The City Of Evil In Joyce Carol Oates's Them

Joyce Carol Oates(1938—)is one of the most famous contemporary American female writers,and is praised by Robert H.Fossum as "the best American novelist since Faulkner"(Fossum,1975:285).them(1969)is often referred to as Oates's "Detroit novel"which won her the 1970 National Book Award.Oates regards it as a "history in fictional form." Taking the life of three generations of Wendell family as a clue,this novel fully demonstrates the pain and sorrow of the bottom American people during the Great Depression of the 1930s and the affluent period of the 1950s and 1960s.Although most scholars at home and abroad interpret the novel from the perspectives of space,the connotation of violence,theme study and so on,they seldom discuss the novel from the perspective of city.Based on a close reading of the novel,this thesis aims to explore it from the following three aspects:the manifestation of evil in city;the exploration into the hidden reasons of the evil;the essence of the evil and the author's attitude towards it.This thesis consists of three parts:introduction,main body and conclusion.In the introduction part,attention is mainly paid to introduce detailed information about Joyce Carol Oates's,her works,outlines of them,literature review,thesis objective,and thesis structure.The main body includes chapter two to four.Chapter two mainly elaborates the evil in city,that is,alienation of modern man,fall of moral values and loss of reason.Chapter three mainly explores the reasons for evil:capitalism.Firstly,under the influence of capitalist economy,consumerism is prevalent in city.Citizens living at the bottom are reduced to be the prey of alienating forces of capitalism;secondly,dehumanized capitalism exploitation in city makes the rich richer and the poor poorer,which aggravates class contradictions;thirdly,hierarchical capitalist class structure and racial hatred are externalized into residential segregation and business district division in cities.Chapter four analyses the essence of the evil and reveals Oates's criticism against American capitalist culture.The dominant ego-consciousness in American capitalist culture,the capitalist's manipulation of public power and the capitalist's ranking system reflected in the novel are the essence of evil.The last chapter makes a summary of the major points in this thesis.Detroit is a typical American city,and the experience of the Wendall's family is a microcosm of the living conditions of the people at the bottom in American society.By analyzing Detroit as an evil city,Oates exposes the maladies rooted in American capitalist culture.In her view,violence is not a solution.The key to reduce the suffering of the people living at the bottom and to build a harmonious city is to solve the problems in capitalist culture.