ROSE MARIE BURWELL

Certain that the law will not save her, that the very concepts of innocence and guilt depend on the human propensities of those who define and dispense justice, the heroine of Joyce Carol Oates' sixth novel recognizes the truth that "Necessity Makes Law." Assuming moral self-responsibility in the final chapter, Elena Howe enters an unspoken plea of nolo contendre, the vulgate of which is the title of the novel, Do With Me What You Will ( 1973 ). The plea, in English common law and in most states, requires the court to proceed on an assumption of the defendant's innocence--even though he refuses to defend himself. Here the reader is the court and Elena Howe is both Everyman and many women. The dilemma she has been chosen to exemplify, the struggle to create and retain a tenable sense of self, is a universal one in which every individual who achieves emotional and moral maturity participates. For Elena a belated and violent sexual awakening sounds a warning signal, forcing upon her the realization that she must synthesize her personality or accede to her own disintegration. Elena's resistance and the Jungian stages of her individuation provide the narrative structure of Oates' most subtle and complex novel yet.

Raymond Olderman has explored the problem of reality in the contemporary novel:

The facts of contemporary experience are constantly beyond belief; calling those facts absurd does not seem to subdue them. There is always some small comfort in the neatness of categories, but only a glance at the day's headlines . . . will destroy the safety categories supply.¹

Reviewers of Do With Me What You Will were incapable of discarding the safety of categories and as unable to recognize the uses to which realism had been put in Oates' sixth novel as in her first.² An obtuse feminist found the work a condemnation of marriage as destructive to the female;³ while a more perceptive feminist saw it as the chronicle of a mind-rape.⁴ Two other reviewers (one male, one anonymous) agreed that the character of Elena is so slight, the narrative structure so complex, that the result is self-defeating and melodramatic.⁵ Walter Sullivan, repeating the exquisitely brutal process of over-simplification he had applied to Oates' earlier fiction, prefaced his advice to Miss Oates with some perfunctory praise for her "eye for the scenery of the modern world [which] never forsakes her."⁶ Even those who put aside any predilection for easy categories, recognizing that "Oates is a potent myth-maker in the drab guise of a social naturalist,"⁷ and that "she gives us back ourselves in art; lovingly documents our guilts,"⁸ did not recognize the distinctly Jungian development of the novel's protagonist.

The narrative movement of Do With Me What You Will is neither chronological nor lyrical: precisely orchestrated shifts in plot direction and point of view mirror the mental states of the characters. Italicized sections permit individuals to reflect upon, to amplify, or to force rhetorical analysis of what the detached narrator reveals about them. Although the four parts of the novel overlap in time, Elena's individuation exists in a continuum that is its structure. Part I is largely her story; from six weeks as the captive of her deranged father when Elena is seven (in 1950); through twenty-one years of another sort of captivity with her mother; and (from 1961) with Marvin Howe, the wealthy, sinister criminal lawyer to whom the mother has arranged Elena's marriage.⁹ Part II belongs to Jack Morrissey, who will become Elena's lover. Here the hostile, but powerful, affinity between Jack and Marvin is revealed. Jack's work as a civil rights attorney permits Elena the contact with socio-economic forces to which she must ultimately relate, the sine qua non of self-creation not attained by the protagonists of Oates' first and second novels to whom Elena bears a noteworthy resemblance.¹⁰ The second section ends at the exact point in space and time as the first-with Jack and Elena's meeting on April 12, 1971. Part III, "Crime," traces the love affair between Jack and Elena which ends with her confession of the infidelity to Marvin and a mental collapse in March, 1972. The affair is the catalyst for Elena's first steps toward the state of psychological wholeness which Jung terms individuation.¹¹ The brief final section, whose title, THE SUMMING UP, in capital letters may indicate that this is what the novel has been building toward, includes a chapter for each of the characters who have formed the moral consciousness of Elena Howe--her parents, Marvin, Jack, and Meredith Dawe. It reveals events which occurred prior to those presented in Parts I-III, or considers those previously revealed from another point of view. Elena's chapter, the final one, marks her emergence from a lapse in the individuation process which occurred with her breakdown, at the end of Part III. No longer innocent, and symbolically shorn of her long, pale-gold hair, Elena enters, at the novel's end, the adult world from which she has heretofore been insulated by mother and husband.

