Silent Girls in Foxfire: Confessions of A Girl Gang

Joyce Carol Oates, one of the most famous contemporary novelists in America, is well-known for her prolificacy and writing of violence. This paper probes the common trait of several girls in the novel, that is, silence or aphasia, which represents the social characteristics of the whole society in the first half of 1950s. Girls’ aphasia is represented in two levels: girls lose their ability to talk or they tend to talk in men’s language, which proves to be just parroting