Book Title: “Do with Me What You Will?

”
Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Date Published: October 6, 1973

Genre
Fiction- Literature created from the imagination, not presented as fact,
though it may be based on a true story or situation
Classics- a book which is well-known and considered to be of a high literary
standard
Adult Fiction- is more likely to be told in the style of a reflection on the
past, mostly using third person narration, sometimes presenting an omniscient perspective
- Can have main characters of any age, but generally tends
to favour protagonists aged 20 and above

Author’s Life
Joyce Carol Oates
America's Foremost Woman of Letters
DATE OF BIRTH
June 16, 1938

Joyce Carol Oates was born in Lockport, New York. She grew up on her parents’ farm,
outside the town, and went to the same one-room schoolhouse her mother had attended.
This rural area of upstate New York, straddling Niagara and Erie Counties, had been hit
hard by the Great Depression. The few industries the area enjoyed suffered frequent
closures and layoffs. Farm families worked desperately hard to sustain meager subsistence.
But young Joyce enjoyed the natural environment of farm country, and displayed a
precocious interest in books and writing. Although her parents had little education, they
encouraged her ambitions. When, at age 14, her grandmother provided her with her first
typewriter, she began consciously preparing herself, “writing novel after novel” throughout
high school and college.
When she transferred to the high school in Lockport, she quickly distinguished herself. An
excellent student, she contributed to her high school newspaper and won a scholarship to
attend Syracuse University, where she majored in English. When she was only 19, she won
the “college short story” contest sponsored by Mademoiselle magazine. Joyce Carol Oates
was valedictorian of her graduating class. After receiving her bachelor’s degree, she earned
her master’s in a single year at the University of Wisconsin. While studying in Wisconsin
she met Raymond Smith. The two were married after a three-month courtship.

In 1962, the couple settled in Detroit, Michigan. Joyce taught at the University of Detroit
and had a front-row seat for the social turmoil engulfing America’s cities in the 1960s.
These violent realities informed much of her early fiction. Her first novel, With Shuddering
Fall, was published when she was 28. Her novel them received the National Book Award.
In 1968, Joyce took a job at the University of Windsor, and the couple moved across the
Detroit River to Windsor, in the Canadian province of Ontario. In the ten years that
followed, Joyce Carol Oates published new books at the extraordinary rate of two or three
per year, while teaching full-time. Many of her novels sold well; her short stories and
critical essays solidified her reputation. Despite some critical grumbling about her
phenomenal productivity, Oates had become one of the most respected and honored
writers in the United States though only in her thirties
While still in Canada, Oates and her husband started a small press and began to publish a
literary magazine, The Ontario Review. They continued these activities after 1978, when
they moved to Princeton, New Jersey. Since 1978, Joyce Carol Oates has taught in the
creative writing program at Princeton University, where she has mentored numerous
young writers, including Jonathan Safran Foer. Her literary work continued unabated.
In the early 1980s, Oates surprised critics and readers with a series of novels, beginning
with Bellefleur, in which she reinvented the conventions of Gothic fiction, using them to re-
imagine whole stretches of American history. Just as suddenly, she returned, at the end of
the decade, to her familiar realistic ground with a series of ambitious family chronicles,
including You Must Remember This, and Because It Is Bitter, and Because It Is My
Heart. The novels Solstice and Marya: A Life also date from this period, and use the
materials of her family and childhood to create moving studies of the female experience. In
addition to her literary fiction, she has written a series of experimental suspense novels
under the pseudonym Rosamond Smith.
As of this writing, Joyce Carol Oates has written 56 novels, over 30 collections of short
stories, eight volumes of poetry, plays, innumerable essays and book reviews, as well as
longer nonfiction works on literary subjects ranging from the poetry of Emily Dickinson
and the fiction of Dostoyevsky and James Joyce, to studies of the gothic and horror genres,
and on such non-literary subjects as the painter George Bellows and the boxer Mike Tyson.
In 1996, Oates received the PEN/Malamud Award for “a lifetime of literary achievement.”
Her husband, Raymond Smith, died in 2008, shortly before the publication of her 32nd
collection of short stories, Dear Husband. The following year, Oates married Professor
Charles Gross, of the Psychology Department and Neuroscience Institute at Princeton. In
the months following Raymond Smith’s death, and before she met Dr. Gross, she suffered
from severe depression and suicidal thoughts. She described this experience vividly in the
memoir A Widow’s Tale, published in 2011. Today, Joyce Carol Oates continues to live and
write in Princeton, New Jersey, where she is Distinguished Professor of Humanities at
Princeton University.
Her most recent books include Babysitter — a novel about love and deceit, and lust and
redemption, against a backdrop of shocking murders in the affluent suburbs of Detroit,  The
Accursed — an eerie and stunning tale of psychological horror — and the short-story
collection, Lovely, Dark, Deep: Stories — a collection of ten mesmerizing stories that map
the disturbing darkness within us all — which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize.

Why is the book titled as such?

Joyce Carol Oates’ literary output is primarily depicting violence and evil in modern
society. Her novel “Do with me What you will” on 1973 was one of notable fictions she
made. The title was made to be genre irony it is because the story itself does not mean to be
what we supposed to expect towards the flow of the novel from the given title. Additionally,
Oates often establishes their subjectivity with remarkable clarity, allowing the reader to
bring wider knowledge and perspective to the story to fill it out and complete the
emotional impact. Notably, it has been argued, creates the truly independent woman.
Noting that the novel is dedicated to a member of the national board of the National
Organization of Women, Patricia Hill Burnett. "Its subject is the raising of a young woman's
consciousness and her liberation. Elena in the character, breaks through to a higher level of
awareness, and, integrated, affirms not only what she wants but also how she will get it."
Thus, reading an Oates story is peering into a vision of the world where almost anything is
possible between men and women. Although they are eminently recognizable as the men
and women of the contemporary United States, at the same time they are wholly
independent and capable of full response to their inner lives. Those inner lives often
contain ugly possibilities. One of the major complaints that Oates faced, especially early in
her career, regards the violence—often random, graphic, even obsessive—that
characterizes much of her work.
However, understanding the environment that the protagonist has grown up with,
we could say that the book is title as such because, after her mother rescued her from her
father, she was raised as a negotiable item. She tends to be passive and there are times that
she is incapable of responding to anything. The idea of being passive is like allowing people
to do whatever they want to do with you and accepting ideas that will consume you.

Kinds of Literature
“Do with me what you will” is a novel (prose) with a contemporary setting reflecting today's
social upheavals and shifting morality, it is, in the author's words, "a love story that
concentrates upon the tension between two American 'pathways': the way of tradition, or
Law; and the way of spontaneous emotion--in this case, Love.