5 - Women in John Updike's Villages: Back to the Madonna and Whore

Summary

IF JOHN UPDIKE's STATUS as a writer were to be assessed on the basis of the nine novels he wrote after Rabbit at Rest (1990), it is unlikely that he would be considered, as he is, one of the most important American novelists of the half-century period in which he wrote. Few are willing to claim greatness on Updike's behalf on the evidence of such novels as Brazil (1994), Toward the End of Time (1997), Terrorist (2006), or The Widows of Eastwick (2008). To this list one could add Villages (2004), a novel that received an unenthusiastic response from critics and that has generated relatively little academic interest, lending credibility to the prevalent view that the imaginative and literary powers of writers of fiction decrease as they age. To that inevitable impediment of nature, Updike (2004a) added an impediment of his own: although sensing that Villages “might be a bad idea,” he stuck with it, he said, out of “the habit of writing,” adding that “finishing it becomes the only way to get rid of it.”

Despite its perfunctory composition, and whatever its literary merits, Villages offers one unique source of interest in the assessment of the overall Updike oeuvre: it is its author's final lengthy fictional exploration of his great subject, middle-class American adultery in the second half of the twentieth century. And although Updike was drawn to the sexual escapades of the adulterous middle classes in several novels and countless short stories, it is with his 1968 novel Couples that Villages has the greatest affinity: both novels are set in small New England towns, both examine the sexual affairs of the inhabitants of these micro societies, and both have as the protagonist an adulterous male. The two novels, moreover, act as markers and—published thirty-five or so years apart—almost as bookends in Updike's writing on American adultery. Couples, then, will be a necessary and valuable point of reference for this essay on Updike's portrayal of women in Villages. But one cannot consider this topic without first referring to the vast and varied critical response to the representation of women in Updike's fiction from Rabbit, Run (1960) onward.