While other, less accomplished writers use violence to shock or provoke, Joyce Carol Oates is usually more subtle and inventive. Such is the case in "Naked," the story of a forty-six year old woman whose placid outer identity is ripped away by a brutal assault while out hiking not far from her fashionable, University Heights neighborhood. Like many of Oates' stories—and in this regard she probably owes something to Flannery O'Connor—"Naked" focuses on a woman so entrenched in her rigid self-image that nothing short of violence could make her vulnerable to a humbling, though redemptive, self knowledge.

The protagonist, a stolid, college administrator, prides herself on her liberal views and anti-racist, fair mindedness. Curiously, she remains unnamed throughout the story, though not without reason. Her namelessness brings us closer to her inner world while at the same time obliquely suggesting that, given these same violent circumstances, she could be anyone, even you or me.

Names represent a kind of social identity, and Oates' main interest here is in exploring what might happen when her character's social framework and the comfortably predictable life that goes with it are suddenly, and irrevocably, taken away. This, of course, is precisely what happens. What then, Oates seems to be asking, would be left? The answer, which is feverishly detailed in the remaining thirteen pages of this sixteen page story, is something this woman would never have asked for nor anticipated.

Like most people in her social sphere, the woman takes for granted the civility and restraints that have kept her, prior to her attack, comfortably exempt from the personal chaos that violence unleashes. All of this proves quixotic, of course, as she soon finds herself, in an ironic reversal of paranoia, contributing unwittingly to her own victimhood by her reluctance to believe that a group of black children could pose any real threat as she hikes "alone in a suburban wildlife preserve" just two miles from her own home:

... the children, led by a strangely intense, even
angry black boy, surged up like unexpected images
in [a] dream... The boy laughed as if in delight and
derision. Had he not been so young she might have
thought him drunk or high on a drug. He came barely
to her shoulder, easing toward her like a wiry little
animal out for blood. He addressed her in a stream
of soprano sounds underlaid by contempt, but she could
make out none of the words except perhaps "Lady" or
"Where you goin', lady?' and his aggressive intentions
bewildered her rather than frightened her since the
children were so young, the youngest no more than eight
or nine, and very small, and there were two or three
girls among them... They're only children, she told
herself even as, instinctively, she took a step backward.
And in the next instant they were upon her. (123-124)

Even once the attack begins, the woman finds herself struggling with her own denial as she helplessly tries to fend off her attackers:

... as the children swarmed over her, pummeling her with
their fists, pounding, kicking, tearing ... even as she
struggled with them, flailing her arms, trying too to
strike, punch, kick ... she was thinking, This can't be
happening! and They're only children! (124)

Only after "they stripped her clothes" from her body, "whooping with laughter as they tore away her brassiere and underpants, yanked off ... her running shoes," and "pulled off her socks" does she apprehend a level of fear and paranoia that—had she been able to contact it earlier—might have helped her at least attempt an escape:

She was too overcome by shock to beg them to stop,
and the mad fear struck her that they meant to
devour her alive: set upon her like ravenous animals,
tear the flesh from her bones with their teeth, and
eat. For what was there to stop them? (125)

After the children have run away, the woman is momentarily overcome with an irrational, though revealing, self-hating thought: "This is what you deserve." But then, once she realizes she is not going to be further harmed, she tries to will herself back to her former state of self assured calm and normalcy: "It's all right", she tells herself. "You're going to be all right. The worst is over." (125)

Now, though, she must decide what to do. The children have run off with her clothes and her wallet, and her car keys have also been taken. Even her gold chain has been "yanked ... violently from her neck" causing her anger to finally surface: "Savages, she thought. Filthy little animals..." (126)

But then rationality quickly regains the upper hand, as it usually does, in service of self-promotion and denial:

She didn't want to think why the children...
had hated her so. Hadn't she been quite
cordial to the boy, unalarmed, even trying
to smile as he approached her? She was by
nature and by training an unfailingly friendly
woman; she practiced friendliness as a musician
practices an instrument, and with as unquestioned
a devotion. (126)

This unquestioned belief in her own goodness makes it difficult for the woman to even begin to understand why the black children "hated her so..." The answer, though, has something to do with where the children come from. For earlier in the story, we learned

they were not children from the University Heights
area ... but from the ragged edge of the old industrial
city below the bluff, that steep drop to a neighbor-
hood of row houses, tenements, railroad yards, factories,
and condemned mills on the river [that the woman] and her
family had rarely glimpsed except from the interstate
expressway elevated over its ruins... So it did not
strike her, as perhaps it should have, upon occasion at
least, that these [children] from [poor black families]
might look upon her as conspicuously different from
themselves and that, against the grain of all that was
reasonable, charitable, and just, they might wish to do
[her harm] and take satisfaction in it.

