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 herself in letters, again and again, as a charming lady with “dark hair and rich complexion.”² To avoid escaping the reader's notice, it is so arranged that Sarah's daughter is also called Pearl, and the mother addresses the daughter repeatedly as “myself-child.” The name and the epithet, to be sure, advance considerably their association. Other obvious analogies can be found in the physician husband Sarah has, Charles Worth, who is also practicing medicine in Boston. This figure brings to mind Hester's estranged husband, Roger Chillingworth, a scholar-turned physician. “Worth” is most ironically contrasted with “Chillingworth.” As if to clinch their linkage, the modern Hester Prynne is involved in extramarital sex, also with a priest. The real name of the priest is Art Steinmetz, with a first name identical to that of the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale. These devices, together with many others, naturally invite a comparison between the two novels.

Though in a rush to establish Sarah Worth as a contemporary version of Hester Prynne, Updike deliberately draws the reader's attention to their differences, especially in their sexuality. The title of the book S. seems to indicate the change in social mores when it is brought alongside the scarlet letter “A,” for “S” can stand for sex while “A” for adultery. It seems to signify that what has once been considered adultery is now no more than a form of sex. This reading serves admirably to explain the widely different social reception of their sexual patterns. When Hester Prynne, away from a husband whom she has never loved and who may be at the bottom of the sea, is found to have had extramarital sex, she is put on trial by the severe puritan society as an adulteress and condemned to wear the scarlet letter A for the rest of her life. By contrast, Sarah Worth first dallies with Myron Stern before marrying her husband, then flirts with the gay lawyer Ducky Bradford, and makes love, after leaving her husband, first with the German monk Fritz and then with the Arhat, supreme leader of the Hindu-Buddhist ashram in Arizona,³ besides a lesbian romance with Alinga at the ashram. But she goes scot free because adultery is no longer a crime in most of the states in the U.S.A.⁴ In other words, after shedding most of its conventional stigma, adultery has become a mode of sex. It is law which makes a big difference. If we accept Sarah Worth as the modern Hester Prynne, as Updike has tried so hard to make us accept it, the context governed by law determines the form sex assumes.

This paper examines the relationship between sex and law as it is represented in literature, specifically in S. and SL. The juxtaposition of sex with law can meet with strong skepticism and even denunciation from those sticking to the Foucauldian idea that “we must at the same time conceive of sex without the law, and power without the king” (Foucault, History 91). This idea can be seen from two perspectives. First of all, Michel Foucault takes a stand like this because he believes power is more than just repressive but can be productive. The legal aspect of power, as he argues, is a negative representation of power because it is associated with prohibition. This association often leads to the neglect of the fruitful side of power. Christian sanctions on sexuality, for example, are often cited to stress their repressive aspect. But as prohibition is enforced, there arise at the same time mechanisms from which positive effects can be garnered. The Christian sanctions on sexuality produce penitence. As Foucault notes, “at the heart of Christian penitence there is the confessional, and so the admission of guilt, the examination of conscience, and arising from that the production of a whole body of knowledge and a discourse on sex which engendered a range of effects on both theory … and practice” (Power/Knowledge 186). No matter whether it is religious or juridical, the imposition of sanctions usually does not result in a simple suppression, but in most cases leads to unexpected ramifications. When Foucault looks on law purely in the light of repression, it is understandable that he refuses to speak of sex with law.

But we do not have to follow Foucault in viewing law as merely repressive. Rather, we can turn to the aspect of law as a major force in determining the formation of sexual norms, that is, law as a shaping force just as context shapes form. This formulation finds its support in Emile Durkheim, who suggests in The Division of Labor in Society, “Law and morality represent the totality of bonds that bind us to one another and to society, which shape the mass of individuals into a cohesive aggregate” (331). Here law is regarded as part of the total bonds that not only bind, but also shape. In the process of establishing restrictions, law and morality induce from these regulations the mode or modes of conduct in individuals which facilitate the emergence of a cohesive group. This format moves beyond the perception of law as merely an apparatus of repression and, instead, places emphasis on its shaping force. But in asserting its shaping force, it does not conceive of law as a separate system of regulation, but rather as a set of privileged ideas with binding power in coordination with public sentiments in the form of morality. The picture of an interpenetration between law and morality is significant, especially when read within the context of the modern capitalist society in which law gains an autonomous status as a separate realm from traditional morality.

Durkheim, Max Weber, Georg Lukács, Jurgen Habermas, and Antonio Gramsci, among others, have explored in one way or another the emergence of law as a rigid system disconnected from morality. In The Theory of Communicative Action Vol. 11, Habermas points out that modern law “is uncoupled from ethical motives,” oberving that “legal norms replace the prelegal substratum of traditional morals to which previously, in their metainstitutional role, legal norms had reference” (309). Weber traces the formation of law as a system to the demand of calculation and rationalization in a capitalist society. In the classic essay “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat,” Weber elaborates on this idea:

The modern capitalist concern is based inwardly above all on calculation. It requires for its survival a system of justice and an administration whose workings can be rationally calculated … according to fixed general laws, just as the probable performance of a machine can be calculated. It is as little able to tolerate the dispensing of justice according to the judge's sense of fair play in individual cases or any other irrational means or principles of administering the law.

