Word: hester
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...level, the novel contains a series of knowing winks to Hawthorne's novel. Updike holds back from calling the novel A after the famous red letter which symbolized adultery and was emblazoned on Hester Prynne's dress. But he does send the adulterous Mrs. Worth to live in an A-frame house on an ashram in Arizona with a man named Ahrat. Updike, though, is not merely referring to that earlier novel, he is modernizing...
Sarah's real rebellion is her rejection of two centuries of American, and specifically of WASP, tradition, heritage and religion. Her predecessor, Hester Prynne, violates propriety by having a child out of wedlock with a priest. But sex out of marriage is not a taboo in Sarah's world. Her betrayal of society comes from aligning herself with the Other, defecting to Eastern thought and to the Occidental religions that a xenophobic society is apt to consider loony and dangerous...
...brought low by carnal temptation. The image may seem to leap from today's headlines, but Jimmy Swaggart and Jim Bakker are only the latest in a long line that stretches back to the fictional Arthur Dimmesdale, yearning for Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. After such falls from grace are revealed, the question always arises: Were the sinners truly devout souls brought to perdition or fiendish fakers from the start? That is precisely the issue raised by American literature's most exuberant portrait of religious hysteria and hypocrisy, Sinclair Lewis' 1927 Elmer Gantry...
...unfrocked New England minister named Roger broods over the infidelity of his wife. This time out, the author makes his indebtedness perfectly clear. S., Updike's 32nd book and 13th novel, opens with two quotations from The Scarlet Letter and with a heroine who is an unmistakable incarnation of Hester Prynne, the most famous adulteress in American literature. Sarah Worth (nee Price) boasts a Prynne among her ancestors and, like Hester, a daughter named Pearl. This mother too is a fallen woman, running away from Massachusetts and her physician-husband of some 20 years to join a charismatic Indian guru...
Goodman, whose earlier play "Hester Meets Huck Finn" was presented at Lincoln Center last year as part of the Showcase for the National Advancement of the Arts, is also the director...