Should Wizard Hit Mommy? (Themes)
Themes
Storytelling and Control
“Should Wizard Hit Mommy” was written in 1959 when John Updike was married to his first wife Mary Pennington. The couple lived in Oxford, England, and had four children before they ultimately divorced. Their oldest daughter, Elizabeth, was herself four-years-old when the story was written. Therefore, it is easy to see the story as at least partly autobiographical, with “Jack” standing in for his author, John. Like Updike himself, Jack is concerned with crafting a compelling and dynamic story, and takes joy in his narrative ability. Jack is especially proud of certain literary and dramatic flairs within Roger’s story even though they are lost on Jo. For example, Jo’s suggestion that Roger should be a skunk “momentarily stir[s] Jack to creative enthusiasm.” He seems to take genuine joy in the task of crafting a narrative. He also uses words that Jo does not know, like “crick” and “eventually,” to showcase his own gift for language, and is annoyed when Jo interrupts and makes him “miss a beat in his narrative.” He is proud of his ability as a dynamic storyteller. “The wizard’s voice was one of Jack’s own favorite effects,” Updike explains; “he did it by scrunching up his face and somehow whining through his eyes.” This joy shows that, for all his complaining, Jack is enriched by the story he’s telling, embracing the ability to exist in an expansive world of his own creation instead of the cramped and unhappy world of his real life.
Jack takes pride in how he tells the Roger Skunk story because he is able to exert a control over Jo that he feels he no longer has over Clare or their life together. As such, he becomes disproportionately upset when Jo seems to not be engrossed in the tale he is spinning. For example, Jack snaps at Jo every time she attempts to take over telling any part of the story herself. “Now Jo daddy’s telling the story,” he chides her, “do you want to tell daddy the story?” Jack is also immensely pleased when his story causes Jo discomfort or trepidation, seeing it as his job as an author to tell her the truth, even though a father would traditionally seek to comfort his child. As such he stretches the story out, prolonging her suspense. Updike writes, “Jack felt the covers tug as her legs twitched tensely – he was telling her something true, something she must know – and had no wish to hurry on.” Because of his level of personal investment in the story, Jack is also immensely frustrated whenever Jo is not enthralled by his tale, seeing it as a failure both as a storyteller and as a father. “Jo made the crying face again, but this time without a hint of sincerity,” he observes; “this annoyed Jack.” He is also protective of the story because he is personally invested in Roger Skunk. He explains that Roger’s bullying from the other animals reminded him of “certain humiliations of his own childhood.”
Finally, despite griping about how stale the process of the naptime story has become for him, Jack still views this ritual as a chance to escape from his other obligations to Clare and to create a world in which he has complete control of the rules. Despite noting several times that he should be downstairs helping Clare, and Jo’s obvious desire to not fall asleep for her nap, Jack continues to tell Jo the story, even taking opportunities to stretch out the moments of suspense or tension to extend his own creative enjoyment. When Jack finally does finish the story, Clare immediately chides him by telling him “that was a long story.” This observation highlights that the story has been keeping Jack from something he needed to be doing, and that perhaps he has stretched out one of Jo’s stories in a similar way before. When he finally does finish his story, he appears to be too exhausted by the sheer act of telling the story to help Clare with the task she has been waiting for him to complete. In this way, Jack indicates that his story was both as important and as emotionally draining as Clare’s chores have been for her—because it allowed him an escape from his obligations toward his wife, which he must now face.
As Jack becomes further engrossed in his own telling of Roger Skunk’s story, the story morphs into a microcosm of his own life. Roger becomes a stand-in for Jack, who trades ultimate happiness and self-fulfillment for the love and comfort of his family. However, despite Jack’s personal investment in and control over Roger Skunk’s story, the story is unable to capture the attention of its intended audience. Indeed, not only is Jo not calmed by the story, but she rejects its ending and demands a new one. This presents a layered crisis for Jack: not only does it remind him that he is bound by his obligations to his daughter, but it also calls into question his skill and control as a storyteller. However, Jo’s reaction to the story ultimately serves to confront Jack with the very thing he had been hoping to avoid in telling his story—that is, the unhappiness of his family life and the violent animosity he feels toward his wife.
