Joyce Carol Oates has often been charged with sensationalizing and commercializing issues of poverty and violence. The present paper seeks to prove that Oates's powerful depictions of America's disenfranchised and violence-ridden world is no mere ploy of sensationalism or catharsis but a leitmotif that enables her to expose the lack of dignity and the absence of basic human rights in the lives of the powerless. In her recent novel, The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007), Oates forcefully articulates the problematic of racial discrimination, economic deprivation and violence that characterized the status of immigrant Jews in post-World War II America.

The despicable condition of the Schwart family in The Gravedigger's Daughter is strikingly similar to what developmentalists like Martha Nussbaum call the absence of all `capabilities'. Nussbaum's `capability approach', which assesses human development not through crude measures such as Gross Domestic Profit (GDP), but by measuring an individual's growth vis-à-vis the quality of life, can be seen as an appropriate tool in the analysis of literary texts such as Oates's, which often deal with economic and cultural deprivations. By reading The Gravedigger's Daughter in tandem with Nussbaum's development ethics, the present paper seeks to establish how Oates's radical social critique calls for reinstating the basic rights of the poor and an immediate revision in the field of human development.

Joyce Carol Oates's oeuvre departs significantly from that of other contemporary American novelists in sharply focusing on poverty in the US. Noted for its prolificity and protean nature, Oates's fiction nevertheless retains humanism as a core value, and in that, her critique of social evils like class difference is noteworthy. Given Oates's prolific oeuvre that can be sometimes, with good reason, characterized as popular literature, it is only natural that the novelist has been charged with issues of sensationalizing poverty and violence. However, this paper seeks to establish that the primary motive behind her often populist fiction is a need to provide a voice for the marginalized, especially for women from the lower classes. Unlike working-class fiction that focuses primarily on issues of upward mobility and agency, Oates's engagement with the underprivileged masses in society does not entail the writing of protest literature. Instead, she focuses on the poor to examine their basic lack of universal human rights, and often celebrates their human potentials as they emerge strengthened from the vagaries of life. Notably, Oates is a contemporary author who, despite her humble origins (she is a descendant of Irish and Hungarian immigrants and her father was a dye designer), went on to become a mainstream writer and educationist. In fact, Oates's literary career, in many ways, epitomizes her as a successful pursuer of the American dream. And in bemoaning the loss of the basic tenets of this dream, the novelist presents us with an insider's perspective.

Dedicated to Oates's grandmother Blanche Morgenstern, her recent novel The Gravedigger's Daughter (2007) narrates the tale of Rebecca Schwart who, in transcending abject poverty and violation, gains tremendous wisdom in her journey from girlhood to womanhood. Powerfully highlighting the issues of destitution, cultural displacement, and loss of identity, Rebecca aka Hazel Jones's narrative is one of sheer endurance. The present paper intends to highlight how Oates uses the literary discourse in The Gravedigger's Daughter to critique America's social inequalities. In doing so, Oates's authorial voice parallels the developmental and theoretical persuasions of contemporary humanists like Martha Nussbaum. Though Oates's fictional world is primarily American, her ability to embrace the pluralities of human culture at large and her knack for offering practical solutions based on human will and endurance, bring a universal appeal to her works, while underlining her ideological kinship with welfarists like Nussbaum.

English Studies Journal, Gross Domestic Product, GDP, Human Development, Racial Discriminations, Developmental Theories, Gross National Product, GNP, Economic Development, Market Economy, Social Hostility, Socio-economic Impoverishment, Nussbaums Development Ethics.