Joyce Carol Oates Against Nature Analysis

Nature is easily projected onto, as it allows for a sense of peacefulness and escapism. Due to its ability to evoke an emotional reaction from the masses, many writers have glorified it through various methods, including describing its endless beauty and utilizing it as a symbol for spirituality. Along with authors, artists also show great respect and admiration for nature through paintings of grandiose landscapes. These tributes disseminate a fixed interpretation of the natural world, one full of meaning and other worldly connections. In “Against Nature,” Joyce Carol Oates strips away this guise given to the environment and replaces it with a harsher reality. To her, it is superficial and only has overlying positive associations because humans

Since these creators are the source of the idolization of nature, she writes to them in order to reverse their misconception. Oates realizes that their subject is not the authentic force, but rather one that was handed endless meaning by artisans. She addresses them mockingly, utilizing rhetorical questions as a way to aggravate their thought process. Including herself in the audience of authors, she toys with the image of authors and jokes that the reason they write so profusely on nature is that “...we must, we’re writers, poets, mystics (of a sort) aren’t we, precisely what else are we to do but glamorize and romanticize and generally exaggerate the significance of anything we focus the white heat of our “creativity” upon?” (Oates 226). Through this query, Oates succeeds in reminding her audience of both their need to give significance to meaningless subject matter and that nature falls into the former category. Her use of quotations on the word “creativity” in and of itself debases her audiences’ self esteem because it could make them rethink how that word really applies to them.Through her mocking tone, Oates dismisses the instigators of the reverence of the natural world. She lost this deference to nature a long time ago she lost through separate and traumatizing encounters with