Do With Me What You Will

Elena is a beautiful child who will grow into a beautiful woman. Her beauty is her defining feature and the only part of herself that anyone has ever valued. Horrifically abused as a child, she walks through life in a daze induced by survival instincts and the machinations of her controlling mother.

Essentially sold into marriage to a much older and very powerful man, she becomes an object of adornment in her husbands home. This existence suits her as well as any other until the day she catches the eye of a young civil rights attorney. Jack is already married, but Elena's beauty has the same effect on him that it has on everyone else. He wants to possess her, and they begin an affair.

This is Elena's first experience with making a choice show more of her own. The tryst with Jack isn't even really something she wants, but she wants to make a choice for herself. Naturally, their love isn't easy or simple. They are tormented by their dual lives. Jack's home life is a disaster and it's very possible that Elena's powerful husband might have one or both of them killed. Are they in love? Is this love worth risking everything to have?

I got this book in terrible condition out of a free library. It was falling apart and so I didn't want to take it with me on the train every morning so I kept it in the house and read it in snatches here and there. This year, I felt like enough was a enough and I just needed to hunker down and finish the dang thing.

Ms. Oates' writing is so captivating. I don't ever feel like I'm reading fiction, it's so true to life and the way people think and act. It seems more like the recounting of actual events. There are no pat or easy morals and nothing is simplistic. I at no point knew where this book was going and still don't think I really understand the characters. But they are each so vividly realized. This is a moving story about survival, mortality, and the choice we make to give our life meaning. show less

An excellent portrayal of a woman who has so consistently gone along with the wishes of others (parents, husband) that she barely knows who she is. As we watch the impact of an affair on this woman (Elena), we see how she struggles to figure out what she really wants out of life. Very well written.

Dust-Jacket Blurb

DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL brings to life in Elena Howe the year's most transfixing heroine. A novel with a contemporary setting reflecting today's social upheavals and shifting morality, it is, in the author's words, "a love story that concentrates upon the tension between two American 'pathways' : the way of tradition, or Law; and the way of spontaneous emotion—in this case, Love. In the synthesis of these two apparently contradictory forces lies the inevitable transformation of our culture.

"Romantic love is one of our Western religions and must be respected as such; it must be acknowledged as the violent, unstoppable, rather beautiful force it is. But the West is also a culture of Law : American society will never be show more transformed by stray acts of violence in the streets—it will be transformed only through the courts. And they, in turn, will not be transformed until the men who run them are changed, individual by individual. Ours is still a time of romantic love; the time of a more communal, transcendental love is not yet come. DO WITH ME WHAT YOU WILL suggests such a transformation.

"If what is available to an individual is romantic love, then it must be—it will be—this kind of love that liberates." In the "freeing" from the enchantment of her "self," Elena Howe lives a drama in which, by a continual process, she is raised to a higher aspect of her own being through involvement with a man—a drama of marriage and adultery that constructs an hour-by-hour, thought-by-thought experience both shattering and redemptive. show less