SOURCE: “John Updike's S.” Tamkang Review 25, no. 3-4 (spring-summer 1995): 379-405.

In the following essay, the critic examines the relationship between sex and the law as treated by Hawthorne and Updike in their respective novels The Scarlet Letter and S.

In John Updike's S. (1988), set in 1986 America, there are passages and characters pointedly reminding the reader of its intertextual relationship to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850),¹ which has as its setting 17th-century Puritan Boston. The epigraphs of the novel, to begin with, are drawn from the masterpiece by Hawthorne. The first epigraph is about Hester Prynne emerging from prison for a public display on the scaffold. In it, the heroine of SL is depicted as having “dark and abundant hair” and a face beautiful from “richness of complexion.” The attempt at linking Sarah Price Worth, the heroine of S., to Hester Prynne, is most clear when the former describes...