In the last chapter Elena walks on the beach in Maine, where Marvin has brought her to recuperate from the psychic collapse which followed her confession:

On the sand before her a vague shadow moved along, not clearly defined because the sun was partly obscured by clouds. It moved along quickly, yet it had the unclear unsteady appearance of something only partly imagined, . . . partly in control . . . at the back of Elena's mind was the conviction, new to her, that no one could touch her, no one was even watching her.¹²

This is early May. From then until she leaves Marvin in late August, Elena manifests a steadily growing confidence in her ability to make decisions and arrange her life--without mental reference to Jack Morrissey. The shadow, only partly in control, is the archetype¹³ which lies closest to the surface of the unconscious, the acceptance of which is the first step in the individuation process. Of it Jung says:

The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real. This act is an essential condition for any kind of self-knowledge, and it therefore, as a rule, meets with considerable resistance.¹⁴

That dark aspect of the personality which, until her beach encounter, Elena has been reluctant to acknowledge includes both her potential for sexual fulfillment and the right to selfdetermination assumed by her parents, her husband, and her lover. An instant before the shadow's appearance Elena had reflected that "all her life had been leading up to this moment," and simultaneously with the epiphany she engages in a strange conversation with a bird:

An ugly, sharp-faced bird darted near her. It alighted on the swaying branch of a nearby tree and shared the clearing with Elena. . . . They stared at each other curiously, without fear. "What do you want, what are you looking at?" Elena said. The gull remained, watching her. . . . It was strangely silent, inside, and unhuman, very consoling. At the back of Elena's mind was the conviction, new to her, that no one could touch her. (525)

The interior calm which the contact with the bird gives to Elena is described by Jung,¹⁵ and he concludes that the bird, well-known as a symbol of spirit, represents, when it alights on the earth, the movement of the perceiver's consciousness toward a previously rejected confrontation with reality. In the confrontation, "consciousness is not only widened but also brought face to face with the reality of things, so that the inner experience is tied, so to speak, to a definite Spot."¹⁶ Consistent with Jung's conclusion, Elena begins immediately to develop a sense of comforting and detached sympathy with the universe.

Although her resistance to acknowledging the shadow (which Jung calls the apprentice piece of self-creation¹⁷) has been deep, its erosion gradual and painful, Elena has sensed both the dark, inherently sexual side of her psyche and the possibility of a wholeness of personality since early childhood. The revelation that such wholeness is achievable only through acceptance of her sexuality is quite literally thrust upon her by the love affair.

At seven Elena had learned to reproduce the responses adults desire: the inner side of her face is "the bad side," because it reflects her own feelings (23). She must mirror the emotions of adults if she wants approval and love. During the six weeks of captivity with her deranged father, Elena witnesses a terrifying incident which sinks deep into her unconscious: standing beside him in the door of a cabin in Yellowstone Park, she sees an animal devouring a snake (267). Only after bringing the snake scene of 1950 into consciousness and recounting it to Jack in 1971 (when she cannot distinguish it as the product of either reality or dream) does Elena experience an orgasm. Her awakening, so powerful that it seems for a time to threaten her sanity, occurs in the wooded area of a city park, and as her body is swept into the frightful ecstasy, Elena remembers "the forest someone had taken her to, long ago, in another part of her life" (380). The immediate effects of the awakening include her realization that "she must fix herself, must change something" (383) and that the bed in which she has lain, unfeeling, with her husband for ten years is "like a common grave" (385).

Jung's research established the snake as both a collective and universal principle of evil and a personal symbol of male sexuality.¹⁸ In the classic account of the mandalas rendered by Miss X., the snake represented so clearly the fear of phallic penetration that the patient herself came to recognize the signification.¹⁹ Jung also records the case history of a patient in an extreme state of introversion who had physical difficulty speaking and believed that a snake was stuck in her throat.²⁰

Through the twenty-one years that follow Elena's stricken witnessing of the snake, further Jungian evidence of the psychic damage done in molding her personality to please authority figures appears. In childhood she is introverted to the point of autism and has a severe speech problem. Sex, shame, fear, and violence has become so fused in her mind that she cannot, in moments of stress, distinguish between the words "afraid" and "ashamed" (47). Forced to go into a basement area of the school, a place where boys might be hiding and where classmates tease her by threatening to turn off the lights, Elena faints. Hearing and seeing in the news media of rapes, murders, suicides, and plane crashes, she imagines herself interchangeable with the victims (67, 77, 81).