(qtd. in Lukács 96)

The rigidity of the judicial system as it grows rational and systematic makes it hard to cope adequately with the real life which is basically irrational and changing. To be calculable and systematic, it has to abandon empiricism, tradition and material dependence. Hence there emerges the growing dichotomy between law as a fixed system and the everyday world as basically irrational and changing. By contrast, “the ‘law’ of primitive societies … can be flexible and irrational in character, renewing itself with every new legal decision” (Lukács 97). Lukács further attributes the standardization of law to the fetishism of commodity,⁵ itself the result of reification. Reification, arising out of the commodification of products, indicates the divorce of phenomena “from their economic bases and from the vantage point from which alone they can be understood” (Lukács 95). In other words, independent of their contexts, these phenomena form a chain of signification, deriving from among themselves systems of knowledge. The standardization of law is part of this process, with itself forming a system separate from morality to which it has prior reference.

It is from this perspective that I would come back to round out our discussion about Foucault's stand on law. Foucault clearly has sensed the detachment of law from the social context in Western society, though he argues differently from the scholars mentioned above. In The History of Sexuality, he sees the form of law and the overall unity of domination not as something given at the outset, but rather as “the terminal forms power takes” (92). Here law is opposed to power in a way similar to that between law and morality. Law is looked upon as a rigid system crystallized from power since the former is static and unitary while the latter dynamic and multiple. In Foucault's conception, “power is the multiplicity of force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate,” with the possible existence of “disjunctions and contradictions” among them (Foucault, History 92). Law obviously fails to reflect the workings of power. The gap finds its expression in a statement Foucault made in an interview: “The law was intended to defend pudeur (decency); nobody ever knew what pudeur was” (Politics 275). The code demanding decency on sexual behavior does not gear up with the ever-changing and the multiple, even contradictory, sense of the word in the world. That is why he declares that “the juridical is increasingly incapable of coding power, of serving as its system of representation” (Foucault, History 89).

To resolve the problem of law's growing irrelevance, Gramsci suggests that the concept of law be extended. In “State and Civil Society,” Gramsci prescribes his rescue of law:

[T]his concept will have to be extended to include those activities which are at present classified as ‘legally neutral,’ and which belong to the domain of civil society; the latter operates without ‘sanctions’ or compulsory ‘obligations,’ but nevertheless exerts a collective pressure and obtains objective results in the form of an evolution of customs, ways of thinking and acting, morality, etc.

(242)

Here is a vision of law reunified with morality. Under this model, law is not only compulsory; it is also educatory. On the one hand, it represents rules to be followed. Just as Habermas has observed, “modern compulsory law … functions as a means for demarcating areas of legitimate choice for private legal persons and scopes of legal competence for officeholders” (Theory 309). It regulates the exercise of power and controls the type of knowledge to be produced and disseminated. On the other hand, it plays the role of an educator through the dispensation of awards. “The ‘prize-giving’ activities of individuals and groups, etc,” as Gramsci suggests, “must also be incorporated in the conception of the Law” (247). When meritorious activities are rewarded, just as when criminal actions are punished, public opinion can thus be shaped. In the form of “a collective pressure,” coupled by its compulsory power, the extended concept of law can help bring about “an evolution of customs, ways of thinking and acting, morality, etc.” (247). The relationship between sex and law can be viewed in this light. Law may not single-handedly govern sexuality. This is evidenced by droves of people like Hester Prynne having extramarital sex despite strict bans. But it surely can induce certain patterns of behavior just as a context can help shape certain modes of fashion. From the above discussions about law, we can now say that law and morality work hand in hand to bind and shape individuals into a cohesive group. In the following discussion of law's shaping force on sex, morality will be taken into consideration.

In a context drastically different from that of the seventeenth-century puritan settlement in Boston,⁶ the pattern of sex is obviously changed. The scarlet letter A, which has once struck Hawthorne as a major symbol to be made use of, is turned by Updike into puns and playful allusions. Sarah Worth is continually pushing her mother to take vitamin A for her eyes, skin and thyroid. Sarah addresses her female lover Alinga as “Dearest A,” and together they live in an “A-frame.” Instead of wearing a scarlet letter A on her breast as a sign of her adultery, Sarah conceals a mini tape-recorder in her bra to document the actual goings-on of adultery. By contrast, the scarlet letter A in Hawthorne's masterpiece is said to throw “a lurid gleam along the dark passage way of the interior” (75) when its wearer is led back into the prison. After her release from the prison, Hester is communally isolated as a social outcast, with the scarlet letter A she wears hunted down by children as an object of witchery. Pearl, the child born as the result of the adultery, is a product of the scarlet letter A. Her birth is regarded as the breach of a great law. The chest of the Rev. Arthur Dimmesdale is said to bear the inscription of the letter, the sin of which is the source of his agony and torture. The symbol A in SL is embroiled in legal and moral lssues.

