What can Connie symbolize in "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"Joyce Carol Oates's "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?"

Inspired to write her short story "Where Are You Going?
Where Have You Been?" after reading an account in Life magazine of
a strangely influential young man who lured and then killed several girls in Tucson,
Arizona, in the early 1960s, Joyce Carol Oates's character of Connie represents the
naive, superficial, and self-centered pretty teen-aged girl with Romantic illusions,
caught between childhood and adulthood.  (Some critics even go so far as to say that she
represents Eve, or spiritually unenlightened humanity.)  As the selfish, naive, and
pretty teen, Connie is a fusion of the materialistic and symbolic world in her
duality:

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Everything about her had two sides to it, one for
home and one for anywhere that was not home:  her walk that could be childlike and
bobbing or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearing music in her
head....

Unconcerned about
the other members of her family, Connie is consumed with her "trashy daydreams"; when
she is with her friends, she talks in an exaggerated manner, high and
breathless,

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which made everything she said sound a little
forced whether it was sincere or
not.

But, the boys who pay
attention to Connie, whom she enjoys ignoring, fade from a face to "an idea." Her
complacency in her beauty leads the naive Connie to lose touch with reality because
"[S]he knew she was pretty and that was everything." In her delight with the
materialistic world in which beauty is so highly valued, Connie also creates a symbolic
world in which music "made everything so good."  It is this symbolic world that Arnold
Friend, himself a preternatural character, invades.  And, he invades it because in her
duality, Connie has allowed illusion in the form of music to enter and make her
susceptible to evil.