Personal Response

I have read just under half of "The Tattooed Girl" so far, and I have already learned a lot about the main characters and the story's conflicts. One thing about this story I have noticed is that the main characters thus far have very distinct personalities, some that all seem to clash with eachother. There seem to be hidden secrets, and so far Oates has left me with a lot of questions about some of the main characters.

The main mystery to me while reading this story has been Alma Busch, aka "The Tattooed Girl." Alma seemed to come out of nowhere, and there are so many unanswered questions that Oates has introduced about her but hasn't yet answered. On Alma's first night into town she got involved with the wrong guy, the waiter Dmitri. She thought he was nice because he took her home and bathed her and fed her, but really he had terrible motives and a disgusting disrespect for her and other women. Although Alma isn't described as a very intellectual girl, she seems to have often had to fend for herself in the past, and has common sense. After being helped by Dmitri, she basically fell in love with him. I don't understand this because he treats her so horribly. Dmitri beats her and abuses her sexually, and sells her body to other men without her consent. But despite this, she still comes running back to a man who doesn't even like her trying to pay him and beg for his love.

Another mystery about Alma is her tattooes. The tattooes are scattered about her body, and are describes as poorly done and appear to be blemish-like. My first impression of these tattooes was that someone did them to her, because they are described to be unflattering and randomly placed; but I don't know this for a fact. My main question regarding this is: If someone did this to Alma in her recent past, why won't she tell anyone anything about it? That question leads me to wonder if she did something bad, something related to this that she doesn't want anyone to know.

The book started off sort of slow, but now I am finding it to be a pretty easy read for me. I have grown used to Oates' style, which is kind of unlike the books I normally read. Oates' uses a point of view in the novel that is very interesting to me: Oates herself is narrating, and is describing the characters and plot in a 3rd person point of view. She is allowing the reader into the minds of her characters, but she only shows the thoughts of one character at a time. Usually this is done by chapter, showing the story through the eyes of different characters in different chapters. It is convenient to be able to know the characters' thoughts, especially with their complicated and somewhat moody personalities. But at the same time, only having a view into one character's thoughts at a time really makes me have to pay close attention to detailed quotes and thoughts of the characters, because the alternation between points of view could get my knowledge of the characters confused between one another. But besides the interesting perspective used by Oates, the story has smooth transitioning and a vocabulary that isn't too difficult for me to understand. So far I am enjoying watching the characters progress and learning more about their complex lives.

Style Analysis

Throughout the book so far, I have noticed that Oates often uses quotes from writers and theologists to express the thoughts of Joshua Seigl, or just reference things written that relate to a situation that he is in. A majority of these selected passages seem to be by authors whose work Seigl is well read on and is passionate about. Some quotes, however, are undocumented italicized references, which also seem to give a deeper meaning to Seigl's situations and thoughts. These passages always seemed to grab my attention, and reading them made me feel almost a closer connection to Joshua Seigl and his mysterious reclusive personality. I wanted to cite examples of these quotes and the explanations I came up for them.

Easy is the way down to the Underworld: by night and by day dark Hades' door stands open; but to retrace one's steps and to make a way out to the upper air, that's the task, that's the labor. -Virgil

So far in the novel I have seen this quote appear twice, both in the thoughts of Joshua Seigl. This quote seems to be of an inspiration to him. In the beginning, when he is dreading over his new and serious medical condition, Oates says that he smiles at the thought of this quote and it seems to brighten his mood. He goes from being depressed and stressed to a more productive and positive attitude, that it would be perfectly fine to hire himself an assistant. This quote is seen a second time in Chapter 7 when Seigl falls while running in the cemetery. He was calling for help but nobody could hear him, but when he thought of that quote by Virgil, he decided not to panic; he decided that if all else failed he could drag himself out of it. This quote seems to be a motavation for Seigl to be strong and overcome his conflicts thus far in the novel.

I will lift up my eyes unto the hills, whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, who made heaven and earth.

This quote is mentioned in the paragraph where Oates introduces Mount Carmel Hill and the cemetary, it is also the line after the quote I mentioned earlier in the Image Study. This quote is not cited, but it seems to be from a religious text. As I mentioned before, there seems to be some significance in the cemetery, as it is a place where Seigl willingly chooses to spend his time alone. The significance of this quote may be in pattern with Seigl's thoughts on the cemetery, it may bring him peace and maybe even be a place where he spends time thinking about religion.

