Wife-Wooing by John Updike

 
As an extension of the DMI challenge, I plan on reading at least one short story a day for the entire year. Perhaps this undertaking is way too ambitious and I am setting myself up for failure although it does sound more reasonable than my initial goal to read 1000 short-stories for 2023 (yes, sometimes my obsessive tendencies do get the better of me).

Lately, in between all the other short stories from the DMI challenge, I have been making my way through two collections by John Updike: The Maples Stories and The Early Stories. Some stories appear in both collections while others do not, Wife-Wooing falling into the latter category. Some readers might find his self-indulgent writing style and misogyny off-putting, which is totally valid. This is my least favorite Updike story so far and contains a very different poetic style and mean-spirited tone that failed to resonate with me. 

Even though the first-person narrator and his wife remain unnamed, we know that they are Richard and Joan Maple. Strip away all the purple prose and this story is about a selfish and chauvinistic husband who is super horny and can't wait for his children to go to bed so that he can engage in sexual intercourse with his wife. I am sure many literary aficionados will get a kick out of the reference to a passage from Joyce's Ulysses when the narrator is sexualizing his wife with the same love language spoken by Leopold Bloom.

The title is ironic because the husband is not trying to woo his wife at all. Not once does he make any romantic gestures towards her. He feels that he ought to be rewarded sexually for completing the basic task of bringing home hamburgers for dinner. The narrator even compares himself to a hunter sent out into the harsh wilderness to gather food for his family. The gender dynamics of portraying the man as the provider/breadwinner and the woman who is responsible for raising the children and taking care of the household is made quite explicit. Furthermore, his fragile and bruised male ego cannot accept the fact that his wife has no time for him because she is always so busy with the children. He is the typical concupiscent male, only interested in satisfying his own sexual desires. There is a funny scene when the children are finally asleep and the couple is alone in bed. The narrator prepares to make his sexual advances only to find that his wife is more interested in reading a book about Richard Nixon and then falls asleep. Ouch, talk about rejection. He takes this personally and does not hold back from spewing vitriolic contempt towards his wife the next morning at breakfast:

"In the morning, to my relief, you are ugly. Monday's wan breakfast light bleaches you blotchily, drains the goodness from your thickness, makes the bathrobe a limp stained tube flapping disconsolately, exposing sallow décolletage. The skin between your breasts a sad yellow. I feast with coffee on your drabness, every wrinkle and sickly tint a relief and a revenge. The children yammer. The toaster sticks. Seven years have worn this woman."

Butthurt much? Upike attempts to justify the rampant misogyny and make it tolerable through this kind of elegant poetic prose. Although this approach did not work for me, I can see how others might praise Updike for his creative ingenuity. He does have an uncanny ability to write about despicable characters, especially men, and somehow make it compelling. I much prefer when Updike tones down the stylistic flourishes and eschews with all the misogyny although this is probably unavoidable.