Joyce Carol Oates

Born in 1938 in Lockport, New York, Joyce Carol Oates thrived in the natural environment of the farm country, despite the devastation of the Great Depression. She attended a one-room schoolhouse. At age fourteen, Oates received her first typewriter from her grandmother. She transferred to a high school in Lockport where she excelled in English. She received a scholarship to the University of Syracuse and then went on to get her masters in only a year at the University of Wisconsin. There, she met her husband, Raymond Smith. She taught at the University of Detroit where she was exposed to the social turmoil and violence of the 1960s that inspired some of her early writing. In 1968, she moved to Canada where she taught at the University of Windsor. From 1968 to 1978, she published two novels a year, started a small press and published a literary magazine, The Ontario Review. She later moved to New Jersey and has been teaching at Princeton University ever since. In the early 1980s, she reinvented the conventions of Gothic fiction. Later her novels were characterized by a focus on femininity, based on memories from her childhood. She has written 56 novels and over 30 collections of short stories. Today she continues to write and teach in New Jersey.

PLOT: the author’s selection and arrangement of incidents in a story to shape the action and give the story a particular focus. Discussions of plot include not just what happens, but also how and why things happen the way they do.

"I don't mind living in a man's world, as long as I can be a woman in it." – Marilyn Monroe

Exposition: Oates sets the scene, describes The Strand and alludes to the true nature of the female protagonists.

Rising Action: The girls discover Marilyn Monroe, in disguise, and shadow her as she shops.

Conflict: The girls do not want others in the store to discover Marilyn; likewise, they do not want Marilyn to discover that they are observing her.

Climax: The store owner detects theft and the girls misinterpret his accusations as acknowledging Marilyn. Also, Marilyn realizes that she is being followed by the girls.

Falling Action: The girls offer to buy Marilyn’s books for her.

Resolution: Marilyn gives them Selected Poems of Marianne Moore.


Selected Quotes:

“…though admittedly we were American middle class, and Caucasian, and female. (Yet we were not “conventional” females. In fact, we shared male contempt for the merely “conventional” female” (74).

“So many years later, I’m proud of us. We were so young. Young, headstrong, arrogant, insecure though “brilliant” – or so we’d been led to believe” (78).

“’Marilyn Monroe’ has entered history, and you have not. She will endure, though the young woman with the blond braid will die. And even should she wish to die, “Marilyn Monroe” cannot” (77).

“’She thinks she’s like us.’ You meant: a human being, anonymous. Female, like us. Amid the ordinary unspectacular customers (predominantly male) of the Strand” (77).

“For when you truly read poetry, poetry reads you” (75).

Please answer 4 of the 6 questions. J

Discussion Questions:

1.  “That magical evening of Marilyn Monroe, when I kissed you for the first time” (79).

What is the significance of the last quote in Three Girls to the reader? What does it expose about the values of the girls?

2.  From your perspective, when is the climax?

3.  What is the moral/central theme of the story?

4.  Throughout the exposition, the author utilized point of view. What is the point of view? Is there more than one?

5.  Identify the moments of suspense in the story. How do these contribute to the order of events in the plot?

6.  Is the plot primary or secondary to character?