O

Connecticut: Greenwood, 1993 There are many reasons for considering Joyce Carol Oates a feminist writer. Her works vividly articulate modernity’s war against the feminine. She has created many memorable female characters. Her style revises canonical literature, often giving voice to the silenced woman. Her article, “At Least I Have Made a Woman of Her: Images of Women in Yeats, Lawrence, and Faulkner,” employs a decidedly feminist strategy in her analysis of the use of images of women. And she has feminist friends in high places. Yet in “(Woman) Writer,” Oates rejects classification as a “woman writer,” claiming that it is too confining, in that an author writes about human themes without consciousness of her embodied gender. In short, the relationship of Joyce Carol Oates to feminism is at best qualified, and often in spite of her own protests.