Black Water and Mudwoman by Joyce Carol Oates: Two ‘Black Waters’ in Comparison
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Miceli, Barbara [1]
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[1] University of Gdańsk
University of Gdańsk
Gdańsk, Polonia
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- Localización: REVELL: Revista de Estudos Literários da UEMS, ISSN-e 2179-4456, Vol. 3, Nº. 26, 2020 (Ejemplar dedicado a: (INTER)TEXTUALIDADES E NARRATIVA), págs. 276-289
- Idioma: inglés
- Enlaces
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Resumen
The two novels by Joyce Carol Oates analyzed in this paper, Black Water (1993) and Mudwoman (2012), were written in two different moments of the author’s career. The first one is based on the infamous Chappaquiddick Incident (1969), where a woman drowned in a car driven by Senator Edward Kennedy; the second is the story of Meredith Neukirchen, a Professor and president of an Ivy League College, who was thrown in a river by her mother as a child. These novels share a relationship of intertextuality deriving from several elements such as the common setting (the water where the protagonist lose/risk losing their lives), the idea of storytelling and the attempt to silence this ability and an ideal dialogue between the two texts on the idea of death and responsibility. The paper analyzes these common features and the reasons that brought Oates to writing, twenty years after the first, what can be defined as the novel of survival: the one where the protagonist lives to tell her story.
