On Child Murderers and Expensive Parents: Joyce Carol Oates’s “Ladies and Gentlemen:”
“Ladies and Gentlemen:” was first published in 1990 in Harper’s Magazine and is reprinted in Heat and Other Stories. It is a dark satire on family greed in which a cruise arranged by grown children as a gift for their wealthy senior parents serves to implement an inter-generational Final Solution. T...
Bewaard in:
| Gepubliceerd in: | URI:https://journals.openedition.org/jsse, |
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| Hoofdauteur: | |
| Formaat: | Article ou chapitre numérique |
| Taal: | Anglais |
| Gepubliceerd in: |
Journal of the Short Story in English
2025
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| Online toegang: | Accès Université d'Orléans et IFPM |
| Samenvatting: | “Ladies and Gentlemen:” was first published in 1990 in Harper’s Magazine and is reprinted in Heat and Other Stories. It is a dark satire on family greed in which a cruise arranged by grown children as a gift for their wealthy senior parents serves to implement an inter-generational Final Solution. The first-person narrative is in the form of a welcome address by the ship’s captain disclosing to his bemused passengers the actual nature of their trip to the lush but dangerous island on which they are to disembark and be left to die. “Ladies and Gentlemen:” seems a postscript to Oates’s 1968 Expensive People but their common focus, child murderers young and old, are represented in vastly different ways. Where young Richard Everett’s assault on his mother is prompted by loathing for the vacuity of suburbia, it is the desire to preserve their Fernwood-style way of life that motivates the passengers’ children to terminate their parents’ lives, embracing in the competitive context of the nineteen nineties the values Richard rejected in the late 1960s. Combining social Darwinism with Oedipus while gesturing toward Brant’s Ship of Fools, “Ladies and Gentlemen:” reaches beyond the satirical dissection of late twentieth-century America to a wide range of motifs and intertexts in ways which the novel form may not allow. A “wicked variation of Swift’s ‘A Modest Proposal,’” as a critic observed, it navigates the ship motif all the way from social practice to archetype, and from ancient to modern myths. |
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