Updike's Scarlet Letter Trilogy: Recasting an American Myth

UPDIKE'S SCARLET LETTER TRILOGY: RECASTING AN AMERICAN MYTH James A. Schiff University of Cincinnati Though many readers are aware of how John Updike has chronicled America of the 1950s, 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s in his Rabbit tetralogy, few have paid close attention to his other multivolume work concerning America (and a canonical American text), namely The Scarlet Letter trilogy. In 1975 Updike published A Month of Sundays , a novel in diary form in which a spiritually tormented and adulterous minister from Massachusetts is ordered to an Arizona motel for ministers-gone-astray; there he is urged to wrestle with his perverse soul and rub out his "stain."1 Updike later referred to that novel as "Dimmesdale's version" of The Scarlet Letter.2 In 1986 Updike published Roger's Version, an unreliable first-person narrative in which a Harvard professor, a crusty old doctor of divinity named Roger, manipulates and feeds upon the life of a youthful, pious computer science graduate student named Dale. Most recently, in 1988, Updike published the epistolary S., in which an angry North Shore housewife , with a strong predilection for Vitamin A, rebels against her Puritan heritage and patriarchal society by traveling to a desert ashram in Arizona. In these three novels, each told from the perspective of one of Hawthorne's three protagonists, Updike has expanded, updated , satirized, and rewritten Hawthorne's text. That such a bold and intriguing project should go largely unrecognized by the critical community is surprising.3 Though these novels, with the notable exception of Roger's Version, are lighter fare and less substantial than the best of Updike (the Rabbit books, The Centaur, The Coup), the project is significant. Any reconsideration of a canonical text by a major literary figure should warrant attention , particularly in light of the contemporary interest in intertextuality . In addition, the project is significant in that it reveals a more experimental and postmodern Updike, one who shares Nabokov's sense of word play and games. Two questions persist in regard to Updike's project: Why should a prominent novelist explicitly rewrite a story which has already been told so successfully? And why Hawthorne? In answer to the former, Updike has long relied upon the successful work of previous writers.4 His first novel, The Poorhouse Fair (1958), was a futuristic retelling of the story of St. Stephen. Rabbit, Run (1960) sprang from Jack Kerouac's On the Road, Arthurian grail legend, and Peter Rabbit. 18James A. Schiff The Centaur (1963) updated and interlaced a variety of Greek myths, so many in fact that Updike compiled a mythological index as an appendix. The mythic mode, in which a writer appropriates and retells an earlier story or tale which has achieved mythic dimensions, has long been salient in Updike's fiction, though critics have failed to recognize its importance except in The Centaur. And according to Updike, the mythic mode is attractive not only because it offers "a counterpoint of ideality to the drab real level" and provides "an excuse for a number of jokes," but because it demonstrates the "sensation that the people we meet are guises, do conceal something mythic, perhaps prototypes or longings in our minds."5 In answer to the latter question—why Hawthorne?—one discovers in Hawthorne many of the same themes and conflicts inherent in Updike's own writing: the conflict between matter and spirit; a fascination with community and communal experiments; the anxiety and fear of moral damnation; the relationship between sex and religion ; an interest in what Tony Tanner calls the "unstable triangularity of adultery" and its effect upon a community; and the use of ambivalent symbolism.6 The link between the two writers is strengthened by the fact that both have lived most of their lives on the same approximate patch of ground near Boston: Hawthorne in Salem and Concord, and Updike in Ipswich, Georgetown, and Beverly Farms. Hawthorne has become more than just a literary antecedent for Updike; he is a figure embedded in the history and myth of Updike's chosen community, a writer whose town Updike must pass every time he goes to and from Boston.7 Yet in appropriating Hawthorne's text, Updike...