor with two. She is increasingly alienated from her fellow professors, as well as her students. She is close only to one brilliant, difficult and demanding English major, Emmett.
Ilena is assigned as a co-examiner to hear a master's degree candidate in English to demonstrate his knowledge of literature. The 30-something Brother proves utterly ignorant of the topic, failing to provide simple definitions for "Tragedy" or "Gothic." When the principal examiners pass the candidate despite his obvious ineptitude, Ilena withholds her consent. For this defiance she is threatened with dismissal and resigns. Her rising literary career, however, sustains her financially, and she sells the rights to Death Dance, nominated for a National Book Award, to a film studio for $150,000. Barbiturates and amphetamines remain a daily part of her existence.
After leaving Buffalo, Ilena takes a new lover and literary critic, Lyle, a reformed alcoholic separated from his wife. Ilena confides in him her drug abuse, and he tells her "Drugs are suicidal, yes, but if they forestall the actual act of suicide they are obviously beneficial."[8] When Lyle's wife discovers the affair, the couple are divorced. Ilena and Lyle plan to get married.
Now a literary celebrity, Ilena is invited back to the Catholic school for a reception in her honor as a former staff member. Now in her thirties, the medications are taking their toll on her physical appearance, which she struggles to conceal. She discovers that her student, Emmett, died recently during an anti-Vietnam war demonstration at the hands of the police. Ilena is deeply distressed by the news. At that moment, Gordon, her former lover, approaches and offers to drive her to her hotel. He knows that she will soon marry Lyle. He also reveals that Emmett was a heroin addict when he died.
In her hotel room, Gordon declares his love and Ilena submits to him when he begins to make love to her in the dark. Her mind wanders back to her ex-husband, to Emmett, and she begins to weep hysterically. A drug induced phantasmagoria develops in her mind, her body naked and exposed: "Lovers were kissing her on every inch of her body and trying to suck up her tepid blood...They were protoplasm that had the sickly pale formlessness of semen." Gordon tries to comfort her, but the image of Emmett appears; in her fantasies, she bitterly regrets not taking him as a lover. As she lay on the bed, the figures of her ex-husband, Gordon, and Emmett converge into one. Gordon asks her sympathetically, again and again "Do you want me to leave?" Ilena feels life ebbing from her brain and she is unable to reply.[9]
Retrospective appraisal
According to literary critic Greg Johnson, the most outstanding features of Marriages and Infidelities are its "use of allusion" and the examination of "literary tradition." The result is "the boldest and most ambitious" of Oates's short-story collections.[10] Johnson adds that "The Dead" establishes Oates "within the context of a feminist literary tradition."[11]
Biographer Joanne Creighton, observing that Oates has not achieved Joyce's "eloquence" in her re-imagining of the original work, her effort nonetheless resonates with "the lost souls of Joyce's Dubliners" (1914), and as such, "invites the reader to re-experience the Joycean world, while offering a contemporary version of it."[12]
Critic Samuel F. Pickering compares the Oates version unfavorably to that of the original:
In Dubliners, Joyce not only made readers aware of the corruptions of religion but also that it adds, has added, and will to the citizens of Dublin. Miss Oates, on the other hand, seems content merely to describe the abuses of religion. Consequently her stories about Catholicism are often one-dimensional...[13]