The puns on and playful allusions to A in S. represent a drastic change in context, and with it a change in value systems. The reference of A to vitamin A or to the housing facility A-frame indicates that adultery is no longer seen as a heinous crime that can shake the social foundation as it once did. Sarah's lesbian relationship with Alinga, whom she addresses as “Dearest A,” is a further testimony to the social tolerance toward sexual orientation. The mini tape recorder concealed in the bra contrasts sharply with the scarlet letter A worn on the breast. Sarah Worth, free from the fear of facing the consequences of adultery, deliberately retains its evidence with the aid of electronic equipment so that she can use it, if necessary, as a means of blackmail. Adultery is exempt, to a certain extent, from the specter of the law which used to scare off potential offenders of the sanctity of marriage. Unlike Hester Prynne, who is victimized by adultery, Sarah turns the tables on the male. As a form of disgrace, the accusation of adultery can seriously tarnish the image of public officeholders and religious leaders, who are usually male, because both are expected to hold high moral standards. All these changes in sexual mores are suggested in S. as the result of a revolution, which has allegedly brought down “all the old barriers” (15).

To put it into perspective, we can trace back to the sexual revolution heralded by Alfred C. Kinsey (1894-1956) and a series of big changes in the 1960s and thereafter. Kinsey's study of American sexual behavior did a lot to temper the moral outrage against extramarital and deviant sexual patterns. The rise of the Beat Generation in the 1960s, with its lax sexual behavior, made a big dent in Americans' sense of decency in sex. On the one hand, this decade witnessed an explosion of new manners and morals: “the generation gap,” “the death of God,” “black consciousness,” “the counter culture,” “the hippies,” and “sexual permissiveness.” On the other hand, America was jolted by waves of anti-war protests, racial turbulences, and various protest movements. As Theodore Solotaroff, editor of American Review, puts it,

the Sixties have probably been the most cataclysmic decade in American history since that of the Civil War. There have been wars since then, but none as bitterly unpopular, divisive, or faithshaking as the one in Vietnam. There have also been serious social conflicts since America's first full confrontation with the evil of racism, but none so rife with violence, hatred, and terror as its second. In the wake of these two traumas, the one intricately and ominously reinforcing the other, has come a vast sense of doubt … about what used to be called … the American way of life.

(162)

The impact of the Vietnam War and racial violence on American society might be shrugged off by some people as a little exaggerated. But it is fair to say that, owing to them, “the presumption of consensus and homogeneity, of a universal ‘freedom’ available to all in America, was shattered in the 1960s” and, on account of the explosion of new manners and morals, “it was unmistakable then that the cultural and intellectual climate of the country had changed dramatically” (Trachtenberg 6). In the middle of these big changes, a more permissive attitude toward sexual behavior dawned on the American society. It arose partly out of the gradual loss of hold the traditional value systems had once had over the public. During a period of time that age-old assumptions were seriously challenged, the moral code that sustained or was built upon them inevitably underwent dramatic transformation.

The loosening of conventional restrictions on sexuality can be further explored from the mode of production that predominated during the period. America in the 1980s, when S. is set, was an advanced industrial civilization and a fully commodified society. Daniel Bell calls it the post-industrial society, a society featuring the production of knowledge and technology. “The student revolts of the late 1960s,” according to Bell, “were, in part, a reflection of the new power of an adversary culture reacting against the growth of a science-based society” (118). The rise of the adversary culture or counter-culture can be viewed in many ways, besides the fact that their existence can be traced to time immemorial.⁷ The perceived threat to the existing value systems might be cited as a possible cause because, as Habermas argues, the value of unskilled labor power, in relation to the scientific-technical progress, plays an ever smaller role (Toward 104). In addition to the spread of technical knowledge, the rise of the manager in industry and the bureaucrat in government signals the advent of rational administration organized around the principle of functional efficiency. The lifestyle of the economy, technology, and occupational system “was shaped by the principle of calculation, the rationalization of work and of time, and a linear sense of progress” (Bell 477). The principles are manifested in “the rational permanent enterprise, rational accounting, rational technology and rational law” (Weber, General 354; emphasis added). The traditional ways of life are subject to a fundamental change, if not threatened with extinction.

The situation is further complicated by a series of phenomena growing out of the post-industrial society. The Puritan ethic, long underlying the American moral code, was destroyed by a hedonistic way of life actively promoted by the capitalist logic of mass production and mass consumption. “The rising standard of living and the relaxation of morals became ends in themselves as the definition of personal freedom” (Bell 477). The promotion of pleasure accompanied by the relaxation of morals stands opposite the lifestyle of the occupational system, technology, and economy, on the one hand, and to the conventional American way of life as defined by the Puritan ethic, on the other hand. Under this context, a clear trend emerges that sexuality is reasserting itself by gradually shaking off the fetter of a moral code dictated by Christian restrictions. The traditional stigma associated with it begins to flounder and lose its grip. The trend is paradoxically “abetted” by the growing rationalization and functional efficiency which are the major characteristics of the systems. As Zbigniew Brzezinski observes, “social problems are seen less as the consequence of deliberate evil and more as the unintended by-products of both complexity and ignorance, solutions are not sought in emotional simplifications but in the use of man's accumulated social and scientific knowledge.” (qtd. in Bell 77-78) The rational law, as a product of this concept, does not treat adultery as an evil to be exorcized. “And sexuality will no longer be a kind of behavior hedged in by precise prohibitions” (Foucault, Politics 281). Sexual permissiveness comes into being partly as a result of the lifting of legal restrictions. But from what we have examined, it is clear that the relaxation of morals also plays a vital role.

