John Updike: Rabbit, Run Modernism

(1960)

John Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short-story writer, art critic,
and literary critic.

Inspiration and historical context

“ My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class. I like middles. It is

in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.[7] ”

Updike said that when he looked around in 1959 he saw a number of scared dodgy men who
could not make commitments, men who peaked in high school and existed in a downward
spiral. Their idea of happiness was to be young.[8] Thus Rabbit, Run was born. In 1959
America the Late modernism period was coming to an end, and Updike inherited the cultural
legacy of Modernism. With this legacy, that lacks spiritual vitality and potent erotic
traditions, Rabbit has no vocabulary to give voice to his sexual and spiritual conundrums and
feelings. In the novel the norms of Modernism are being replaced with those of a new era
with a desiccated view of spirituality and a revaluation of eroticism, things previously held
constant and in some cases repressed in traditional American thought.[9] Updike creates a
character that is neither an intellectual nor a poet, but simply is an average middle class man
who is overwhelmed by the shifting world around him. Unable to cope with feelings he
cannot accurately express and dissatisfied with religion and the moral value structure
presented to him, Rabbit chooses flight.

The title matches the popular World War II-era song "Run Rabbit Run".

Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class", Updike was
recognized for his careful craftsmanship, his unique prose style, and his prolific output – he
wrote on average a book a year. Updike populated his fiction with characters who "frequently
experience personal turmoil and must respond to crises relating to religion, family
obligations, and marital infidelity".
His fiction is distinguished by its attention to the concerns, passions, and suffering of average
Americans, its emphasis on Christian theology, and its preoccupation with sexuality and
sensual detail. His work has attracted significant critical attention and praise, and he is widely
considered one of the great American writers of his time. Updike's highly distinctive prose
style features a rich, unusual, sometimes arcane vocabulary as conveyed through the eyes of
"a wry, intelligent authorial voice" that describes the physical world extravagantly while
remaining squarely in the realist tradition. He described his style as an attempt "to give the
mundane its beautiful due".

In this sense, Rabbit, Run is a clever subversion of an old US motif: the man on the run from
the suffocating effects of society, as if a tragicomic western had lost its way and ended up
trapped in southeastern Pennsylvania. But this tradition is also endlessly troped as men
escaping the domestic snares of women, a tradition which Rabbit, Run cheerily joins. From
Huck Finn lighting west for the Territory to escape Aunt Polly’s efforts to “sivilize” him, to
Charles Ingalls, with his itch for travel and his wife who insists they build a little house on
the prairie for their girls, to Sal Paradise and Dean Moriartytaking off on the road: US
popular culture is riddled with stories of men who yearn to be free, and the women who yearn
only for them not to be. These are doubtless very enjoyable stories for men to read, but for
women they can be quite irksome. Always cast as the smothering presence, the old ball-and-
chain pinning men down who would otherwise roam wild, women end up symbolising
dependence and paralysis while men get to symbolise independence and liberty. I know
which one I prefer.

Characters: Harry aka Rabbit, his wife is Janice,his son Nelson, his daughter who will die
Rebecca, his lover who is an ex-prostitute is Ruth, Lucy Eccles is the wife of Reverend
Eccles,

At the beginning of the novel, 26-year-old Harry climbs into his car and leaves his depressed,
pregnant young wife, Janice, and heads south with dreams of Floridian paradise. He stops for
fuel and directions; instead of being given a map, he is given advice that sums up the novel:
“The only way to get somewhere, you know, is to figure out where you’re going before you
go there.” Drift is not an option; Harry, who shares a rabbit’s proclivities for procreation, also
shares its legendary inability to win the race after starting out in front. The imperative of the
title means that some unseen voice is telling Rabbit to run, perhaps suggesting his internal
compulsions, or some kind of higher power – whether of the authorial or spiritual kind –
urging him on. But by 1960, there was nowhere to run: the frontier was well and truly closed,
and all that was left for men was the mock heroism of suburban tragicomedy, running in
circles.

