Lavish self-divisions

Joyce Carol Oates's authorial voice is lavishly diverse. In her works she divides herself into many voices, many persons. This up-to-date examination of Oates's novels argues that the father-identified daughters in her early novels have become, in the novels of the 1980s, self-authoring women who seek alliances with their culturally devalued mothers.

Oates's struggle to resist and transform male-defined literary conventions is often mirrored by the struggles of her female characters to resist and transform social conventions.