In S. we can obviously see law working hand in hand with morals in shaping Sarah Worth's sexuality. Or, to be more precise, the post-industrial society has created the kind of law which no longer dictates sexual mores. Law has become more a tool to monitor activities in the public sphere. As Sarah states in a letter to her mother, the consumer society needs law to maintain the order of a society in which people are kept “in a constant state of material agitation” (S. 102). A major function of the law is to keep “the agitated people” from violating “others' property rights” (S. 102) since hedonism, created by the capitalist logic of mass production and mass consumption, has to be regulated. With its focus placed on “demarcating areas of legitimate choice for private legal persons and scopes of legal competence for officeholders” (Habermas, Theory 309), modern law does not actively intervene in moral matters. What used to be a morally charged issue like adultery now has “oddly little legal recourse” (S. 185). This is demonstrably clear in Sarah's response to her husband's accusation of deception, desertion and adultery: the courts and the whole world “are bored with couples,” and “if a couple doesn't take an interest in itself no one else will” (S. 185). The non-intervention of law in moral issues like adultery certainly has an influence on sexual mores.

But law's widening gap with morals makes it hard to rely solely on the rational law to shape and guide sexuality. The dichotomy between law and morality is fully reflected in Sarah's quarrels with her husband. In the eyes of Charles Worth, their marriage is guaranteed by law once the contractual relation is established by consent. To defend the sanctity of marriage, the nuptials are performed in a way like the singing of a contract, with each of the two parties swearing to follow their agreement to the letter, that is, to be faithful to and stand by each other even in trying times. The contractual relation is in keeping with the basic spirit of the law. From this perspective, it is understandable that he claims “damages to his mental health and professional reputation” due to Sarah's “desertion,” and threatens to sue for “alienation of affections” (S. 154). But from the aspect of morality, sheer reliance on the expression of consent without a moral core is not enough. As Habermas points out, “It is not enough that the contract shall be by consent. It has to be just” (Theory 81). Therefore, “twenty-two years of mental and emotional cruelty you with your antiseptic chill have inflicted on me” (S. 11-12), as Sarah complains to her husband, frees her from the bondage of the marriage in a way because it is not a contract supported by justice. The fading sex life between the couple, his emotional desertion, and the discovery of his indulgence in erotic pleasure with little nurses and receptionists, give her additional reason not to abide by the contract. But justice is not a timeless concept. It changes with time. America in the 1980s clearly does not sanction what Charles has done to his wife. But law gives him a ground to formulate his complaint against his wife. A glaring discontinuity exists between law and morality.

With law withdrawing from the sphere of morality, what Gramsci calls the civil society steps in to create ideologies which will in turn shape and guide the public sentiments. The various ideological apparatuses, to borrow the words of Louis Althusser, or institutions from the civil society, in the terms of Gramsci, include church, mass media, schools, family, culture, and trade unions. In S. there is a passage which deserves to be quoted at some length:

Never mind that “brainwashing” is a nebulous term that could with justice be applied to our elementary-school introduction to the history and the capitalist, “freedom-loving” values of the United Sates; or to the religious rubrics pressed upon the child not only by church, synagogue, and mosque but by home influence and certain sentimental strains of popular entertainment; or to the massive inculcation of consumeristic hedonism sought by the relentless barrage of television commercials and printed advertising. Not to mention the habituation to violence and vice that follows from even modest exposure to the televised dramas sandwiched between the insidious commercials; and the absolutely pervasive and irresistible rape of adolescent minds by the nihilism and eroticism of popuar music; and the more specialized forms of brainwashing undergone in military and corporate indoctrination programs.

(S. 217-18)