The idea that she could be hateful to children she didn't even know was repellent to her. Just why the woman wants to shun such knowledge is evident in her insular outlook which, as reviewer Sally Robinson has pointed out, indicates "an absolute failure to see beyond a certain point of view—and, perhaps worse, a willed ignorance about the possibility that the 'Other' might have a point of view that could be trained on the self." Robinson also shows how Oates takes this a step further as she "subtly challenges this woman's secure conviction that she harbors no racist sentiments and, simultaneously, challenges her readers to place themselves in the woman's position." In delivering "a ringing indictment of a certain, self-congratulatory liberalism," Oates "at the same time, manages to elicit sympathy for the woman who is, after all, the victim of a violent attack." [1]

But Oates has more than just social commentary or satire in mind. For the arc of this story does not progress, as one might assume, from the safe and familiar, to the wild and savage, then back to the safe and familiar. No. The violent tearing off of the woman's clothing has also ripped away the comforting illusions of her self-image. Thus, a return to what had passed for normalcy in her formerly well ordered life is now all but impossible. The woman, however, tries repeatedly to fend off this revelation. In this regard, Oates is at her story telling best. For she has set up a subtle tension between the woman's (and reader's) desire that the woman return to a safe and normal home and her growing realization that the predictable familiarity of her life is something she has made up all along.

Self-confrontation, however, is forestalled by more immediate problems. What, for example, is she to do now that she is stranded without clothes, her car keys stolen, her car locked, and all the windows rolled up? Moments pass, and then she hears a car pull into a nearby parking lot. Doors open and slam, and there are the sounds of men's voices. She realizes that to be rescued all she need do is call out "that she had been stripped of her clothing and could they please bring her a blanket or something with which to cover herself..." But instead of calling for help, she panics and runs behind some shrubs. "The terror of being discovered naked ... was simply too much for her: she wanted only to hide and not be seen." (128)

Psychologist James Hillman has observed that when people fall into a state of panic, they literalize. And when we literalize, we "are susceptible to the panic of putting words in execution ... the all-or-none reaction..." [2] Clearly, the suffering and panic of this woman have brought on a kind of altered state similar to what Hillman describes. For her, exposure can only mean humiliation while remaining hidden seems the only way to preserve her dignity. All middle ground choices—calling the police, for instance—are shunned as too risky: "Nothing mattered to her but that she not be seen." (128) Moments earlier while still in the throes of panic, the woman experiences a grotesquely inflated vision of herself as a kind of public cartoon: a giant naked "balloon woman" hoisted up into the sky with "big breasts and belly and pubic hair" for everyone to see. Below, she imagined a crowd of "people, mostly men, gathered to gape, smirk, point their fingers." (127)

When the men who might have been her rescuers have gone, the woman decides to try and make her way back home alone and unassisted. But as she cautiously walks barefoot the long, two miles to where her husband and children await, the whole idea of what "husband" or "home" might mean are called into question. We learn that the "practiced friendliness" the woman habitually shows others conceals "the small doubts and shifts of mood that frequently overcame her." (128) She has hidden these doubts not just from friends but from her own husband in much the same way that her clothes have concealed her nakedness. She "could barely think" of how her husband might react to any public disclosure of her being found naked and beaten:

... so ambitious, so caught up in his work, so concerned
with his reputation in the community... She knew he
would feel a kindred humiliation. (129)

As for her children, she feels anxiety and guilt "at the possibility of their learning of her" beating "or, worse yet, seeing her in the state she was in." (130) So, as she stealthily creeps from bush to tree in the wooded preserve that has now lost its veneer of safety, the woman makes plans for her eventual return:

Once home, undetected, she could steal away upstairs
and revert to herself again. She would bathe, doctor
herself up, dress, reappear... She would tell her
husband she'd lost her car keys in the woods and had
decided to walk home without telephoning him or anyone:
no need to fuss; he could drop her off in the morning
and she could pick the car up then... "You walked home?"
her husband would ask, mildly surprised, and she would
say, "It wasn't far. I enjoyed the exercise." (131)