Growing Up and Loss of Innocence
For Jack, the main sign that Jo has begun to grow up is her desire to question everything he tells her. This habit upsets Jack because it indicates that she is beginning to craft her own ideas and beliefs, which he will no longer be able to control. The fact that Jo suggests that Roger be a skunk makes Jack think that “they must be talking about skunks at nursery school.” This shows that Jack is aware that his daughter is bringing outside knowledge into his storytelling space—and it does not seem to be the first time she has done this. When Jo asks Jack if magic is “real,” he explains that “this was a new phase, just this last month, a reality phase. When he told her that spiders eat bugs, she turned to her mother and asked, ‘do they really?’” For Jack, Jo’s focus on reality is at odds with his desire to craft a reality for her through storytelling, a job that requires complete confidence from his audience. However, Jo continues to have more questions as the story goes along. When Jack brings up the Wizard, for example, Jo immediately wants to know if the Wizard is going to die and is not calmed when Jack tells her that “wizards don’t die.”
Jo’s preoccupation with truthful storytelling means that she is also consistently challenging Jack’s attempts to craft a story that exists beyond the confines of reality, and to reconnect with his own sense of childlike innocence as well as hers. For example, Jack sticks to the same basic structure every time he tells his daughter a story because it is unchallenging and promises a happy ending, even though this is decidedly unrealistic. Although Jack finds the story form “fatiguing,” it is also completely free from conflict: every problem is presented with the solution in hand. For instance, the formula dictates that the wizard always demands, as payment, a greater number of pennies than Roger has, while “in the same breath directing the animal to the place where the extra pennies could be found.” For her part, Jo has reached the point where she will not accept such an easy resolution. When she sees that Roger Skunk and his Mother fundamentally disagree on his smell, she is unhappy with her father’s simple resolution. In Jo’s version of the story, “the wizard hit [the mother] on the head and did not change the little skunk back.” Jack is unsettled by Jo’s suggestion because it removes the innocence of the story that he is trying to tell, and replaces it with a tale of conflict that mirrors the kind that Jack experiences in his life. While Jack views his storytelling as an opportunity to escape the stresses of his reality, Jo’s perception of her parents’ flawed relationship is making her unable to countenance a happy ending.
Jack’s displeasure with Jo’s reaction to the Roger Skunk story is primarily about control. For him, Jo growing up means that she will no longer blindly accept the things he says as true, but will instead reach her own conclusions and fight for her own beliefs, even when they directly contradict her father’s. By challenging and appearing uninterested by his story, Jack believes Jo is acting just like her mother—a reality he neither likes nor accepts. When Jo gets bored with his narrative, for example, Jack explains that he “didn’t like when women took anything for granted.” This observation indicates that Jack views his daughter’s disinterest as an adult quality, replacing a sense of wonder with boredom and cynicism. Ultimately, however, Jack cannot get around Jo’s cynicism. Jo flatly refuses to accept Jack’s story because it does not end in the way she wants, and the characters are not behaving in a way that she thinks is truthful or correct. She even goes so far as to tell Jack how she wants the story to go the following night: “Tomorrow I want you to tell me a story that the wizard took that magic wand and hit that mommy.” This exchange represents a turning point for Jack in his relationship with his daughter. Not only is she no longer engrossed by his stories, but she is now writing her own stories, and Jack lacks the willpower to reassert his own desires or challenge his daughter’s desires about how the story should end.