Here are a number of apparatuses striving to influence and shape the minds of the people. The first group of them includes school, religion, and family, which seek to preserve traditional moral values. In the case of Sarah Worth, her first dalliance with Myron Stern has been brutally stopped by her family under the pretext that an outsider like him might push her off “the creaky old bandwagon of respectability” (S. 98). Her marriage to Charles Worth, then a prospective physician, is urged upon her by her family on the ground of the respectable status of a doctor. As Sarah tells her daughter, “I was nineteen when Lee Harvey Oswald shot them dead—and then by twenty I was married to your father and working too hard to support him really to notice that a revolution was going on, and all the old barriers were down” (S. 15). To support her husband through his medical education at Harvard, she drops out of Radcliffe at the outset of her junior year and helps pay his tuition fees with the trust fund her father has set up for her. The willingness for self-sacrifice can be attributed to the family education instilling in her the idea of woman being inferior to man: “My genitals had always been presented to me subtly as a kind of wound” (S. 15). The castration complex is revealed vividly in Sarah burying her face in Charles's pajamas searching for his faint, stale sweat when left alone at home to while away the long afternoons. “Even the scent of your urine,” she confides to her husand in a letter written on the plane taking her away from home, “and of that unmentionable other lingering in the bathroom into the middle of the morning was comforting—doorways into another being, another body like your own, helplessly a body” (S. 6-7). The fetishism of the male body and even its excreta represents patriarchy at its peak. That explains why Sarah has to wait twenty-two years to confront her husband, pitiably by being out of the house when he comes home from work.

Charles Worth, who “took up right where [Sarah's] parents left off, as enforcers of the stale old order” (S. 98), always has a tremendous ability to instill guilt in his wife. Women are conditioned to think of themselves as number two, like Eve and Avis. Women are treated as impure creatures who may distract men from God. As an embodiment of these thoughts, Charles denies her freedom to develop her potentials as a woman, making sure that her “function is simply to hold still, to be the same day after day” (S. 181). All of these are done in order to fit her as a cog into the system in which man reigns supreme. It is a system in which a man like Charles can womanize when getting wealthy and prominent, even though the wealth and rank are acquired at the expense of the wife. Left alone at home most of the time, a wife like Sarah, with experience limited to her husband for twenty-odd years and “a bit of hand-holding and snugging before that” (S. 92), can only bury her head among her husband's pajamas, thinking of his body while smelling his sweat. As Sarah tells her daughter, “I had no climax when you were conceived; I rarely did in those virtually virginal days” (S. 170). The sexually frustrating and spiritually depressing lift is a yoke she bears after so much of her parents' emphasis on respectability and so much of her husband's indoctrination about “the stale old order.”

And behind her parents' preaching about respectability is an attempt to prove self-worth, which serves as a sign of divine election in Puritanism. To Sarah's parents, Puritanism gives them the sense that “piling up earthly goods” signifies “divine election” (S. 102), because it proves self-worth through the idea of respectability. The idea of respectability predisposes them to be inordinately tied to ancestral achievements and to their own set of people as New Englanders. That idea even leads her mother to dislike Sarah's broad hips because she suspects they are inherited from an aunt whose husband gave her syphilis and who died insane. Sarah feels that her womanly self is something of a vexation for her own family since she does not live up to their idea of respectability: “puritanism in my parents had dwindled to a sort of housekeeping whose most characteristic gesture was to take something to the attic because it was undistinguished or vaguely reminiscent of some relative we preferred to forget” (S. 263-4). The sense of oppression in a puritan family like Sarah's arises out of the fact that it admits only things tied to something. It lacks the sweet and refreshing feeling she has while visiting her Jewish boyfriend. “Your porch always felt thrillingly untied to anything,” she tells Myron Stern, “and there was this tumbing feeling in your apartment … abundance, a sweetly crammed feeling” (S. 263). It is sweet, thrilling, and abundant because, not tied to anything, it allows everything to find its place there. But her dalliance with Myron is stopped by her parents because he does not fit their Puritan idea of respectability. She is urged to marry the prospective physician because he meets their Puritan criterion of respectability. Sarah complies with the wishes of her parents in marrying Charles Worth because she has no confidence in finding a place in any world but “the atrophied Puritan theocracy” (S. 111) in which she has been raised. It is under the sway of Puritanism that she succumbs to the respectable bondage of being a doctor's wife, leading a life of socially sanctioned frivolity.

The atrophy of Puritanism can be attributed to the coming of the post-industrial society. The new world of services and computer communication represents a socio-technical dimension vastly different from the preceding stage, bringing along new value systems. In S., Puritanism's discontinuity with the post-industrial society is suggested in a letter Sarah writes to her mother:

Someone of your age or even mint trying to select stocks tends to be disastrous because we have no real grasp of this new world of services and computer communication and go for solid old things like steel and rivets and coal oil and GM that are losers. Real things nowadays are losers. Things like fast food and videotapes that people use only for a minute and then forget are where the money is, somehow.

(S. 28)

Here “solid old things” and “real things” are characterized as “losers” which people raised under Puritanism select. Steel, rivets, coal, oil, and cars are associated with the industrial society, which “is primarily fabricating, using energy and machine technology, for the manufacture of goods” (Bell xii). The social structure of that stage “was shaped by the principle of calculation, the rationalization of work and of time, and a linear sense of progress,” fused in turn with a character structure which accepted “the idea of delayed gratification, of compulsive dedication to work, of frugality and sobriety,” sanctified by “the morality of service to God and the proof of self-worth through the idea of respectability” (Bell 477). In other words, it was a socio-technical stage perfectly integrated with the value system of Puritanism. The loss of value in “solid old things” and “real things,” hence, signifies the growing irrelevance of Puritanism in a new world where “things like fast food and videotapes that people use only for a minute and then forget are where the money is” (S. 28).