From Tenedos, on the placid sea, twin snakes endlessly coiling, uncoiling, swam abreast to shore. - Virgil

I came across this second reference to Virgil in the novel referenced in the thoughts of Joshua Seigl on the day of the first visit by Alma, his new secretary. Now that he had an assistant sorting through all of the backed up letters and files he had accumulated over so many months, he decided he would spend more of his time reviewing and translating poetry, specifically mentioning Virgil's poetry. Seigl is clearly a devoted fan of Virgil, reading and analyzing much of his work, and also periodically quoting him. Seigl referenced this quote as an opinion of Virgils writing, "Even in the nightmare tale of the deaths of Laocoon and his hapless sons, what beauty of speech." I think that when he said this, Seigl was relating Virgil's life to his. Like Virgil, Seigl wants to be able to write and translate poetry, even in his times of conflict and despair.

Image Study

"Seigl, to whom nostalgia meant little, like a brilliant autumn foilage to the color-blind, tried to think of a consoling reply, but could not."



At this point in the story, Seigl has just picked up his sister, Jet, from the airport, and is having a conversation about their childhood. Jet recalls how happy she had been living in Carmel Heights, where she is visiting Seigl, and Seigl searches for a reply but is not successful. In this quote, Oates uses a distinct visual image of a vibrant fall forest setting that has been transformed into black and white to give the reader a better understanding of Joshua Seigl's situation.


"Dmitri stood over her and saw with interest that the girl's forearms and the backs of her hands were fiercely marked as with calligraphy, or embroidery; where her hair parted to reveal a portion of the milky nape of her neck, there was a filigree of magenta and dull red. The marks on the girl's hands, across her knuckles, looked like the wispy remains of lace gloves. If these were tattoos, they weren't very vivid or emphatic; they looked more like a miniature language. The needle tracks of a junkie mainlining heroin, morphine, Demerol?"



In this scene, the cafe waiter, Dmitri, is studying the appearance of the Tattooed Girl, Alma. She is introduced as very mysterious, he doesn't know where she came from or who she was; but she has these blemish-looking tattoos scattered on her body. In this visual discription, Oates describes the appearance of these mysterious tattoos, and how unusual and poorly done they appeared.


"Mount Carmel Hill above the river was a glacier hill, a drumlin, so steep that paths and roadways zigzagged from side to side like frantic snakes. The landscape was rock ledges, gulches, chasms, and thin trickling streams that in flood time became raging creeks flowing into the Tuscarora Ricer two hundred feet below. The old Catholic cemetary through which Seigl ran-or, in frigid weather, hiked-on an almost daily basis was a place of beauty and neglect; of wind-ravaged oakes and juniper pines amid a necropolis of grave markers, tombstones, rotted-looking crosses and shabby yet fierce-eyed angels, family vaults in neo-classic design with columns, fluted porticos, solemly carved names, dates, exhorations from a simpler era."



Oates went to great detail in describing the location and atmosphere of the cemetary where Seigl frequently ran and hiked in, and when I first read this passage I wasn't sure why. But now I think that by providing detail of a place Seigl often spends solitary time in, Oates was trying to describe something about Seigl's personality. Using the vivid details of the trees, grave markers, and tombs, Oates seems to be hinting at a sense of "beauty and neglect" in Joshua Seigl's life, as well, that draws him to this unusual spot of solitary enjoyment.


"Adulthood was itself a kind of beard, a shield held up before him. And here was his sister plucking and pulling at it, threatening to expose him."



Joshua Seigl is definitely a person who likes to keep to himself. He doesn't enjoy attention, and desperately tries to hide his life from others, by keeping social conversation light, and even going as far as to not tell anyone about his neurological illness. In this quote, Oates is referring to Seigl's adulthood as a beard that he hides behind. His sister is trying to lower this shield, and it is making him defensive and nervous. In the picture above, the man with the beard is hinding his eyes, his identity. I thought the image well suits the sense of hiding that Seigl also shares with his life.

Rhetoric Study

"Family history as a sort of immense spiderweb spanning part of two continents. If you know spiderwebs, you know that they are spun with infinite precision and patience; according to the spider's genus, they conform to a design; yet individual spiders spin variants of this design. If broken in one area, the web is constructed to hold in other areas. Nine-tenths of a cobweb might be broken yet the one-tenth would remain, holding fast, distinctive. Seigl had thought of himself as re-weaving a spiderweb, re-constructing and re-strengthening. A shimmer of fading impressions had been woven into a work of apparently durable prose, secreted by Joshua Seigl, born 1964."

In this quote, Oates is describing Josuha Seigl's book, The Shadows. As I mentioned before, this novel was about the lives of Seigl's relatives during the time of the Halocaust, they were Jewish peoples who suffered the cruel mistreatment of the Nazzis and many lost their lives. However, Seigl himself did not experience these events firsthand. Stories have been told to him by a few relatives who survived, and that is the only witnessed Seigl has to the events.

