Volume 20, Number 21 & 22 · January 24, 1974
Nolo Contendere
By Mary Ellmann
Do with me what you will
by Joyce Carol Oates
Vanguard Press, 561 pp., $7.95
I think, or I like to think, that Do with me what you will is a novel which could not be written fifty years from now. This is not yet an aesthetic judgment, but a personal preference. I don't like to read about browbeaten women or even about their breaking free. I don't intend, though, any injustice to Joyce Carol Oates. She is far from a fool; on the contrary, she is a person all too aware of male abuse. Her sympathy is with her main character, Elena Howe, who endures this abuse. But this endurance is depressing at the start and later, when it is altered to action, the action is enforced by the date of composition. The whole sequence makes me, at any rate, want to be born much later, say in 2023.
Review, 1240 words
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