The pattern of “use and forget” in consumer behavior, reflecting the rhythm of post-industrial economic activities, triggers modes of culture that are basically in conflict with Puritanism. Eroticism, hedonism and nihilism are dominant themes in popular music and various other activities in the apparatus of culture. Together with drug abuse, they contradict “the idea of delayed gratification, of compulsive dedication to work, of frugality and sobriety,” ideals approved by Puritanism. The new mode of behavior and culture can be traced to the capitalist logic of mass production and mass consumption. Television commercials and printed advertising, in keeping with this logic, swamp every family with various forms of sale promotions. “No other people in the world is expected to get as whipped up over wanting as we are” (S. 102), Sarah tells her mother in a letter. But measures are taken so that people will not be agitated so much as to violate others' property rights. It should be noted that law is used as a tool to ward off possible trespassing. The process of agitating and guarding (or denying) leaves the created desire ungratified. Psychologically, “if you can't hold on to a thing you have less motive to acquire, and that's what drugs and all the crime with them are doing, de-materializing America to an extent” (S. 102). Reflected in the behavior of consumers is the pattern of “use and forget.” It is a symptom of the loss of the center, the disappearance of fixed value. As an echo of this trend, popular music, absolutely pervasive and irresistible, fills adolescent minds with nihilism and eroticism.

The orgies, lesbian romance, and other extramarital sex Sarah abandons herself to in the Hindu-Buddhist ashram may be looked upon as part of the rising tide of nihilism and eroticism. Nihilism recalls the Nietzschean idea of abundance in possibilities if not tied to anything. Likewise, in throwing away “a façade of unimpeachable propriety,” eroticism frees up “full and limitless being” confined “within the trammels of separate personalities” (Bataille 109, 21). With its preaching of sensual gratification, as it is represented in S., Hindu-Buddhism moves in to partly fill the void created by Puritanism's gradual loss of hold in the face of consumeristic hedonism. Its rise can thus be examined from within the mechanism of the post-industrial society in America. Sarah's encounter with this religious sect signals a turning-point in a life dictated by Puritanism. Her sexual indulgence in the ashram, as a revolt against Puritan asceticism, in a way corresponds to the rise of nihilism and eroticism touched off by the capitalist logic of instrumental reason.

The Hindu-Buddhist ashram Sarah flees to after abandoning her husband teaches that “perfection can be gained by satisfying all one's desires” (S. 158). Out of this corollary come praises for copulation. Buddha is said to have “conquered Mars, death, by the technique or maithuna of fucking” (S. 116). In the various teachings of the Arhat, supreme leader of the ashram, sexual love is valued above all else. The Arhat even goes so for as to proclaim that “sexuality and spirituality are forms of one energy” (S. 64). In the ashram, orgiastic excesses are performed as “acts of worship” (S. 158), as “love in its many forms” (S. 101). Amidst praises for sexual joy, women are viewed as “gods,” as “life,” as “active nature,” and as (the name Sarah is given in the ashram), “Kundalini”—the female energy allegedly existing in all things. This view runs counter to the Puritan idea that “Women are impure. Women distract men away from God” (S. 117). As a reification of the changed perspective, the woman assumes the active role in coitus. “The men always sit and she is always on top.” As Sarah reports, “I was shy at first but now I like it, it's being up to me, even when there's all these men in one of these groups” (S. 54). Even in her love-making with the Arhat, it is Sarah that does all the work. The active role she assumes in the orgies and in her sexual encounters with the Arhat is something unknown to her in her twenty-two years of marriage to Charles Worth. The sexually fulfilling moments she has in the ashram are denied her in the Puritan theocracy in which she has been raised.⁸

To compare Sarah's sexuality with Hester Prynne's, we can start by examining the differences between how they are received after violating the sanctity of marriage. Sarah is greeted with apparent disapproval from her mother, brother and daughter, besides her husband's bluff of suing her for deception, desertion and adultery. Their reactions are limited to emotional outpourings. This is suggested in a letter she writes to her daughter Pearl: “you say my mother has written lachrymosely to you … I do believe she has goaded your Uncle Jeremy into writing me a somewhat harassing letter as well” (S. 171; emphasis added). Charles Worth's threat of lawsuit never follows through. In her correspondence with Gilman, the lawyer hired by Charles, it is mostly about the settlement of their property. Law no longer meddles with “a question of human guilt, passion and anguish” (S. 71) as it once did.

