12 - “Marching through Boston,” “The Stare,” “Report of Health,” “Living with a Wife,” and “Slippage”

Summary

LATE IN COUPLES, when Georgene Thorne discovers that Piet Hanema has rekindled his affair with Foxy Whitman, she muses on the enthrallment of men to women: “Of Piet she expected nothing except that he continue to exist and unwittingly illumine her life. She had willed herself open to him and knew that the chemistry of love was all within her, her doing. Even his power to wound her with neglect was a power she had created and granted; whatever he did he could not escape the province of her freedom, her free decision to love.” Updike's fiction is undeniably male-centered, especially in the 1960s, and yet it does grant to women a particular kind of power: the power to enthrall and to ensnare the male mind. This is the peculiar tenor of the feminine imagination, as Updike sees it: it can control and redirect the male imagination, which must either resist or be overthrown. In “Marching through Boston” (1966), for example, we find the power dynamic in the Maples’ marriage shifting from Richard toward Joan, who has reimagined herself as a protestor for African-American civil rights—as, in fact, a leader in that movement: “She spoke on the radio; she addressed local groups. In garages and supermarkets he heard himself being pointed out as her husband.” He has lost his ability to define himself and is now defined negatively. Simone de Beauvoir laments in La deuxième sexe (The Second Sex, 1949) that every woman “finds herself living in a world where men compel her to assume the status of the Other. They propose to stabilize her as an object and to doom her to immanence since her transcendence is to be overshadowed and forever transcended by another ego which is essential and sovereign.” In effect, Joan's virtue has temporarily transformed her into the “essential and sovereign” member of their marriage; Richard is thus subordinated and made into the Other, defined by her actions. What is more, he begins to discover that he exists primarily in the imagination of his wife, and that her imagination does not allow him to be the hero he imagines himself to be. When he meets Joan's former psychiatrist, for example, he “felt himself as a putrid heap of anecdotes, of detailed lusts and abuses” (226).