The Role of New Orleans Parish Prison in Joyce Carol Oates’s “Aiding and Abetting”
Though no Oates story exclusively uses New Orleans as setting, the city does play an important role in the short story “Aiding and Abetting” (collected in I Am No One You Know, 2004). Steven and Holly’s idyllic home life with their two young children in urban northern New Jersey is interrupted by fr...
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| Format: | Article |
| Language: | English |
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Laboratoire d’Etudes et de Recherches sur le Monde Anglophone (LERMA)
2016-12-01
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| Series: | E-REA |
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://journals.openedition.org/erea/5379 |
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| Summary: | Though no Oates story exclusively uses New Orleans as setting, the city does play an important role in the short story “Aiding and Abetting” (collected in I Am No One You Know, 2004). Steven and Holly’s idyllic home life with their two young children in urban northern New Jersey is interrupted by frequent disturbing evening phone calls from Holly’s mentally unstable brother, Owen. In this context, the mention of “deplorable conditions in the New Orleans Parish Prison,” which Steven hears in an NBC news report while he is on the phone with Owen, serves as a metaphor for feelings of victimization and imprisonment on the part of each of the characters, as well as a metaphor for Steven’s own mistreatment of his mentally scarred brother-in-law whose fragility he takes advantage of by suggesting he commit suicide. The mention of the prison also somehow encourages Steven in his transgressive act. This article explores the role played in the story by the New Orleans Parish Prison and examines the implications of the use of this ultra-marginal space in the fiction of a traditionally northern writer. |
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| ISSN: | 1638-1718 |