In SL, adultery is a sin that evokes fierce moral and legal condemnations. There is law both in the Scripture and the statute-book that deals specifically with the emotionally charged issue of adultery. Thus Hester Prynne, when discovered to have had extramarital sex, is brought before a tribunal that could have given her a death sentence if they hadn't given her case special consideration: “[T]his woman is youthful and fair, and doubtless was strongly tempted to her fall”; and “as is most likely, her husband may be at the bottom of the sea” (SL 69). It is clear that the judges are not bound by the law which will in the capitalist period develop into a rational and rigid system. Hence, they can hand down rulings on individual cases. Hester is condemned to stand on the platform of the pillory for three hours, and thereafter to wear on her bosom a scarlet letter A for the rest of her life. The sentence is a commutation, judging by the bystanders' demand for her death: “This woman has brought shame upon us all, and ought to die. Is there not law for it?” (SL 59). But as a mark of shame, the scarlet letter extends the Puritan judicial penalty into the field of everyday life in innumerable ways. “Every gesture, every word, and even the silence of those with whom she came in contact, implied, and often expressed, that she was banished” (SL 87). Since public sentiments gear up with law in enforcing punishments, as the narrator in SL puts it, “a penalty which in our days would infer a degree of mocking infamy and ridicule might then be invested with almost as stern a dignity as the punishment of death itself” (SL 58).

The harsh treatment Hester receives as a result of adultery can be attributed to the context she is placed in. Seventeenth-century Boston is a settlement where “the sentence of a legal tribunal had but confirmed the verdict of public sentiment” (SL 57). It is a period of time in which legal norms have reference to “the prelegal substratum of traditional morals,” compared with modern law which “is uncoupled from ethical motives” (Habermas, Theory 309). At that epoch of pristine simplicity, matters of slight public interest and of little intrinsic weight are strangely mixed up with the deliberations of legislators and acts of state. The interpenetration between law and public sentiments as well as between public and private spheres gives an intolerant religious sect like Puritanism a chance to meddle with “a question of human guilt, passion and anguish” (SL 71). For a community to whom “religion and law were almost identical” (SL 57-58), the Puritanic prohibition of erotic pleasure is turned into a law that harshly punishes a transgression like adultery. The judicial penalty is, in turn, reciprocated in the everyday world and, together, they form a network of sanction that can banish an offender of the Puritan ethic from the community.

Hester Prynne and Sarah Worth are both women who dare to defy social norms and “become anything other than [an] obedient servant” (S. 171). In the process, they have a brush with the law of their respective societies. The difference in the stage of development in their society determines the kind of law it is and the kind of relationship the law has with the moral code. Their sexualities are shaped and treated accordingly. In seventeenth-century Puritan Boston, law coordinates closely with morality in actively intervening in a highly emotional issue like adultery. Hester is thus condemned to wear the scarlet letter A, which has “the effect of a spell, taking her out of the ordinary relations with humanity and enclosing her in a sphere by herself” (61). Law effectively forces on Hester a life of sexual abstinence after committing adultery. By contrast, Sarah indulges herself in sexual orgies at the ashram and continues to seek sexual gratification after leaving that place. But she remains free from the sanctions of law or social ostracism, except scattered regrets and disapprovals. This is due to America's moral landscape in the 1980s and law's detachment from private and emotional issues as a result of capitalism's growing sophistication.

But the imposition of sanctions, as noted in our earlier discussion, usually does not result in a simple suppression. The case of Hester Prynne is itself an illustration of prohibition leading to unexpected ramifications. When led to the platform of pillory, Hester repells the town beadle, who represents in his aspect “the whole dismal severity of the Puritanic code of law” (SL 60), by an action filled with grace and natural dignity. She steps into the open air as if by her own free will. When standing on the platform for public humiliation, she looks so radiant and captivating in her mien and attire that, with the infant at her bosom, she evokes the image of divine maternity. “The very law that condemned her—a giant of sterm features, but with vigor to support, as well as to annihilate, in his iron arm—had held her up through the terrible ordeal of her ignominy” (SL 82). Law can annihilate but it can also invigorate. Hester does not simply succumb to pressures. When released from prison, she finds herself ostracized by the whole community. The result of social isolation, however, is a stronger resolution to defy the law and the moral code of the Puritan settlement.

Hester's defiance takes two forms. On the one hand, she leads a most ascetic life and gives whatever she can save to those who need help. Her readiness to help finally wins the public's approval and acceptance. The “A” of the scarlet letter changes in the public's perception from its original signification of “adulteress” to that of “angel.” On the other hand, sanctions on sexuality provide her with a chance to review the worldly regulations from another perspective and thus to escape from its bondage. “For years past she had looked from this estranged point of view at human institutions, and whatever priests or legislators had established. … The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dare not tread” (SL 189-90). There reflections in turn lead to fruitful results. She is thus able to cast away the whole system of ancient prejudice: “The world's law was no law for her mind” (SL 158). Near the close of the book, with the wisdom acquired through years of isolation and reflection, Hester assures women in her neighborhood of her firm belief that “at some brighter period … a new truth would be revealed, in order to establish the whole relation between man and woman on a surer ground of mutual happiness” (SL 245). Her belief in a happier future of women arises from the insight she has gained from trials and tribulations.