Jo’s strongly-worded declaration at the end of the story shows that the nature of her relationship to her father has fundamentally changed. Whereas story time used to function as a space where both she and her father could embrace their imaginations and sense of innocence, it is now an arena where a perpetual power struggle plays out—in which both seem to be processing very real aspects of their family dynamic. By the end of the story, Jack views his relationship with his wife and daughter to be roughly the same. In both he views himself as being beleaguered, fatigued, taken for granted, and—most importantly—out of control of the plot. Jack’s preoccupation with the signs of Jo’s growth (both physical and emotional) highlight the ways in which he is fixated on her personal growth, as she becomes more wayward and less innocent. As far as Jack is concerned, innocence means a willingness to accept everything that is told to you without issue. Therefore, Jo’s loss of innocence is equivalent not only to Jack’s loss of control over her, but to his realization that one day, she may exert control over him in the same way that Clare does.
Duty, Conformity, and Fitting In
Jack becomes engrossed in the tale of Roger Skunk because it reminds him of his own childhood being bullied and ostracized. However, he ultimately wants to teach Jo a lesson that every person has innate characteristics and responsibilities that they have to accept and cannot change. Jo is unable to grasp this concept as a four-year-old, and, as a result, believes Roger Skunk’s mother is cruel for not allowing him to have the thing he wants most: the acceptance of his peers. Jack is “remembering certain humiliations of his own childhood” as he enthusiastically describes the way Roger Skunk’s fellow animals would taunt him. These details make Jack feel vindicated, but they only make Jo more upset. In fact, Jo is beside herself when she hears that that Roger Skunk’s mother will not allow him to smell like roses. “But Daddy,” she cries, “then he said about all the other little animals run away.” For Jo, the concept of not being liked by her peers is truly terrible and she cannot understand why the skunk’s mother doesn’t feel the same way. Confused by Jo’s anger, Jack attempts to teach her that a skunk’s smell is part of who he is, and that his love for his mother is greater than his desire to fit in by changing his smell. Jack explains that Roger “loved his mommy more than he loved all the other animals. And she knew what was right.”
Much like Roger Skunk’s scent, Jack views his domestic and familial duties to be something that he cannot change or give up, however negatively they make him feel. For example, family plays a key role in the stories that Jack tells Jo. Roger always starts the day at home with his mother and comes back home “just in time to hear the train whistle that brought his daddy home from Boston.” This detail suggests that Jack is telling a story that mimics Jo’s daily routine (in which, presumably, Jo also stays at home with her mother and Jack returns in time for dinner each evening). Much like the routine of story time, Jack is becoming more and more fatigued with the burdens and responsibilities of family life. Indeed, whenever he is confronted with a familial duty within the story, Jack reports becoming tired or unhappy. He explains that “his head felt empty” of more stories to tell Jo, but the prospect of putting her to sleep and helping Clare repaint their living room makes him equally unhappy. Like his trusty story form, Jack views his life as a routine that is a “cage,” slowly choking out his joy in life. However, just as he explains to Jo that Roger Skunk accepts his scent out of love for and trust in his mother, Jack understands that he cannot leave his life out of obligation to Clare and his (growing) family.
Jack’s deep unhappiness with his life comes to a head at the end of the story when he finally goes downstairs to help Clare. Without Roger Skunk’s narrative to mask his resentment towards his wife, it becomes clear that he feels trapped in a life that he is unable to make magically disappear. Despite knowing that he should be helping his immensely pregnant wife move furniture, Jack sits down “with utter weariness, watching his wife labor.” This suggests that Jack considers telling his daughter a story to be a greater burden than his wife’s very real physical exertion. This sense of weariness stems from the fact that Jack feels trapped within his life. Describing the interior of Jack’s family home, Updike writes: “The woodwork, a cage of moldings and rails and baseboards all around them, was half old tan and half new ivory and he felt caught in an ugly middle position, and though he as well felt his wife’s presence in the cage with him, he did not want to speak with her, work with her, touch her, anything.”
