The Apocrypha of The Maples Stories: John Updike’s Fe/Male Points of View Reconsidered

ABSTRACT

John Updike’s notorious penchant for using the male point of view should not be attributed to the author’s alleged misogyny; on the contrary, his careful handling of male and female perspectives deserves close re-evaluation. After tracing how the young Updike struggled to incorporate a female point of view in his early fiction and, for a time, settled on employing a male perspective in his mid-career stories of Richard and Joan Maple, this essay revolves around a female-voiced story “Killing” (drafted in 1975 and published in 1982), scrutinizing its publication history and the archival materials associated with it. As a result, we see that the story demonstrates Updike’s successful attempt to explore a woman’s interiority as well as shows an example of his subtle craftsmanship, involving his use of the pronoun us at the sto-ry’s dénouement. Moreover, “Killing” foreshadows Updike’s female narratives in his late phase, especially Seek My Face (2002), where the similar technique is extensively utilized to portray two women’s incompatibility and their following reconciliation.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. Although technically this comment is attributed to Wallace’s anonymous female friend, “Ostensibly he believes these things himself, which raises questions about the authenticity of such attributions,” as James A. Schiff points out (“John Updike and David Foster Wallace” 17).

2. The collection was later published under the title The Maples Stories (2009) with a sequel story, “Grandparenting,” which is not covered in this essay.

3. In his introduction to Rabbit Angstrom: A Tetralogy, Updike himself admits that Joyce’s “influence resounds, perhaps all too audibly, in the book’s several female soliloquies” (RA viii).

4. As Begley suggests, the postponement of publication was, for one thing, due to the roman-à-clef quality of the novel. Since the book had drawn its material from the extramarital affair that the author experienced himself, the publication had to wait until his divorce from his first wife was completed, and the affair with the other woman was a fading memory (249–50). Updike said to an interviewer, “Some [reasons] were personal, but in addition I just didn’t think the book, well, ‘came off’” (Reilly 134).

5. There are various published versions of the Maples stories, including those first published in magazines, those printed in several collections during the 50s-70s, those prepared for The Early Stories (2003), and those further revised for The Maples Stories (2009). In this paper, I principally refer to The Maples Stories (MS) unless otherwise noted.

6. The last two sentences from The Awakening were italicized in The Early Stories (2003) whereas the earlier text provided them put in quotes (unitalicized).

7. This sentence, which reminds us of Updike’s use of female soliloquies in Rabbit, Run, was also added by the author for the text of The Early Stories.

8. David Crowe takes up the scene where Richard “unthinkingly matched” Joan’s gait on the beach and argues: “This instinctive bodily mutuality is … emblematic of an inward mutuality that becomes evident” in the latter part of the story (266).

9. The publication chronology in this paragraph is based on Christopher Carduff’s note in Collected Early Stories (923).

10. William Maxwell to John Updike, 31 Jan. 1975. John Updike Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. MS Am 1793 (986).

11. Peter J. Bailey’s speculation proves right: “although the story [“Killing”] is more fractious and explicitly erotic than the Maples stories tend to be, [the couple] resemble the Maples in many ways” (37).

12. Updike’s composition in 1975 was obviously inspired by the death of Leslie Talbot Pennington, his first wife’s father, in December 1974. Perhaps the story’s plain identifiability also induced the author to withdraw the manuscript, just as he shelved Marry Me for years.

13. The title “Killing” also suggests a connection with the Maples stories. As Verduin points out, the eleven stories out of the eighteen in the 2009 collection “appear under gerundive titles … and therefore constitute a tacit homage to similarly named novels by Henry Green: Living, Party Going, Loving, Concluding, Doting” (“Gestures of Reflection” 140). Green was one of Updike’s favorites.

14. Unless otherwise noted, the page references are to the Early Story version of the story (referred to as ES).

15. John Updike Papers, Houghton Library, Harvard University. MS Am 1793 (986). All the materials cited here belong to this item.

16. The finished version turned out much longer. All the complete manuscripts that remain in the archive are 15–17 pages long.

17. In “The Holy Land” (a Bech story composed in January 1979), Updike employs a similar device. When Bech’s wife says, “We’d love to [live in Jerusalem],” the Jewish protagonist feels he has to “step on this creeping ‘we’ of hers” and barges into the conversation: “My wife speaks for herself” (Bech Is Back 87)

18. Updike changed “one of the Maples” into “someone” in the undated typescript that should be placed between the January 20, 1975, and May 27, 1976 versions. This revision serves to superimpose the father’s voice on the speech, further obfuscating and enriching the story. In a later typescript, Updike considered revising “someone” into “a male voice” (and decided not). The change would have foregrounded the father-daughter relationship too much.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the JSPS Overseas Challenge Program for Young Researchers (No. 201880039).

Notes on contributors

Haruki Takebe

Haruki Takebe is a PhD candidate at Kyoto University, Japan. His work has appeared in The John Updike Review and Notes and Queries.