Also evident early in the novel is Elena's dim awareness of the potential for wholeness in herself. Jung's research suggests that fragments of a concept of wholeness exist a priori, are put together during the process of individuation,²¹ and are observable at exactly those moments when the efforts to maintain separation of body and psyche is greatest. When Elena is rescued from the vermin-ridden room where her father has hidden her, she is near death from malnutrition and dehydration. Trying to explain to the hospital attendants why she will not speak, Elena discovers that words flow in two streams-one stream in the throat, the other in the head: "like little stones, but you can't touch them or get them out. . . . They don't dissolve. They hurt. . . . they swell up and get big" (40). Their swelling can be stopped by loving contact with another human being: Elena whispers, "I love you," to her mother and the swelling stops; the world becomes perfect again (46-7).

Ten years later her mother poses her before a mirror, enhancing her already haunting beauty for the marriage bargain she hopes to strike. Elena contemplates herself turned peacefully into stone:

I looked down upon my body and saw that it had gone into stone, and the folds of my dress had become the creased folds of a gown. Such a body does not even need a head. I could see my own arms, what my arms had become, absolutely at rest. My mother stood behind me, holding me in her arms, which had gone into stone also. We had no weight . . . we were both at the center of time and nothing could disturb us . . . I was happy . . . there was no danger. (101)

Later she endures her husband's passion by commanding herself, "lie still. Go into stone, into peace" (159). Until, after ten years of marriage, Elena's existence as the showpiece of a famous man has become so devoid of meaning that she sees, with fascinated horror, her own future in the condition of an embittered luncheon companion--the wife of a prominent judge. Fleeing the scene where the odor of the woman's vomit conjures up her own husband, Elena stands before a statue of the nuclear family on a Detroit street (163) and enters a catatonic state (from which she is awakened by Jack Morrissey) that she remembers later as:

I went into peace and then I woke and it was later, time had gone by . . . I had gone into stone like the statue in front of me: I had gone into peace . . . Then I came back, I was frightened . . . The other was peace and now I had to live again, I had to come back to myself in the world and live. (311)

Jung found the rendering of a conflict into images of stone a human attitude related to the process of personality transformation, concluding that the unity of stone is the equivalent of individuation, that stone is a projection of the unified self.²² Elena's sexual awakening destroys forever the ability to detach the self from reality (528), forcing her to pursue in actuality the wholeness heretofore realized in withdrawal.

Six months before experiencing her first orgasm, Elena had refused to acknowledge a clear manifestation of the shadow: while talking on the phone, "Elena felt, passing near her, another person, like a shadow of herself given substance and weight, but she refused to look up. She knew she was alone" (324). Her refusal occurs just three weeks after the day on which Elena awoke from the trance in front of the statue to meet Jack. On that day she had first sensed that "A stranger to her, a shadow-woman, might have stepped into her body" (319). But the dreadful deliverance of the orgasm cannot be denied: the integration of the conscious (which pleases others) with the unconscious (which presses for self-determination) must be accomplished or Elena will go under--mentally, perhaps even physically. Torn by the conflicting demands, "She wanted to give up, to surrender into parts, pieces, chunks of herself. Then she could rest. But she told herself: I'm not going to die" (403)²³

Elena's first independent and rebellious action is the product of her contemplating the alternatives revealed by the sexual awakening--and with it comes her first painful acknowledgment of the shadow. Elena goes, unescorted, to a lecture by Mered Dawe, a mystic client to whom Jack has introduced her. Dawe extolls a love of the future, "light love," a mode of human relationships in which people will not be chattels as she has been. When the lecture ends in a police riot and Elena finds herself spirited home by bodyguards, whose existence, until now, was unknown to her, she realizes that Marvin knows also of her infidelity. The luxury of evading decisions, which resides in her status as Mrs. Marvin Howe, has grown more tenuous. Elena tosses restlessly through the night. Toward morning she "seemed to see a figure, a woman like herself, walking silently past her and out of the room. She shuddered" (423). Talking to Marvin on the phone, a few hours later, she thinks of her marriage in the past tense: "He never knew me either."

Both Jack and Marvin are angered by Elena's independent action. Many years earlier Elena's mother had warned her that a woman either invents herself or she is invented by a man (72). Marvin, Jack, and Mered Dawe share in the creation of Elena, but she will belong ultimately to herself. The love affair ends in February or March, 1972, precisely because Elena, struggling inchoately to realize her self, will not make for Jack the irreversible decision between divorce and marriage to her, or reconciliation and the adoption of the child his wife wants. Instead, Elena seeks reprieve from self-responsibility by confessing her adultery to Marvin and briefly--until the willing acknowledgment of the shadow on the beach--regressing into the moral slumber which had marked her life before the terrible, and ultimately redeeming, sexual awakening.

