Oates, Joyce Carol,--1938---Them

Joyce Carol Oates's novel them and Wallace Stevens's poetry can be examined in light of Oates's critical essay "Against Nature." These fictions illustrate Oates's idea of Nature not existing as a noun, Nature, but as an experience which we attempt to understand through language. Indirectly, Oates calls on other authors and theorists to argue for a redefinition of Nature. She comes to conclude that what we call "Nature" in reality exists as Nature-as-experience. Once we fully understand Nature-as-experience, we can utilize those principles to understand a relatively new occurrence in history and literature: the manmade city. In them, the city, in much the same way as Nature, becomes City-as-experience and in fact lives in the experience of the character Maureen.