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• W1530485768 abstract "Wonderland, a tour de force even among the many impressive novels of Joyce Carol Oates, traces the transformations of Jesse Harte Pederson Vogel from his own father's attempt to murder the boy through his career as a neurosurgeon. According to Oates's critics, the complex themes of the book encompass everything from the negotiation of gender to the representation of American history (see e.g., Friedman and Daly), but as Oates herself has declared, Wonderland is a book brains--the human (Bellamy 19). Having developed some neurological symptoms later attributed to stress, Oates consulted a doctor and began to research her own condition (Afterword 510). Besides providing factual background for Wonderland, as she told Joe David Bellamy in 1972, through this investigation Oates discovered there is no way out of the physical fact of the brain.... Yet it can't be measured or adequately explained, at least not the relationship between the brain and the 'mind' it somehow generates (20). Nevertheless, in the several decades since the publication of the 1971 novel, a period of explosive cognitive and neurological investigation, both scientists of the brain and philosophers of the mind have been theorizing about the meaningful relation of mind and brain that Oates's novel dramatizes. Specifically, Jesse's story suggests that the self written by the brain and the book, according to the theories of neurologist Uta Frith and psychologist Katherine Nelson, is a product of social interaction; and according to arguments of philosopher Martha Nussbaum, it may be a vehicle of ethical development. To understand Wonderland as a model of neurocognitive ethical enlargement is to place the novel in the context of the overarching purpose of Oates's oeuvre. We are used to thinking about mental experience in light of psychoanalysis and psychiatry, and Oates introduces both of these perspectives early in the novel. The stunning first chapter presents the protagonist as a normal fourteen-year-old boy in a highly abnormal situation. This emphasis on Jesse's initial normalcy is coded through Freudian allusion. Aware of the sexuality of both his pregnant mother and his pretty older sister, Jesse attempts to work out the conundrum of his own attractions and repulsions. Already disturbed by his father's bizarre behavior, Jesse notices a mysterious drawing in the school bathroom on the day of his family's murder, the body of a woman seen from the bottom up with long legs spread apart, the head at the far end of the body small as a pea. Superimposed on this sketch is the cartoon of a house, the area between the woman's legs shaded into a hard black rectangle like a door and her arms, etched over with a brick pattern, turned into walls (22). This palimpsest, a reflection of Jesse's own suspension between childhood--the sense of the female as a protective house--and adulthood--the sense of the female as sexual partner--implies that he has not completed his oedipal transition. Unable to identify with his father's priorities, Jesse is still uncomfortably attracted to his mother. In Freudian theory, the father's threat of castration is meant to bring about the disengagement from sexual attraction that Jesse's ambivalence suggests he has already begun. In Wonderland, however, the symbolic threat becomes an actual promise. After killing the rest of his family and before turning the shotgun on himself, Jesse's father shoots his son in an unsuccessful attempt to murder him, too. Unable to move into mature masculine identity through alliance with his father--defined by Freud through the shift of sexual investment impelled by symbolic paternal threat--Jesse spends his life both attracted to mother figures and vulnerable to abuse by a series of destructive father figures. As a result of his father's attack, Jesse also becomes an evident psychiatric case. In the period immediately following the violence, Jesse experiences the psychic numbing so well described by Robert Jay Lifton as a coping mechanism of trauma victims, (1) and he suffers the symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder throughout his life. …" @default.
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• W1530485768 date "2006-12-22" @default.
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• W1530485768 title "Why Can't Jesse Read?: Ethical Identity in Wonderland" @default.
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