'Black Water': Joyce Carol Oates's parable about female power and helplessness in the 1990s

On the evening of June 18, 1969, Senator Ted Kennedy left early from the party he had organized to honor the Boiler Room, the girls who had worked so diligently on his late brother Robert's presidential campaign . Kennedy didn't leave alone. A twenty-eight-year-old girl named Mary Jo Kopechne left with him without anyone noticing.

The next morning, when she was found drowned in the senator's car , everyone knew about it. Kennedy claimed he had tried to save Kopechne, although he didn't inform the police of the accident until many hours later. The event, known as the "Chappaquiddick incident," effectively ended Kennedy's presidential aspirations, and despite the scandal, he continued to hold political office.

Having become a symbol of the impunity of power , Chappaquiddick inspired, for example, one of the plot points of the series Succession . It was also the event that prolific American writer Joyce Carol Oates used as a reference for her novel Black Water (Fjord), originally published in 1992.

In the book, Mary Jo Kopechne plays Kelly Kelleher, a young woman interested in politics who meets a Democratic senator thirty years her senior at a party . What follows is a discreet escape from the meeting and a fatal accident when the car they are traveling in skids on a curve and ends up sinking into the sewage river of the title.

Oates brought the story into the present and blurred some details, but readers quickly recognized the parallels between fact and fiction .

Even more than the author intended. As she stated in interviews, her intention was not to create a fictionalized account of those events, but rather a sort of archetypal parable about the imbalances of power.

What led that girl to run away with an older man? Why didn't she get out of the car when she saw he was still drinking while driving?

Kelly's character bears the marks of her time . She's a nineties young woman who aspires to be independent and a respected professional, all while struggling to follow the prescriptions of her horoscope and the advice of Cosmopolitan-style women's magazines. A modern girl , she's tormented by the thought of what her parents would say if they saw her in the car with that man.

“I was a young American girl, so you have to be as beautiful as possible and be your BEST ,” Oates describes the psyche of her protagonist, besieged by the mandates of femininity and the guilt generated by her own desire.

Oates takes Kelly's thoughts as she suffocates in the senator's car as her focal point, maintaining the suspense of a narrative that spirals forward. The same episodes repeat and expand, illuminating Kelly's past only to find her desperately trying to breathe again.

"Something is about to happen that no one will be able to prevent," she senses as the senator drives recklessly, first excited by the adventure he's decided to embark on, then unable to raise his voice. She suspects they've taken the wrong path; he says they're taking a shortcut.

How can she upset this man she admires , about whom she wrote her university thesis, and who, to top it all off, chose her over all the other girls at the party? How can she do it, when her mother taught her that no man tolerates being ridiculed ?

As the senator swims out, Oates stays with her helpless protagonist. While waiting for her rescue , Kelly imagines she's being asked to tell what happened. "You have to rehearse the future with words. Your words. Your story," she tells herself.

Mary Jo Kopechne was unable to give her version; she was a victim not only of drowning, but also of posthumous rumors about her reputation . Through Kelly, Oates gives voice to her alter ego and lets her, albeit through the guise of fiction, tell her story.

Black Water , by Joyce Carol Oates (Fjord).