Part of the problem for women reading Rabbit, Run is that Updike made the decision to have
Harry choose between two stereotypes: after returning home Harry leaves Janice again, this
time moving in with a prostitute. Janice, the asexual mother, is small, childish, bony; the
prostitute Ruth is voluptuous, large, welcoming and fecund. There are those who argue that
Updike is ironising this stereotypical choice, showing how narrow and foolish it is, and it is
true he gives both Ruth and Janice slightly more complex interior lives at points in the novel.
But Updike doesn’t imagine them really having any desires that are not centred around
domesticity or keeping a man, whether because, as in Ruth’s case, they fall madly in love
with him or, as in Janice’s case, they merely want to avoid social humiliation. Either way, to
judge it against a modern metric, it’s fair to say Rabbit, Runfails the Bechdel test (requiring
that two or more female characters discuss a topic other than men).

In 1960, Richard Gilman described Rabbit, Run as both a “grotesque allegory of American
life, with its myth of happiness and success”, and a “minor epic of the spirit thirsting for
room to discover and be itself”. It remains the case that only male characters get to be treated
as allegories of US life, grotesque or otherwise. Mankind can denote all humanity;
womankind can only denote all women. Surely part of “the curse of incompleteness that had
haunted American writing” was its inability to recognise the full humanity of half of
humanity – the female half; and if Updike is to be put in the same class as Henry James, then
he should be measured by the same standards.

When Henry James looked at women, he imagined that they thought like him. When Updike
looked at women, he imagined that they thought about him. For me, questions about
misogyny in literature are of limited efficacy at best; I prefer judging a novel by how well it
thinks about the problem it has set itself. Rabbit, Run is a novel ruminating on the costs of
patriarchal society that is partly limited by the very limits it depicts, but cannot quite
overcome. The incompleteness remains, while the novel endures.

Harry is a Toyota car salesman. His politics are fairly reactionary, his attitude to women and
children unprogressive. He is not an articulate man: as such, he's the opposite of Updike.
And yet, by incredible literary sleight of hand – by sliding in and out of Harry's point of view,
and by describing what Harry is thinking in ways that Harry himself could not describe –
Updike is able to make this ordinary bloke into a great seer, a prism through which all life
can be refracted. It's an unrivalled literary magic trick.

Plot

Twenty-six-year-old Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom runs home one evening to find his wife,
Janice, who is seven months pregnant, at home – without their son Nelson and without the
family car – drinking, again. They argue, and he leaves to fetch the car and the boy, but along
the way decides to permanently hightail it out of Mt. Judge, Pennsylvania and drive until he
gets to the beach. He drives in circles and ends up back in Mt. Judge the next day. Instead of
going home, he goes to see his high school basketball coach, Marty Tothero, who introduces
him to Ruth Leonard, a sexually experienced woman about his age who has dabbled in
prostitution. Rabbit and Ruth hit it off famously, and Rabbit decides to drop his car off for
Janice, grab a few clothes, and shack up with Ruth in the city of Brewer, of which Mt. Judge
is a suburb.

While leaving his old pad he is pursued by Jack Eccles, the minister of Janice’s family’s
church. Eccles and Rabbit develop a friendship of sorts, which mostly consists of Eccles
trying to convince Rabbit to return to Janice while battling (and coaching) him on the golf
course – and of Rabbit getting into some heavy flirting with Eccles’ wife, Lucy.

Two months pass. Rabbit and Ruth are for the most part happy. Rabbit has left his work as a
MagiPeel Peeler salesman and found fulfillment in the widowed Mrs. Smith’s fabulous fifty-
acre garden. Yet, signs of trouble are emerging in the Rabbit and Ruth household. Ruth is
about a month pregnant, but hasn’t told Rabbit yet. Ruth and Rabbit go out for drinks one
night and things get ugly. Rabbit feels that Ruth took the side of her old lover, Ronnie
Harrison, when Ronnie was clearly giving Rabbit a hard time. Rabbit interrogates Ruth as to
her sexual history with Ronnie, and then, upon finding out that she gave Ronnie a blowjob,
requires Ruth to give him one to make up for her traitorous behavior. She does, and a little
later that night Reverend Eccles calls to tell Rabbit that Janice is in labor.