Unlike Hester Prynne, Sarah Worth does not come up with a rosy picture of women's prospects. After leaving the Hindu-Buddhist ashram, she reads in a hotel a battered old college textbook in zoology. It gives a grim depiction of women's situation: “the simultaneous eagerness of the female for sexual stimulation and her inherent fear of body contact with any other animal, including a male of her own species” (S. 268). The dilemma of the female boils down to the pull between two powerful instincts: “they want to escape and at the same time they want to greet the male” (S. 268). Sarah finds its description about the lady gray squirrels very touching because it seems to be telling the story of her life. Her escape to the ashram is made out of a protest against the unfair treatment she has received at home. But when she gets wind that her estranged husband will marry her best friend Midge, she is plunged into a rage and writes him to say negative things about her. After experiencing orgies in the ashram, she hurries to arrange a tryst with her first boyfriend soon after leaving the Hindu-Buddhist sect. Unlike Hester and her self-denial, she is in hot pursuit of material gains. She bargains with Gilman, the lawyer appointed by Charles Worth, over the share of property she shall have in a divorce settlement. She even steals from the ashram coffers when working as the chief accountant there. Sarah seems to be acting instinctively to gratify her desires. With no law to restrain her sexual ventures, she seems to be sinking into a rut from which she cannot extricate herself.

This paper has discussed the literary representation of sex and law in two novels. Sarah Worth and Hester Prynne, respectively the heroines of S. and The Scarlet Letter, share some traits which make them the archetype of defiant female spirit,⁹ though they have some differences at the surface. They each rise against an oppressive marriage which denies them an equal status. Their rebellion takes the form of adultery, which flagrantly violates the Puritan moral code. But their consequences are very different. Our studies of their differences invite reading sexual norms as archetypes changing with the context regulated by law. In S. the invitation dangles before the reader all the way through the book, especially when Sarah Worth declares in a tape to Midge, “We're all just masks anyway, don't you think? I mean masks of the archetypes” (S. 214). Near the end of the novel, contexts are compared to “those holograms” that “show you different things or the same thing from a different angle when you very slightly move your head” (S. 254-55). The idea of a certain aspect of woman being induced by the framing is there. Law, or rather the expanded sense of law, clearly dictates the type of context which will in turn affect the status of women.

Notes

1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (New York: Penguin, 1980). References to the book appear in the text as SL.

2. John Updike, S. (New York: Fawcett Crest, 1988) 5. Further references to the book will appear in the text as S.

3. According to James A. Schiff, the ashram as depicted by Updike “is a miscellany of Buddhism, Hinduism, human potential movement, Zen meditation, encounter group therapy, Tantric sex, yoga, and a variety of California youth religions and psychologies” (95).

4. According to American Jurisprudence, 2nd ed., prosecutions for adultery have become rare in modern times though adultery continues to be a statutory crime in several states. “The Model Penal Code also completely removes fornication and adultery from the area of criminal law, taking the position that private immorality should be beyond the reach of the penal law” (Vol. 2, 1147).

5. Karl Marx coins this term in Capital to refer to a phenomenon arising from the replacement of use value by exchange value. According to Marx, in the religious world, “the productions of the human brain appear as independent beings endowed with life, and entering into relation both with one another and the human race” (Capital 321). Marx calls this fetishism. The point of this is that what has been created by the human brain has acquired an independent status, instead of being part of the social conditions under which they have been produced.

6. The reconstructed Puritan settlement in The Scarlet Letter may not be true to seventeenth-century Boston. Hawthorne admits in “The Customs House” essay that “it was a folly, with the materiality of this daily life pressing so intrusively upon me, to attempt to fling myself back into another age, or to insist on creating the semblance of a world out of airy matter, when, at every moment, the impalpable beauty of my soap-bubble was broken by the rude contact of some actual circumstance” (SL 46). Though not a faithful reconstruction, it still retains the outstanding features of that society—for example, the avoidance of erotic pleasure as requested by Puritanism of its believers.

7. The Dionysian in the Greek period and the Saturnalia in the Roman Age are two prominent examples of the adversary culture or counter-culture.

8. Updike's depiction of Hindu orgiastic excesses and Puritan asceticism needs to be further elaborated. As Max Weber states in his The Sociology of Religion, “Hindus have played a leading role in dervish orgies as far afield as Bosnia” (182). Dervish orgies are ecstatic dancing and whirling or chanting and shouting that lead to orgiastic excesses as a quest for salvation. By contrast, as Weber observes, “only in the Occident, when the monks became the disciplined army of a rational bureaucracy of office, did asceticism directed toward the outer world become increasingly systematized into a methodology of active, rational conduct of life” (182). Then he moves on to discuss the unique, inner-worldly asceticism of Protestantism: “This religion demanded of the believer, not celibacy, as in the case of the monk, but the avoidance of all erotic pleasure …” (183). It is pretty clear that “the avoidance of all erotic pleasure” proceeds from “rational conduct of life.”

9. James A. Schiff argues that “Sarah Worth, a literal descendant of the Prynne family, is a contemporary Hester: rebellious, strong-willed, tough, energetic, defiant, and practical. … Like her ancestress, Sarah has been stifled, imprisoned, and betrayed by a patriarchal system, and she too is in search of an alternative lifestyle in which she may assume a ‘freedom of speculation’” (Schiff 96).

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