[1] The story is set, as are other works in By the North Gate, in Oates's fictional "Eden County," similar to the rural upstate New York community where she was raised.
[2] "Pastoral Blood" is written in the third-person omniscient point of view, with Grace, a young woman, as the focal character.
Unlike his fraternity brothers and their girlfriends, Grace has only kissed Tom and never felt deeply stirred sexually.
[4] She buys a cheap outfit at a discount mart and abandons her expensive clothing in the dressing room, driving off in her late-model automobile.
Grace remembers her early success in high school writing courses, but decides they were quite pointless.
She recollects these lines of early English verse: The hawk had naw lure, and the horse had nae master And the faithless hounds thro the woods ran faster.
She picks up three young men and begins to lose control mentally, crashing the car into a sign near a river-front slum.
[8] "Pastoral Blood" marks the first appearance of Oates's "specifically female terror" that would become a central theme in her fiction.
[9] Literary critic Greg Johnson writes: Oates's women in By the North Gate can succumb to their sense of terror and vulnerability through the trance-like resignation assumed by Grace after her doomed bid for freedom...[10] Johnson adds that "Pastoral Blood" is representative of the author's fiction dramatizing the social and biological factors that "distort and inhibit the healthy development of autonomy and personality in her female characters."
This "feminist allegory" is unique among the stories in the volume in that the protagonist is a member of the upper-middle class which itself contributes to her emotional disaffection.