Reflections Of A Mirror

"When you go to the woods / To gather hedges / Remember the girl / Who writes on the edges" (Johnson 35). The talented Joyce Carol Oates is the author of many novels, short stories, poems, and essays, including one of her most autobiographical novels Marya: A Life (1986). Joyce was the type of girl who "not only wrote on the edges but, in a very real sense, lived there (Johnson 38). At the ripe age of 13 Joyce already had a sense of personal marginality and an adult view of herself as "an invisible woman" (Johnson 35). Joyce's character Marya is almost a mirrored image of Joyce and it would be impossible to deny that a connection exists between the creator, Joyce, and the created, Marya. Joyce's fictional character Marya was deeply influenced by a combination of Carolina's and Joyce's childhood, as well as some of Joyce's adult life, her being a victim of molestation, and her yearning for invisibility.

"Joyce remarked that behind all her fiction lay an 'imperishable sense of reality' derived primarily for the natural settings and economically straitened circumstances of her family background--a reality she has transcribed faithfully and sometimes obsessively in her fiction" (Johnson 10). "In 1986, when Joyce Carol Oates published Marya: A Life, she described the novel as a blending of her mother's early life and her own...In Marya, the emotional matrix of Marya's childhood is virtually identical to Carolina's" (Johnson 8). Tracing back to Joyce's maternal grandparents, we see Stephen and Elizabeth Bush who came to the United States from Budapest in 1902 (Johnson 3). The couple "had been urged to emigrate by family members already living in Buffalo, New York. The couple settled near the Black Rock section of the city, 'a bleak waterfront area dominated by the Niagara River'" (Johnson 3).

Although conditions in New York were better than those in Hungary, immigrant life was difficult for the young couple, especially as the size of the family increased...The clash of languages and cultures combined with heavy drinking and the frustrations of poverty, led to frequent out breaks of violence...One night in early 1917, when Stephen was forty-three, his life ended violently. Though the precise circumstances of the tavern fight are not known, it seems likely that the violence erupted spontaneously, out of a sudden argument, since neither of the men was armed. Stephen's assailant grabbed the nearest available blunt object--either a shovel or a poker...and beat him to death. Stephen Bush left behind Elizabeth and their nine children, six boys and three girls. The youngest child Carolina--born November 8, 1916--was only six months old. (Johnson 3-4)

Elizabeth now being a widow with nine children, felt that she had one more child than she could handle. Elizabeth asked her sister Lena for help and in response, Lena spoke with her husband. The couple had no children and so they "volunteered to take in the six-month old Carolina...Elizabeth agreed to this informal adoption--a transaction that Carolina would later come to resent deeply" (Johnson 4). "When Carolina was older, "she came to perceive the adoption as abandonment by her mother. 'I was never really part of the family'...I was sort of left out and I always felt really bad. I just couldn't understand why my mother couldn't handle one more child." Observing Marya's life, we see a striking resemblance. It almost seems as if Carolina is Marya in fictional form. In the novel Marya: A Life (1986), Marya, is later told how is it that her father really died. "A death in a tavern brawl, a man savagely beaten, a certain alcoholic content in his blood, a certain reputation in the area for making trouble" (Oates 29). Afterwards, Marya's mother simply leaves Marya with her aunt and they end up adopting her. The novel tells us "Marya made inquiries about adoption--about having been abandoned, lost, given away, left, and then adopted--among people she knew" (Oates 300). Although her aunt adopted her, she felt great resentment towards Marya, always saying "She's not my kin, she's my husband's niece" (Oates 41). Another thing that Carolina and Marya have in common is the place in which both grew up when they were a child. Lockport, which is where Carolina grew up, in the novel "becomes the more romantic sounding 'Innisfail', Transit Road becomes 'Canal Road,' Millersport and the Tonawanda become 'Shaheen Falls' and 'Shaheen Creek.' Descriptive passages in the novel evoke both the austere natural beauty and the underlying sense of menace at the heart of Joyce Carol Oates's world" (Johnson 8).

However, Marya is also has a mixture of Joyce. Carolina married Fred Oates and soon enough "Joyce was born in 1938...outside Lockport, New York, and she was raised amid a rural setting on her maternal grandparents' farm" (www.bookrags.com). The farm house was in desperate need of renovation and Fred, having worked with reconstruction before, fixed the farm house up himself. He covered the outside walls of the house in artificial siding, made of asphalt that contained speckles on it and grit. It was supposed to be fireproof composition board (Johnson 19). In Marya: A Life (1986), we see the same kind of housing. Marya states, "Everard and Joe had nailed up asphalt siding so clever in its design and grainy texture it looked from the road to be genuine red brick" (Oates 24). Joyce went to the same one room school as her mother did except Joyce was picked on by many of the boys. Although she was always being chased, when "dealing with bullies, Joyce's assets were her cunning and her speed: "I could run very fast. 'She runs like a deer.' I can remember one of my tormentors exclaiming" (Johnson 28-29). "In Marya: A Life (1986), Marya contemplates the terrors of certain unsafe areas, 'no-man's-lands, limbos of a sort, places where language did not prevail and the protection was flight, if you could run fast enough; or submission, if you couldn't'" (Johnson 29). Joyce completed her 6th grade at Pound Elementary and transferred to Lockport's North Park Junior High school (Johnson 44). Here, "once again she became the object of harassment, but ironically enough the perpetrators were not the bullying farm boys she ad known at the district school, but some of the very teachers who praised her academic work." (Johnson 46). One day, Joyce lost the secretary notebook in which the class records were kept. The teacher tormented her for days afterwards (Johnson 46). Through out the novel, Marya displays a constant fear of upsetting her teachers. She