He leaves Ruth to go to Janice and soon becomes the proud father of one Rebecca June
Angstrom. While Janice is recovering, Rabbit moves back into their old apartment with his
son Nelson, and cleans the place up while spending quality time with the boy. Janice gets out
of the hospital, and things are OK. Janice isn’t drinking. Rabbit is working for her dad,
selling used cars. But after nine days both Janice’s body and mind are feeling postpartum
strain.

That Sunday, Rabbit goes to Eccles’s church for the first time (leaving Janice and the kids at
home to rest). He gets into some deep flirting with Lucy Eccles and comes home wanting to
have sex NOW with Janice. The baby won’t stop crying though, for like hours, and the whole
time Rabbit is trying to get Janice to drink (to put her in the mood), chain smoking, and
clinging to her in case she suddenly feels like having sex with him.

Finally, the baby stops crying, Nelson goes to bed, and Rabbit gets Janice to take a drink.
They get into bed and Rabbit tries to have sex with her. Still sore from giving birth, from her
episiotomy, and from Rabbit living with “a whore,” Janice rebuffs him. He gets mad and
leaves.

Meanwhile, Janice really does start drinking, and drinks all day Monday in fact. Frantic and
depressed, she slaps Nelson. Her mother calls and upsets her, and then she finds that Rebecca
June has somehow gotten baby poop all over herself and her crib. Drunk and full of anger,
confusion, and fear, Janice tries to give Rebecca a bath and accidentally drowns her.

Rabbit calls Eccles that night and finds out what happened. He’d spent the night in a motel
and the day trying to catch a glimpse of Ruth, but with no luck. He busses back to Mt. Judge
full of shame and remorse. Why is he so ashamed? Because he really thinks, most of the time,
that he killed his daughter by not being in the apartment at the time of her death. He feels like
he took out a hit on the kid when he walked out on Janice. He really convinces himself, and is
disappointed that the law doesn’t consider him a suspect. This guilt makes him more
determined than ever to work things out with Janice. To stay with her forever to atone for his
sins…but…

At the end of Rebecca June’s burial service he loudly accuses Janice of murdering their
daughter and loudly proclaims his innocence. Humiliated, he runs.

He runs to Brewer, finds Ruth, and guesses she is pregnant. She is really nasty to him and
threatens to abort the baby if he doesn’t divorce Janice so he can marry her. He agrees, but
when he steps out to pick up food from the deli, as you’ve probably predicted, he runs…And
the book ends.

??? Confusion at the end ???

We are not sure what Rabbit will chose to do next: stay with his wife, divorce her, marry
Ruth of leave both of them and raise Nelson as a single dad.

Settings

Let’s look at the setting of Rabbit, Run from the top down. It goes: mountains, then virgin
forest, then Mt. Judge (a suburb), then Brewer (a big city). So we have varying degrees of
wilderness, and varying degrees of civilization. This is the perfect setting for one of major
ideas the novel explores: civilization vs. wilderness. In addition to trying to find a
compromise between being a grown-up and being a kid, Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom is trying
to find a compromise between living in society and living in the wild.

This is even reflected in his name. Harry is a human, city name, and Rabbit is a wild animal.

In addition to the broad geographic setting, Rabbit, Run gets down to the particulars of life,
offering cramped apartments, love nests, hospitals, churches, urban and suburban streets,
upper-middle class homes, and even goes into the characters’ beds, from time to time. These
are where the novel earns its place in the Gothic genre. Gothic lit is big on spaces that are
supposed to resemble the minds of the humans who live in them, and who aren’t happy with
their lives. In case you were wondering, civilization vs. wilderness is actually fairly common
in the Gothic.

Narrator point of view

Third Person (Limited Omniscient)

Most of Rabbit, Run is told from the perspective of Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, though
occasionally the narrator will slip into other characters’ heads. At the beginning of the novel,
we see Rabbit through the eyes of some young men playing basketball. In one section, we see
Ruth through Rabbit’s eyes, and then Rabbit through Ruth’s eyes.