Symbolic Games in A Garden of Earthly Delights by Joyce Carol Oates

Abstract

This article will show that postmodern thoughts play an essential role in Joyce Carol Oates’ Wonderland Quartet. In its opening novel A Garden of Earthly Delights, I will also consider the imagery of Lewis Carroll’s Alice texts that influenced Oates’ Quartet. Oates’ and Carroll’s texts share the depiction of decentralised permissiveness and rejection of all authority that I interpret through the aesthetic conception of postmodern games by Gilles Deleuze. By blurring the lines between fantasy and reality, the aspect of violence is repressed in Carroll’s texts. However, Oates aestheticises violence to maximise the diverse impact of postmodern sentiment on American cultural forms that emerged in the decades of the 1950s and 1960s. In contrast to Carroll’s Alice, who demands order to protect herself from the chaos, Clara in A Garden of Earthly Delights rejects conventions and fabricates chaos to alleviate her unprivileged condition.