I Lock My Door Upon Myself

by Joyce Carol Oates

Book Overview

In turn-of-the-century, upstate New York, a strange, beautiful child who wanders the countryside like a sleepwalker is married off to a coarse, much older farmer. Bitter and increasingly estranged, she falls in love with a tall, black, itinerant water diviner. When the doomed affair ends tragically, she withdraws completely.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0880012609
• ISBN13: 9780880012607
• Release Date: January 1990
• Publisher: Ecco Press
• Length: 98 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.8" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Short, Intense, and Dramatic

Joyce Carol Oates was born in 1938 in upstate New York State and is a distinguished Professor of Humanities at Princeton. She gained fame with her first novel With Shuddering Fall in 1964. Now four decades later, she is the author of scores of novels and other works. The present novella from 1990 is somewhere near the chronological middle. I have read a number of her works and set up a Guide to Joyce Carol Oates Listmania list. Oates is known for her emotional and dramatic stories, often with women caught in stressful situations, and often set in her native upstate New York. The present novel contains those two elements. It is a story set in turn of the century (1900 to 1912 approximately) New York near the towns of Shaheen and Milburn. A young woman, Calla, is married and meets a man on their family farm dowsing for water. I quote from the end of the novel: "Did you know it was Death that summoned you, a dowsing rod in his hand? Or was it love?" The work is short and intense, just 98 pages long, and it is narrated by the grand-daughter. The protagonist, Calla, is left orphaned as a teenager and is forced to move in with relatives leaving her parents farm. She lived an unsettled life and marries young. Then we have what followed: a complicated marriage and love story. People in her town thought that she is "touched in the head" but it is more complicated than that. The story opens with something very dramatic happening at Tinter Falls: two people in a small row boat up river of the falls are speeding down the river towards the falls. As readers, we we do not fully understand what is happening. Then Oates breaks away and re-traces the steps of the story, starting back at the beginning of Calla's life. This is a dramatic and entertaining story that most Oates fans will love.

Delivering Herself

Inspired by the fantastic poem by Christina Rossetti, I Lock My Door Upon Myself is a tremendous novella that recounts the life of Edith "Calla" Freilicht from the perspective of her granddaughter. Calla is raised in a small New England community in the early 20th century isolated and detached from her surroundings. She lets others decide the course of her life because she has little interest in the major decisions and is trapped instead inside conundrums of existence: whether life is a dream and if it is who dreams it? Only rarely does she wake from these deep thoughts to reality of the world and the decisions she makes when she does are staunchly opposed to the opinions of society. Her actions though sparse leave her family befuddled for generations so that her granddaughter constantly wonders who Calla really was.This novella questions strongly the location of narrative. The granddaughter tells the story, but it is not really hers and often it is broken by the voice of Calla herself in Oates' characteristic italicised sections which mark the sharp emotional responses of the characters. There is great attention paid to the way the tale is told as the story of the tale itself. It also explores the repression of women in this time period as well as the inherent racism of America. The central theme of the book holds close to the dilemma of Rossetti's poem asking how the self can be protected from others who it recognises itself as separate from and, more importantly, how can false conceptions of oneself be separated from the physical reality of being. This is an emotional and serious tale that makes you think how we are bound to each other and how we place ourselves in the world.

over all well written and exciting book.

I Lock My door Upon Myself is an example of just how upsetting life can be. It is a disturbing book but also one that is exciting and mind boggling to read. I recomend this book to an older group.