Seigl's father is often shown as frequently in Seigl's mind throughout the story so far, and it seems to be a sensitive topic for Seigl. His father was sent to live with other relatives at age 7 because of fear of the Naziis, and he lost much of his family. Ever since childhood, he was always more of a melancholy figure, and his son Joshua seemed to really notice it. Although his father died, I think that one of the main motivation's for Joshua Seigl to write his most famous book was as a tribute to his father.

In the quote posted above, Oates uses a metaphor to relate the family heritage of Karl Seigl when talking about his book. Comparing Seigl's knowledge of Halocaust experiences to the structure of a spider web allowed me as a reader to understand Seigl's knowledge of the topic and that in turn helped me learn something about him as a writer. The book was an imagined account of the tragic events, but he did have some idea of what went on, passed down from his family. Using the metaphor, Oates tells us that writing the book for Seigl was like spinning a web for a spider, it was something he could reconstruct and restrengthen.

A bit further into the novel, I noticed another good metaphor used by Oates to again tell me something about the main character, Joshua Seigl. At this point in the novel, Seigl is recalling a visit to the neurologist, and worrying about his illness; more importantly, people not finding out about his illness:

"For Seigl, desperate not to be found out, just yet, by the community, still more by his relatives, had become inordinately secretive. He'd never shared secrets readily, kept his private life private, but now he was becoming parenthetical: he felt like an eclipsed moon. He was still there, but you couldn't see him."

To describe Seigl's feelings about his situation, Oates compared him to an eclipsed moon, and explained why there is a relation. I really like Oates' comparitive style because it really helped me as a reader to get to know and understand the characters better, through logical comparisons to things less abstract and emotional.

The Story Begins...

"'What the hell is wrong with me? I'm hiring only an assistant, not an heir.' He realized then. That was exactly what he was hiring: someone to outlive him. Joshua Seigl was thirty-eight years old."

Joyce Carol Oates began The Tattooed Girl with a glimpse into the life of Joshua Seigl, a relatively young, succesful, but reclusive, author. His most recognized novel, The Shadows, tells the story of his grandparents experiences in Nazi Germany during the Halocaust. Seigl is certainly described as an attractive man who has had many relationships in his past, but is viewed as more of a bachelor. Oates describes him:

"Seigl was sexually susceptible: less so emotionally susceptible. He'd had a number of love affairs since late adolescence, but had never wanted to marry nor had he been weakened, or flattered, by another's wish that he marry."

He lives in a large house on a hill in Carmel Heights, and seems to be relatively content with just keeping to himself. He's described as always having been self-sufficient, and through his life and career he hasn't let himself depend on others to get him by. But out of nowhere, Seigl has begun to show symptoms of a degenerative nerve disease, one that is not initally diagnosed, but clearly affects his motor skills and mobility. The self-sufficient, reclusive writer realizes that he needs an assistant, even if he doesn't want one. He cannot get all his work done alone, and more regretfully, soon may not be able to manuever around alone.

So the interviews began. Many successful, admiring, intelligent, and seemingly qualified young men come to Seigl's house within a few days to interview for the position of his assistant. Many of them share similar writing interests, clearly admire his work, have excellent educational backgrounds and work ethics, and are even fluent in four or so languages. No matter how qualified and promising each candidate seems, Seigl finds some reason to turn every single one of them down. One particularly promising young man who interviewed, Essler, was everything Seigl wanted in his assistant. Oates described Seigl's thoughts during the interview:

"Seigl wanted badly to grip Essler's tremulous hands to still them and assure him, Fine! You're hired. I'm not a great man but it's fine, I will hire you. Yet hinking, no. Impossible. He means to write about me. He'd devour me alive."

Although Essler was an extremely promising applicant who greatly admired Seigl and his work, Seigl came up with a random and unevidenced reason to not hire Essler, even though Seigl himself admitted later that he had no reason not to. Instead of hiring one of the suitable and educated interviewees, Seigl flightingly hires a young, damaged, uneducated, and mysteriously troubled girl named Alma, who he met randomly one day in a library. Not knowing much about this girl, this young, pale girl with the blemish looking tattooes, he invited her to quit her new job and come be his assistant.

After reading the first few chapters, I wasn't quite sure what to make of Joshua Seigl. He seems to be a smart and responsible person, and reading his thoughts confirmed that. Yet, he seems to be making decisions that are completely opposite to his thought processes. I wonder, as the story goes on, if Joshua Seigl will turn out to be more of a tortured soul; not from his neurological condition, but if something in his past is keeping him from making better decisions for himself because he thinks negatively upon himself.