9 - A Month of Sundays

Summary

UPDIKE'S INTEREST IN IMAGINATIVE male lust—and the harm it does to both men and women—continues in his so-called Scarlet Letter trilogy, three novels that reproduce the love triangle at the center of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: a woman is torn between a man of science and a man of faith. Each novel is told, via first-person narration, from the perspective of one corner of the triangle. A Month of Sundays (1975), which pre-dates its two sequels by more than a decade, is narrated by the Dimmesdale figure, a disgraced Midwestern minister named Tom Marshfield. Marshfield writes to the deceptively named Ms. Prynne, the matron of a specialized establishment in the American Southwest where ministers with serious ethical failures are sent. His lust, predictably enough, has temporarily banished him from his congregation, as he has had a torrid affair with his church's (unbelieving) organist, Alicia Crick. This affair incites an almost psychotic jealousy in him when she moves on to Marshfield's effeminate, liberal assistant pastor, Ned Bork (presumably the Roger Chillingsworth figure, though his interest in science is rather limited). Lust is therefore at the center of this novel—almost literally, since in the opening paragraph, Marshfield describes the shape of the motel in which he sits as “an O, or more exactly, an omega.” The narrative is also an O, or more exactly, an omega, and the space in the middle of it is devoted to Marshfield's lust, which is combined in this rather unattractive character with a Christian existentialist fideism. Every single one of Marshfield's actions is motivated by one of these two noetic forces— such that it may make more sense to call them a single force.

From the beginning of the novel, Marshfield presents the male imagination as a defiling force, initially expressed not in sexual but in literary terms. “Though the yielding is mine,” he writes, “the temptation belongs to others: my keepers have set before me a sheaf of blank sheets—a month's worth, in their estimation. Sullying them is to be my sole therapy” (3). In this sense, the blank sheets of the paper represent the female body and soul, onto which the desires and caprices of the male imagination will be transferred. Masculine lust, thus connected with the literary act, becomes a potent creative, or perhaps re-creative, force.