A smooth, face saving plan, but unfortunately there is still nearly two miles of partially wooded territory she must traverse. Though now, a world of strange new perception—the familiar no longer familiar—has opened up to her:

She had never noticed how, in the woods, there were so
many dead trees: dried lifeless stalks from which dried
lifeless leaves, last year's leaves, hung in tatters.
And the continuous scurrying of invisible birds, animals.
And the continuous wind. On all sides mysterious sounds
of rustling, stirring, shifting, as if a gigantic organism
were defining itself, never quite rising to consciousness.
She felt a thrill of deep calm fear, thinking this thought.
It was not one she'd ever had before. (132)

While there seems a lull in the dramatic thrust at this point in the story, Oates is actually using this middle section to bring us deeper into the moment to moment experience of her character. Even something as undramatic as the interlude during which the woman waits for a safe time to cross a road becomes charged with a tension hovering between exhilaration and fear:

At the road she waited. She was prepared to wait for a
long time... A car passed, and another. After an interval
another. And then there were several in a row, then what
sounded like a diesel truck, heaving and sighing, and then
there was silence. She peered excitedly out of the underbrush,
seeing nothing but pavement and the farther side of the road.
It was nearly dusk but not quite! A figure running across the
road, a figure of pale astonishing female nakedness, might be
visible for miles.
She was trembling... (132-133)

Then, as unbidden and swift as one of the cars passing on the road, a thought crosses her mind with such naturalness it seems a part of her must have known its truth all along:

She did not trust her family not to stop loving her
should they see her; thus they must not be allowed
to see her, or to know! (133)

The woman does not stop to ponder what this lack of trust reveals about her relationships with her husband and kids. Perhaps there will be time for this later. For now, there is still unknown and possibly dangerous terrain to get through:

How painstakingly she was walking, barefoot! How
treacherous the seemingly soft, moist earth laced with
invisible stones and bits of branches! When she left the
path..., her feet sank in muck and she had to stifle a
scream of panic, for what if this were a bog or even quick-
sand that might swallow her up without a trace? (132)

Here, the understandably paranoid thoughts of the woman have almost merged with the outer landscape. After all, if small children can and will attack and beat you and rip every shred of clothing from your body, what is to prevent the very earth itself, given one misplaced step, from swallowing you up?

It has gotten late in the day now, and the woods have begun to shadow over. In this dream-like, existential twilight, the woman's fear-strewn thoughts have grown more chaotic: "It's all right, she consoled herself repeatedly, not knowing what she meant." (128) Curiously, this dark and uncertain world the woman now inhabits offers a kind of deliverance—though not without pain—into an intensity almost too real to bear:

She threw herself blindly out of hiding and began to run
[across the road], her forearms steadying her breasts from
beneath, and no dive or flight or plunge or physical ecstasy
in her life had prepared her for this effort, running naked
and wincing, gasping for breath through her opened mouth,
eyes wide and stark and fixed on the farther side of the road,
not daring to look elsewhere. And then almost at once she was
there, and safe, seemingly, scrambling through a shallow ditch
and into the field beyond. But somehow she had cut her foot.
Stepped on glass and cut her right foot at the heel. (133)

Then, with manic persistence, the woman tries once again to calm her fears and regain control:

It's all right she told herself. You're all right...
... The bleeding will wash the dirt away... She walked
on, limping. ... She could not be exposed now and would
not be, but she would have to guard against waves of
panic and faint-headedness and the possibility of losing
her way... (133)

Suddenly, a rat crosses her path, one of many life forms that live and breed amidst human refuse at the edge of society, and thus, like the black children, had previously gone unnoticed by the woman. The rat, like the unwanted return of a banished thought, triggers first the woman's hatred for her attackers, and then an even deeper revelation: her long standing resentment toward her husband for trying to hide the fact that he had been happier with his first wife:

Her head rang with accusations. How dare you.
How dare touch. My skin doesn't define me.
My color, my skin. She was thinking suddenly
of her husband and the happiness of his first
marriage, of which he would never speak except
crudely to deny it... 'You must think I'm a fool.'
Her voice sounded loudly but did not startle her. (134)

This outcry—"You must think I'm a fool"—is the woman's angry protest against the emotional abandonment she has lived with as a married woman. The events of this day have also pounded into her a kind of second abandonment, this time by the impersonal forces of nature—of which, in her mind, the quick sand, the rat, and the black children all have become a part.

