"One warm evening in August..." Image Theme

"One warm evening in August 1937 a girl in love stood before a mirror. Her name was Loretta. It was her reflection that she loved, and out of this dreamy, pleasing love there arose a sense of excitement that was restless and blind - which way would it move, what would happen?..." - pg 3 of them by Joyce Carol Oates

Joyce Carol Oates begins them with the image of a girl looking at herself in a mirror. This girl is not in love with a man, not in love with a boy. She is in love with herself. She is in love with what the future could bring her, in love with what could happen to her on this day, Saturday. This image sets a tone for people who look toward the future for their happiness, not focused on the present and, in turn, sets a recurring theme for the rest of the novel.

At first it seems insignificant, this girl and her thoughts on her reflection. Her name is Loretta, Loretta Botsford, and she is no more special than any other girl. She takes pride in being like the other girls and is set in a routine that she has followed for years. Throughout the entirety of the novel, Loretta can be seen saying she will do something, but in the end, doing nothing at all. She is, like most people, full of hot air and talks just to talk.

The image of her getting ready for Saturday, pondering what will happen as the evening wears on, there is a sense of restlessness. As if there is a guarantee that SOMETHING will happen on this night. Loretta is neither the protagonist nor a sub character. She is one of the few characters who gets her story told from her point of view, one of the few characters with which the readers get to sympathise for despite her faults. Her ordinariness is what makes her key, as she is surrounded with the people whose views are extraordinarily different from her. She represents the everyday working class American of the 1930s and the 1940s: a gossip, a wife, and a mother. She is what the other characters get compared to throughout the story, as it is she who we are introduced to first. There isn't much depth to her, nothing original about her and because of this we feel sorry for her. For she is not very bright but not dumb either, not gorgeous but not ugly, and her emotions are up and down. She is a being of little, insignificant contradictions, a conformist to the ways of the world around her, never yearning to be different from any one person around her.


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