11 - S.

Summary

A MONTH OF SUNDAYS is presented as a diary; Roger's Version is a traditional first-person narration, albeit one that imagines itself to be omniscient. S. (1988), the conclusion of the Scarlet Letter trilogy, is Updike's only contribution to the venerable genre of the epistolary novel. And whereas A Month of Sundays is narrated by the Dimmesdale standin and Roger's Version by Roger Chillingworth, S. comes to us from the point of view of a twentieth-century Hester Prynne—Sarah Price Worth, who abandons her upper-class doctor husband to live on an Arizona ashram with the Arthat, a Hindu spiritual leader. S. thus gives us what its two predecessors did not: a woman's point of view. Even so, the movement of the novel remains largely the same as the earlier novels: a woman is forced into the imagination of a powerful man, only ultimately to resist that imagination by the force of her own material existence. Here, however, Updike is much more blatantly concerned with female power, although that power largely fades in the face of the male imagination.

The opening sentences of the novel announce Updike's interest in female power. In A Month of Sundays, let us remember, Tom Marshfield expresses his power through his writing, which is figured as an instrument of the male imagination. Fittingly, then, S. figures the female imagination as a form of silence. As she flies west to the ashram, Sarah writes to her husband: “The distance between us grows, even as my pen hesitates. The engines drone in the spaces between words, eating up the miles, the acres of the flat farms in big brown and green squares below the wing as it inches along.” Women, as Sarah sees it, tend to exist in absence and in silence. This is why she argues that the word daughter, “with those mysterious silent letters in the middle,” is “a much more satisfying word” than son (16). Words—both spoken and written—are the tools of men. And so when Sarah writes, it is necessarily a transgressive act. Female power begins in silence but grows by co-opting male language. Her lawyer, she tells Charles, “sent me these forms requiring both our signatures and I rummaged through your desk for one of those big black felt-tips you always use” (6).