"There Was Once" by Margaret Atwood and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" by Joyce Carol Oates are two very different stories. "There Was Once" was held in a conversational tone, while "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is more of a short story. In "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" the main character Connie, is made to resemble a rebel teenager trying to escape her reality and live some sort of fantasy. Similar to Connie, the main character in "There Was Once" is also rebelling against the adult trying to tell her a short story, but instead of trying to live in a fantasy, she is trying to live in reality. While looking at the use of literary devices, such as, punctuation and word choice, one will notice being unrealistic is dangerous for women. 

Punctuation is an important literary device that is used in both "There Was Once" and "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" In "There Was Once" the reader will notice the short story is being told in a conversational tone between two female characters. One female character is telling the other female character a fairy tale, but the listening female character disagrees with the story she is being told (Atwood 305). For example, the hyphen at the beginning of each line shows an apparent conversation between the two characters. Throughout the story there was a constant use of the same hyphenated conversation, yet, it became more of a disruptive conversation. For example, the storyteller states, "I was just describing -- " (Atwood 305). When Atwood places the hyphen after the word "describing" it shows an interruption coming from the female listening to the story. The female listening to the story is disagreeing with the story being told to her, she does not like the theme of the story being about a fairytale instead of something realistic to the world she lives in now. Next, storyteller says, "There -- " (Atwood 306). This short phase, which happens to only be a word, is one of the most important lines in the whole conversation. This hyphen is not used to begin the fairytale but it is used to end it. The hyphen after "there" is not another interruption from the listener, but a dramatic pause from the storyteller (Atwood 306). Throughout the story the storyteller always had a change to improve the story for the listeners approval, yet, this time the storyteller has ran out of changes.

The punctuation in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" is also a very important literary device to be analyzed throughout the story. In "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" the story was told more from the narrators point of view, but, the use of quotation marks show the building sense of danger for the main female character being unrealistic. For example, in the beginning of the story the quotation marks were rarely used. Oates states, "Stop gawking at yourself. Who are you? You think you're so pretty" (Oates 333). This array of questions is coming from the mother of the main character Connie. The importance of the quotation marks in this phrase is that they are only one of the two used sets of quotation used at the beginning of the story. Quotation marks are seen scattered through the story, the use of quotation marks increases from being used only a few times at the beginning of the story to being used in every line until the end. The story went from told in a subtle manner to a dangerous conversational manner. The use of quotation marks increased as the main character Connie is having a conversation with a boy she has only seen once. For example, "But -- how come we never saw you before" (Oates 339). In this phase, the reader will see the use of the quotation marks becoming more of a conversational use. The main character Connie is having a very edgy conversation with a boy that has driven up to her house. The hyphen shows Connie having an apparent pause and moment of thought between the constant questioning of the boy that appeared at her house. The hyphen shows Connie's internal realization that her unrealistic thoughts have finally put her in danger (Oates 339).  In "There Once Was" the danger of being unrealistic as a woman was less serve as in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" In "There Once Was" the severity of being unrealistic is shown as making the woman storyteller appear uneducated or not educated enough to think of a realistic story to tell to the listening female character, yet, in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" the danger of being unrealistic is more serve, serve enough that the main character Connie's life is in apparent danger. 

By analyzing the word choices in "There Once Was" the reader will be able to notice the mental risk of being an unrealistic female. For example, the storyteller of the story began to tell the fairytale by introducing the main poor female character that lived in the forest (Atwood 305). As the storyteller continues the story the listening character intervenes to make the story more realistic. For example, "Forest? Forest is passe, I mean, I've had it will all this wilderness stuff" (Atwood 305). When Atwood uses the word "passe" it is used to put a more educational and realistic twist on the otherwise unrealistic story. Atwood could have used phases, such as; "out of date" or "old" instead she decides to use a more educational vocabulary. Next, Atwood states, "What's this was, once? Enough of the dead past. Tell me about now" (Atwood 305). In this statement the storyteller is no longer speaking, the listener has now taken over the conversation. When Atwood italicizes "was" "once" and "now" she is putting an apparent emphasis on those three words (Atwood 305). "Was" and "once" are shown as words that are unrealistic, the listening character had grown tired of hear of the past and events that she continuously proved unrealistic (Atwood 306). The listening character would rather hear a realistic story of something that could relate to the present or the "now" (Atwood 306). Jinnie Templin also has a growing disagreement with unrealistic fairytales, "I began to witness the flaws that were deeply embedded within my favorite bedtime stories.  Love isn't usually as perfect as the epic adventures make it out to be, and those seemingly perfect fairytale endings actually end up 50% of the time in divorce" (Templin). 

By analyzing the word choices in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" the reader will understand the serve danger of being an unrealistic female. Oates states, "when she opened her eyes she hardly knew where she was" (Oates 336).  The word "hardly" allows the reader to conclude that Connie had been away in fantasyland for so long she almost forgotten where she was at the time. For Connie, daydreaming and living in her fantasyland a place where she can escape and think about boys, she does not realize that fantasyland is not real and will not protect her from her quickly approaching reality. Jon Barron states, "According to a recent study, people spend close to half of their waking hours occupying their thoughts with anything but the task at hand.  And, as it turns out, spending time daydreaming does nothing to make us happier individuals" (Barron).  Next, Oates states, "She watched herself push the door slowly open as if she were back safe somewhere in the other doorway" (Oates 346). In this statement Connie's daydreams have finally caught up with her reality. Oates uses the statement "back safe somewhere" to allow the reader to understand everything that was happening was now reality, no longer is Connie allowed to escape back to her "safe" place, she is now faced with a dangerous reality. Connie wanted to live in a fantasyland with boys that would be "sweet" and "gentle" to her (Oates 336) however by the time she woke from the fantasy she wanted, she was already in danger, danger that she could not escape from.

Each story had a very different way of showing the danger of being an unrealistic woman. Whether it was going from a conversation tone to a very disruptive tone as in "There Once Was" or going from a less serious story to a very dangerous story as in "Where Have You Been, Where Are You Going?" Although, in "There Was Once" by Margaret Atwood the danger of being an unrealistic female was not as serious or serve as it was in "Where Have You Been, Where Are You Going?" by Joyce Carol Oates the danger of being an unrealistic woman is still very apparent.