Such regressions were frequently noted by Jung, who found the recognition and integration of the shadow to create such a harrowing prospect for the individual that the longing for a savior is inevitably manifest.²⁴ Elena prostrates herself before Marvin, whom both she and Jack have earlier contemplated as a deity. She realizes, but is too psychically harassed to confront the fact, that for the refuge she now craves she must surrender all of her nascent self: "She knew she was going to be ill, she knew there was a risk in keeping anything of her own around her" (466).

The regression is relatively brief--the collapse occurs in March, the acceptance of the shadow on the beach in early May. Alone much of the time at the Deer Isle retreat, Elena makes the inward journey which consolidates the selfknowledge emergent from the love affair, achieving a moral rebirth.²⁵ She finds the sea and the rain inhuman and comforting and wakes to the numinous quality of the universe. The death wish she had entertained when pressures to be what mother, husband, or lover required were strongest (309-10) is replaced by a keen desire to live (534). In the final chapter, Elena is contrasted to Jack's wife, Rachel, who begins as Elena's physical and psychological antithesis but regresses as Elena grows.

Although Elena remains inarticulate, the narrative voice is identical with Elena's during the last chapter as her selfdiscovery becomes equated with the Jamesian epigraph of the novel: "the world as it stands is no illusion, no phantasm, no evil dream of a night; we wake up to it again for ever and ever; we can neither forget it nor deny it nor dispense with it." Finding that she can no longer go into stone (528), no longer disjoin her mind and body, Elena realizes that an aura emanates from her which must eventually make someone want to kill her--Marvin, who needs her cold and unawakened, as a symbol of absolute innocence with which to redeem his own corruption; or merely an unknown sinister figure whom she meets on a country road (532-4), a figure that may only be the projection of her darker self. Elena knows now that "everything is awake, the universe is awake; that it cannot be escaped," and that to try to forget it or deny it or dispense with it would be careless of her life (534). Her awareness contrasts sharply with the mystic disregard for individual life, preached by Mered Dawe, which Elena had longed to embrace earlier.

When we add to our view of Elena's individuation two new aspects of her personality revealed in the closing pages of the novel--her regard for financial reality shown by accepting money from Marvin, and her taking an active role in the "kidnapping" of her lover--what lies beyond the novel cannot be ignored. Jung calls individuation the definitive solution to psychic fragmentation for which all other ways serve as makeshifts and auxiliaries.²⁶ He points out that no psychological synthesis is achieved until those aspects of the personality manifest in the shadow archetype are integrated and that such integration can be accomplished only in relation to a partner.²⁷ Jack Morrissey is that partner for Elena, but he must not be romantically considered as Elena's entelechy.²⁸

What Joyce Carol Oates has created in Do With Me What You Will is not simply the story of a young woman raised to a higher state of consciousness through love and sexual awakening²⁹ (although that story is there) but a novel in which a complex and nearly perfect tension exists between personal individuation and the societal forces resistant to it. Speaking of the inadequacy of what is legally, morally, and socially approved to encourage--or even tolerate--the creation of a tenable sense of self, Jung says:

Man's great task is the adaptation of himself to reality and the recognition of himself as an instrument for the expression of life according to his individual possibilities. It is in his privilege as self-creator that his highest purpose is found.³⁰

The bringing together of the conscious and the unconscious is a task facing not only individuals, but whole civilizations. The political and social isms of our day preach every conceivable kind of ideal, but, under this mask, they pursue the goal of inhibiting the possibilities of individual development. . . . This problem cannot be solved collectively, because the masses are not changed unless the individual changes. . . . The bettering of a general ill begins with the individual, and then only when he makes himself and not others responsible.³¹

Although Elena Howe is moving confidently in the direction of self-responsibility when the novel ends, her advance is not certain to be complete nor triumphant. She must now master a mode of personal interaction (and perhaps vocational skills as well) that will permit her to consolidate and maintain her moral independence. The process of ethical evolution through which she passes cannot have as its goal the finding of a person less selfish than her mother, less sinister than her husband, with whom she can experience sexual fulfillment and to whom she will now turn over her life.