The woman's anger is a pivotal moment in the story. For it does not signal, as one might expect, a continuation of victimhood but instead a new resolve to live for herself and from her own inner resources. Blood becomes a dominant symbol here. For her bleeding feet remind her of her menstrual cycle which "she had always liked" and which parallels, in its hidden importance, the same kind of "doubleness" about her private self she has kept from her husband. (135) This affirmation of her own blood, though hardly more than half conscious, signals a redirection of her identity from her outward possessions (husband, house, reputation, children) to what she contains within. Her situation, however, is still far from resolved:

Not single pains but a wash of pains rose and
throbbed in her body. She did not think of them,
but increasingly they penetrated her consciousness
and left her panting, whimpering... Forever would
she walk in this no man's land so strangely close
to familiar suburban roads yet hidden from them ...
how strange she should be here. It was a place for
death, for nude female bodies: victims of assaults,
murders. She was not one of those women. (135)

This assertion, "She was not one of those women", is wonderfully ambiguous in that along with its obvious element of denial (she has indeed become "one of those women"), it also carries a strong sense of determined self-preservation. Yet despite her resolve, moments later when faced with a large, unfriendly dog whose relentless barking threatens to bring unwanted human attention her way, she still fears the prospect of public exposure even more than being attacked by a vicious animal:

... she could not take a chance ... She thought
how people would laugh at her - the dog's owner,
if he came out into the lane to investigate. A
disheveled naked woman confronted by a barking
dog, trying to protect herself with a branch.
How had her life come to this? (136-137)

Then, nearing home, "running, sliding...and staggering downhill" as she snatches "at bushes to steady her," the woman has a final revelation:

She should never have married, she was thinking.
She'd been happiest alone. The effort of hypocrisy
wearied her."(137)

The implicit connection here between weariness and the "hypocrisy" of the woman's married life hints at something far deeper. Just as the bones of our distant ancestors are embedded deep within ancient rock strata and cannot easily be pried loose, so too have certain childhood strategies for getting parental love been buried and then encoded into adult behavior with the unconscious purpose of trying to obtain what is emotionally unobtainable. Such strategies, of course, are as unworkable as they are persistent. Thus, the woman's predicament, far from being a disaster, has turned out to be just what was needed: absolute physical and emotional exhaustion. For this is what it took to break down her defenses so she could finally discover that her constant efforts to always present a competent, controlled, and pleasant face to everyone, and especially to her husband, have been futile and self contradictory: "The effort of hypocrisy wearied her." Consequently, a story that began as a kind of satire ends with the woman gaining the courage to affirm her autonomy by taking responsibility for her past as well as her present: "I do what I want to do, though until that instant she had not known that this was so." (137)

The unreal, dream-like quality of the woman's long ordeal no longer resides inside the woman who, at last, has found something solid within herself. This sense of unreality has shifted to her house—a place that no longer seems her own—where her husband and children now appear to the woman like "strangers" on the other side of the windows. The house itself seems to float, like the fantasy of love and goodness it once represented, before her wearied but knowing eyes. An so the story concludes with the woman "crouched," still naked, "in the underbrush" below her house and marveling how strange it is to be seeing her husband at last after "having wanted so desperately to get home," and yet now feeling "no emotion" at what she saw. (138)

Works Cited

Hillman, James. Eranos Lectures 8, "On Paranoia," by Hillman. Dallas: Spring Publications, 1986.

Oates, Joyce Carol. "Naked." Heat and Other Stories. By Oates. New York: Plume, 1991.

Robinson, Sally "Heat and Cold: Recent Fiction by Joyce Carol Oates," Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXI, 1992.

Notes

1. Robinson, Sally. "Heat and Cold: Recent Fiction by Joyce Carol Oates." Michigan Quarterly Review, Vol. XXXI, 1992. In Contemporary Literary Criticism, Vol. 108. 383.

2. Hillman, James. Eranos Lectures 8, "On Paranoia." Spring Publications, 1986. 13-14.

Jim Knight is a graduate of Amherst College and teaches writing and literature at Pima Community College in Tucson, Arizona.