5 - “Unadorned Woman, Beauty's Home Image”: Updike's Rabbit, Run

Summary

Let me, testing the thin ice, begin as far back in time as my memory can reach, with my maternal grandmother.… I still remember the strain on her sharp-nosed face as she stared upward at me while I crouched on a lower branch of a tree. That was one of the things women did, I early concluded: they tried to get you to come down out of a tree. She was afraid I would fall, and that possibility had occurred to me also, so I was half grateful to be called down. But the other half, it seemed, needed to climb higher and higher, in defiance of the danger.

–John Updike, “Women,” Odd Jobs: Essays and Criticism

“America fiction is notoriously thin on women,” John Updike once remarked when asked about how much he sees himself as belonging to an American literary tradition. Asserting “I have attempted a number of portraits of women,” and contrasting his own inclusions with the notable omissions of nineteenth-century male novelists, he ended by speculating, “we may have reached that point of civilization, or decadence, where we can look at women. I'm not sure Mark Twain was able to.” There is looking, of course – and then there is looking. Harry Angstrom has no difficulty looking at women in Rabbit, Run – his gazing at wives and waifs, strangers and sisters, mothers and matrons makes him a consummate voyeur.