The possibility of Elena's self-realization continuing through motherhood, which several reviewers suggested, is largely nullified by the contexts of her visions of children within the novel: they occur always, like the visions of stone, at moments of great stress and as an escape. Jung found what many a family-court judge who knows nothing of research in psychic wholeness can verify--that the contemplation or conception of a child is frequently the way in which the nonsyncretized personality seeks to create a new and unrelated mode of existence in order to avoid those elements of the present with which it cannot cope.³² Jack's wife argues for the adoption of a child for exactly this reason, yet, as he points out to her, her friend committed suicide despite three small children who needed her terribly.

The tension between the necessity of individual development and the barriers to it raised by societal structures and expectations converge in the Gatsby-like aspirations of Marvin Howe, in Jack Morrissey's response to reading Kafka, and in the destruction of the young mystic, Mered Dawe. Howe describes himself as a nobody from Oklahoma (102-4), and he re-enacts the American dream of a literary ancestor probably unknown to him--with the same result. Like Gatsby, he has created an existence at the center of which is a woman who remains a mystery to him, and who, like Daisy, moves on, leaving the man who made of her the image he needed to complete himself in the throes of a Kierkegaardian sickness unto death (554).

The second section of the novel has as its epigraph a line from Kafka, "I am a lawyer. So I can never get away from evil." Jack once read, without understanding, two books by Kafka, obviously The Trial and The Castle. At the time he admired the protagonists, both of whom die seeking to justify themselves to a remote, ambiguous, and sinister order (civil and religious law) whose basis remains hidden. Now, contemplating the fate of his clients who blindly oppose an entrenched social and legal system, Jack thinks a self-defensive retreat might have been better.

Mered Dawe, for whom Elena feels an inexplicable love and longing, embodies the impossibility of either an unqualified acceptance or a complete disregard of the existing social and legal structure. He tries first to overcome resistance to his quest for unlimited individual freedom by ignoring the criminal charges against him in the name of an all absorbing love. Dawe ends in prison--crippled and insane. His final act is the writing of a voluminous letter to the judge who sentenced him which, like Kafka's letter to his father, begins with reproach and ends in pleading for forgiveness and understanding. Elena calls him "solved" (531) and resolves that she will not be solved.

Kafka's characters commit a kind of suicide searching for justice: Elena realizes that she must create her own. In Dawe's fate the epigraphs from James and Kafka fuse, setting in juxtaposition what Dawe has failed to learn and what Elena will not forget--that the world and the evil in it cannot be escaped or ignored, only encountered with self-knowledge and selfresponsibility. Elena is prepared for such encounters by a consciousness of her own sexuality and free will which, though it is still nascent, transcends the knowledge of good and evil. Her personal knowledge of evil--itself a relative term, since the "crime" of adultery is, in another vocabulary, the act of love-permits her to attain the greater good of moral selfdetermination.

Jung speaks of the unsynthesized personality as existing in the plural stage, not able to experience wholeness outside the community of the family or tribe, passive and unwilling or unable to assert its will, incapable of moral judgment. As individuation progresses it becomes capable of choice and of assuming responsibility for its actions. The kidnapping scenes which open and close the novel provide a constant by which this progress in Elena can be measured. During the first abduction, Elena is coaxed under a fence by her deranged father who murmurs, "'Obey me, Elena. Obey me. Yes, like that, yes don't be afraid--crawl under--crawl under'--And the child crawled under the fence" (10). On the final page Elena has returned from Maine to Detroit; standing outside the shabby apartment building where her lover, his wife, and the child whose adoption was to seal their reconciliation live, she wills Jack to come to her, remembering "years ago, centuries ago, it seemed, scrambling beneath a fence someone held up for her."

That Elena's evolution from the passive object of the first kidnapping to the active agent of the second, from the state of moral slumber to that of moral choice, should be manifest in the destruction of two marriages and the orphaning of a child is both ironic and thematically necessary. Elena's years of psychic immolation have been determined by the family. The law, which both Jack and Marvin represent, is indifferent to such suffering. The entrenched values of both the family and the law are therefore irrelevant to her. Guilt or innocence has nothing to do with the marriage vows that bind her to Marvin Howe or Jack Morrissey to Rachel; or with the contract the Morrisseys made in adopting the child. When the socio-legal and familial guidelines for individuation are disintegrating, the self must be created and protected by finding them irrelevant and by pleading, nolo contendre: do with me what you will.

NORTHERN ILLINOIS UNIVERSITY

NOTES