Enduring view of the 60s - finding love in a time of turmoil

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	• Do With Me What You Will Joyce Carol Oates The Vanguard Press, 1973 - 561 pages average customer review:based on 2 reviews view larger image
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Enduring view of the 60s - finding love in a time of turmoil

DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL is a wonderfully complex love story set in Detroit of the turbulent days of the late 60's and early 70's. Joyce Carol Oates says it is "a love story that concentrates upon the tension between two American 'pathways' : the way of tradition, or Law; and the way of spontaneous emotion-in this case, Love. In the synthesis of these two apparently contradictory forces lies the inevitable transformation of our culture.

"Romantic love is one of our Western religions and must be respected as such; it must be acknowledged as the violent, unstoppable, rather beautiful force it is. But the West is also a culture of Law : American society will never be transformed by stray acts of violence in the streets-it will be transformed only through the courts. And they, in turn, will not be transformed until the men who run them are changed, individual by individual. Ours is still a time of romantic love; the time of a more communal, transcendental love is not yet come. DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL suggests such a transformation.

"If what is available to an individual is romantic love, then it must be-it will be-this kind of love that liberates." In the "freeing" from the enchantment of her "self," Elena Howe lives a drama in which, by a continual process, she is raised to a higher aspect of her own being through involvement with a man-a drama of marriage and adultery that constructs an hour-by-hour, thought-by-thought experience both shattering and redemptive."

The critic Mary Ellmann says: "DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL combines the legal novel with the romantic triangle. Oates provocatively but not entirely successfully attempts to show the interconnections among the issues inherent in the two very different types of stories."

Another critic Rose Marie Burwell states: "Certain that the law will not save her, that the very concepts of innocence and guilt depend on the human propensities of those who define and dispense justice, the heroine of Joyce Carol Oates' sixth novel recognizes the truth that "Necessity Makes Law." Assuming moral self-responsibility in the final chapter, Elena Howe enters an unspoken plea of nolo contendre, the vulgate of which is the title of the novel, Do With Me What You Will ( 1973 ). The plea, in English common law and in most states, requires the court to proceed on an assumption of the defendant's innocence--even though he refuses to defend himself. Here the reader is the court and Elena Howe is both Everyman and many women. The dilemma she has been chosen to exemplify, the struggle to create and retain a tenable sense of self, is a universal one in which every individual who achieves emotional and moral maturity participates. For Elena a belated and violent sexual awakening sounds a warning signal, forcing upon her the realization that she must synthesize her personality or accede to her own disintegration. Elena's resistance and the Jungian stages of her individuation provide the narrative structure of Oates' most subtle and complex novel yet."

This novel also provides a timeless look at the counter-culture and it relationship to the dominant culture in the 60s and 70s. Long, but rewarding in its detail and richness, this is a novel that has a timeless appeal.

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painful, haunting, good

Oates knows what happens to girls whose self-esteem has been shot to hell. Her depiction of such a girl and the pathologically passive woman she becomes made me ache. The hope-filled ending made me sigh.