Customer Reviews

The Goddess and Other Women

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Oates epigraph by that seventeenth-century literary ubermensch John Donne, which I used for this review's title up there, goes a long way toward foreshadowing that which is to come among these twenty-four stories. Supposedly arising from Oates' early 1970's interest in Hinduism and specifically her pull toward the goddess Kali, these widely ranging, highly diverse (as in differing) tales give a sort of Oatesean statement on feminism as a force of good and ill, as well as on the intense complexity of behavior, thought, and deed of which all women are capable.

The unifying and underpinning theme in The Goddess And Other Women is reflective of the disparate natures of the goddess Kali. While mostly known in the west as Kali the Destroyer, Hindus also see this virtually omnipotent being as at times a nurturer, a life-giver, a trader in compassion, and a warrior. She is both a sort of Queen of Heaven and Queen of Hell. The women in these stories show each of those traits in their behaviors, plus many more. There is the seemingly submissive trophy wife who secretly sabotages her businessman husband's career. In these pages there are seductresses and crones, teenaged troublemakers and questing intellectuals. There are murderesses and loving mothers, and women in many roles, sometimes in a variety of roles all at the same time.

Probably the best story here is "Concerning The Case of Bobby T." which is set in a small town in modern times on the day a black man is to be released from prison, where he has spent much of his life in the wake of a conviction for assaulting a young white girl. The main character here, though, is not Bobby T. himself, but the now mature white woman whose accusation sent Bobby T. away. While the woman's father, the woman herself, the entire town, are tense on the day of Bobby's release, the woman secretly knows she was the one who attacked Bobby T. and did so for no good reason at all except an inexplicable momentary whim, and that Bobby had done nothing more than shove her away from him in self defense. Finally we meet Bobby T upon his return. Where once he had been a notorious young hoodlum, he is now a bent, prematurely aged man beaten down (in the literal sense) during many years of incarceration.

The Goddess and Other Women is not Oates' best anthology but it is still a fine collection. The stories are classic Oates and grant much back to the reader. They range in style from ultra-literary to almost pulp fiction-like, and throughout have much to say on the subject of the motivations, desires, and actions of women in this world.