Family Relationships in the Fiction of Joyce Carol Oates

Abstract

This PhD dissertation analyzes a selected corpus from the American writer Joyce Carol Orates (born in 1938 in Lockport, New York): A Garden of Earthly Delights (1967), Expensive People (1968), them (Fiction1969), Wonderland (1971), We Were the Mulvaneys (1996), Little Bird of Heaven (2009) and Carthage (2014) with the objective of demonstrating that the rigid role-enactment that the traditional patriarchal nuclear family exhibits has harmful consequences for the characters, manifested in distortion and confusion of roles, conflicts and violence. In order to prove this hypothesis, a multi-layered theoretical approach has been employed by resorting to gender studies, kinships studies, trauma studies and studies on violence, among others.