"Eros Rampant" in Updike's 1960s New England Trilogy
Résumé
This essay maps what turned out to be a pivotal nexus in Updike’s fiction by revisiting the texts which form a kind of erotic trilogy around the question of adultery and sexual liberation in 1960s suburban America. Though they belong to different genres—romance (emphasized by the subtitle) for Marry Me, the Victorian novel for Couples, and magic realism for The Witches of Eastwick—the three novels probe the issues of love, lust, and sex, domesticity and adultery, against the psychological and social consequences of this sexual utopia.
