'An Expected Gift': Literary Resumption of Marital Intimacy from Donne to Updike

Abstract

JOHN Updike was awarded a lifetime achievement award by the Literary Review in November 2008, following a fourth consecutive nomination—this time for The Widows of Eastwick.1 The merits of Updike’s depictions of intercourse have therefore attracted a degree of notoriety, but the present note concerns the more conventional award winning short story ‘Wife-Wooing’ (1960),2 a story in which the much-anticipated sex act which the whole story builds to is elided rather than described. To appreciate the full significance of what is at issue in this story, however, it is necessary to view it within the context of its literary antecedents. To that end this note will show how this story can be read as a twentieth-century reworking of John Donne’s Elegy ‘To His Mistress Going to Bed’ (the dating of which has been the subject of much conjecture, but which was first anthologized posthumously in 1654).3 In making this case, I would suggest, following Katherine Duncan-Jones, that Donne’s poem should be understood as having a later date of composition than that of around 1593–6 which it is traditionally given in order to make sense of its concerns. Read in a full seventeenth-century context, the poem can be seen to be thematically linked with the plot of the twentieth-century short story by Updike. The main concern of Donne’s poem has been overlooked by critics until Duncan-Jones, but by examining the later work through the precedent that her analysis provides, the main thematic matter of the short story becomes apparent.4 In the case of both works the idea that men are seeking sexual intercourse is transparent, but it is the precise occasion of their desire, which is the resumption of sexual intimacy after the abstinence occasioned by the birth of a baby, which is not normally drawn out. As well as thematic similarities, the two works share formal characteristics: both are personally narrated by husbands, and rather than being a conventional realist short story ‘Wife-Wooing’ with its opening address of ‘Oh my love. Yes’,5 which resonates with Donne’s ‘Come, Madam, come’ (1),6 has more in common as Donald J. Greiner contends with a ‘lyrical meditation’.7 The husband’s monologue is packed with poetic diction because as John B. Vickery writes, ‘his sexual arousal is stimulated by his thoughts of Ulysses as well as the imitation of Old English verse’.8 In this way Updike’s ‘Wife-Wooing’ when considered as a standalone vignette of a moment in a marriage, as it was first published, rather than as part of the story sequence into which it was later merged, depicts concerns which accord completely with its seventeenth-century antecedents.9