The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates

The next morning, Clara finds Lowry again and leaves town with him. When she comes back home that evening, Carleton begins to beat her. At the restaurant she meets another man named Lowry, and she goes home with Lowry, though he declines to sleep with her. The meeting at the church disturbs Clara, and she leaves early with a young man named LeRoy and they go to a restaurant. They invite her to a prayer meeting at their church that evening, which Clara accepts. One day when Clara is a teenager, she receives a visit from two women from the First Methodist Church in Florence.

Clara goes to school, though she does not excel, and Carleton favors her out of all his children. Pearl dies in childbirth a few years later, and Carleton takes up with a woman named Nancy. Carleton is an arrogant, vain man who later kills a man by accident in a bar. One day the truck breaks down, and as they wait for repairs his wife, Pearl, gives birth to a daughter whom they name Clara.

Carleton Ĭarleton Walpole is a migrant worker, traveling with his family from camp to camp looking for work during the Great Depression. In an attempt to rise above her mother's ambitions, Clara struggles for independence by way of her relationships with the four different men in her life.įor a recent Modern Library edition of the novel, Oates revised three quarters of the original published text. The novel explores Clara's ill-fated life and the four men who shaped it: Clara's father, a bitter, hard-working farm worker Lowry, who whisks the teenage Clara away and tempts her with love Revere, a wealthy married businessman who gives Clara stability and Swan, Clara's son who carries the physiological burden of Clara’s determination to escape her haphazard existence of violence and poverty. It follows heroine Clara Walpole, the beautiful daughter of a Kentucky-born migrant farmer. Ī Garden sets out to explore social class in the United States and the inner lives of its youngsters.

It was a finalist for the 1968 annual U.S. Her second book published, it is the first of her series known as the 'Wonderland Quartet'. A Garden of Earthly Delights is a novel by Joyce Carol Oates, published by Vanguard in 1967.

The Corn Maiden and Other Nightmares by Joyce Carol Oates