Tonia Jordan:
Critics Gretchen Schulz and R.J.R. Rockwood state that Arnold is
"created in the mind of Connie . . . exist[ing] there only (520). They
further suggest that Connie created Arnold in order to have an
opportunity to pass into womanhood. Schulz and Rockwood also note "that
Connie, like all young people, needs help as she begins to move from
the past to the future, as she begins the perilous inward journey
towards maturity" (152).
Marilyn Wesley:
In "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" fifteen-year-old
Connie is engaged in the tentative process of defining herself through
a counter-ideology — made up of popular music, shopping center
trinkets, and youthful sexuality — that opposes the belief system of
her parents and her "plain" and "steady" twenty-four-year-old sister (
The Wheel of Love 29) until mock-heroic Arnold Friend introduces her to
the unapprehended corollary to heady independence: that in abandoning
family norms she also loses family protection. To read the moral of
this story as a disparagement of tasteless teenage defiance is entirely
possible. In fact, critics generally interpret "Where Are You Going,
Where Have You Been?" as Connie’s initiation into evil, and in the
ending of the story they discover Connie’s capitulation to the shallow
values of a debased culture (Norman 168, Creighton 118, Wegs 92).
Gretchen Schulz and R.J.R. Rockwood:
Arnold ”is created in the mind of Connie … and that it exists
there only,” they still persist in having Arnold as a demon and Connie
as doomed: "But we know that he is still the Wolf, and that he still
intends to ‘gobble up’ this ‘little girl’ as soon as he gets the
chance. Connie is not going to live happily ever after. Indeed, it
would seem that she is not going to live at all."
Mike Tierce and John Crafton:
While all of these critics insist on seeing satanic traces in
Arnold, they refuse, on the other hand, to see that these traces are
only part of a much more complex, more dynamic symbol. There are indeed
diabolic shades to Arnold, but just as Blake and Shelley could see in
Milton’s Satan a positive, attractive symbol of the poet, the
rebellious embodiment of creative energy, so we should also be
sensitive to Arnold’s multi-faceted and creative nature. Within the
frame of the story, the fiction of Arnold burns in the day as the
embodiment of poetic energy. The story is dedicated to Bob Dylan, the
troubadour, the artist. Friend is the artist, the actor, the
rhetorician, the teacher, all symbolized by Connie’s overheated
imagination. We should not assume that Arnold is completely evil
because she is afraid of him. Her limited perceptions remind us of
Blake’s questioner in "The Tyger" who begins to perceive the
frightening element of the experiential world but also is rather duped
into his fear by his own limitations. Like the figure in Blake, Connie
is the framer, the story creator—and the diabolic traces in her fiction
frighten her not because they are the manifestations of an outside evil
but because they are the symbolic extrapolations of her own psyche.
Rena Korb:
There are still others who read the story as a feminist allegory
which suggests that young women of today, like the generations that
have come before them, are headed into sexual bondage. When Connie, the
innocent female, walks out of the house to meet what may be her demise,
she also represents the spiritual death of women at the moment they
give up their independence to the desire of the sexually threatening
male.