Faced with the arrival of a new child and the expansion of a family that he already feels to be constraining, Jack feels himself caught in limbo. Much like his half-painted living room, he has one foot in his old life and one foot in the possibility of a future with a bigger family and even more responsibilities weighing him down. This state of unhappiness influences the story that Jack tells his young daughter, who only wants her protagonist to fit in and be happy and comfortable. However, because Jack feels trapped by his own duties as a husband and father, he is unable to provide a happy ending that he feels he will never experience himself. In this way, Updike suggests that by conforming to the expectations of family life, men must prioritize their duties above their individual desires. Just like Roger Skunk gives up his chance at fitting in because his mother does not like his new scent, Updike suggests that Jack compromised his individuality and happiness when he became a husband and father.
Marriage, Family, and Misogyny
Throughout the story, Jack is preoccupied with outlining the ways in which he fulfils his roles as “man of the house”: completing his duties to his family even when it is difficult and unpleasant for him to do so. For example, Jack makes it clear immediately that he has grown to find Saturday story time tiresome, even though it is a duty he must continue to perform. He says that telling the same story “was especially fatiguing on Saturday, because Jo never fell asleep in naps anymore.” He continues however, because he views it as a commitment and one of his duties as her father. In a similar vein, Jack notes that he should be helping Claire move furniture downstairs. “She shouldn’t be moving heavy things,” he explains “she was six-months pregnant.” Here, Jack again calls attention to the tedious drudgery of his duties as a husband and father. At the story’s end, Jack watches Claire move furniture, too fatigued—and resentful—to help her.
Jack channels this same resentment towards Jo, viewing her dislike of the Roger Skunk story as another attempt by a woman to confine and undermine him. He reacts to Clare and Jo’s behavior in the same way even though one is an adult woman and one is a child. Both his wife and daughter make him feel negatively toward women in general. For example, when Jo begins to fuss when she doesn’t like the trajectory of Jack’s story, he gets incredibly frustrated. “Jack didn’t like women when they took anything for granted,” Updike writes; “he liked them apprehensive, hanging on his words.” This may seem a disproportionately harsh reaction to have to a four-year-old’s loss of interest during story time, but Jack repeatedly goes out of his way while telling Jo the story to make her feel trepidation or discomfort, and becomes instantly angry when she does not seem thrilled by the story she is hearing. For example, when Jo makes a sad face “without a touch of sincerity,” Jack is irked, seeing it as an attempt on his daughter’s part to undermine his storytelling. Jo’s disinterest also indicates that she has learned the structure of Jack’s story, and she repeatedly indicates that she feels she could take control of the narrative herself. Jack sees this loss of narrative control as another attempt by a woman to undermine him. In addition, Jo’s extreme anger at Roger Skunk’s mother for making Roger return to his former smell suggests that Jack’s ire at women (and specifically Clare) is something that he probably does not keep well-hidden, and has informed the way Jo thinks about her parents’ roles in her own life as well as in the story. Indeed, both Jo’s fierce exclamations that the skunk’s mother is “a stupid mommy,” and her conviction that Roger’s mother deserves to be physically punished for her transgression, suggest that she has potentially been exposed to both verbal and physical violence directed against her own mother.
This assumption is supported by the way that Jack overreacts when Jo’s behavior reminds him of Clare. For example, Jack continually points to evidence of Jo’s physical growth, referring to Jo’s “tall body” (an odd descriptor for a four-year-old) “fat face,” and “pudgy little arms,” which indicate a level of animosity and disgust that are out of place for a father to feel towards his own young daughter. However, Jack also often comments on Jo’s features or expression in situations where Jo reminds him of Clare. He explains that Jo’s eyes are “her mother’s blue,” and that Jo’s “wide, noiseless grin” reminds him of “his wife feigning pleasure at cocktail parties.” This complicates Jack’s animosity towards Jo and her body because it indicates that Jack grows to resent Jo more as she ages simply because she is turning into a miniature version of his wife. Coupled with her newfound desire to contradict his stories, Jack is increasingly unable to distinguish between the two women in his life, and takes out his feelings of animosity towards Clare on Jo.
Many literary critics, especially throughout the feminist movement, critiqued John Updike for misogynistic depictions of women and overtly sexist perspectives in his central male characters. Updike refuted what he called his “feminist detractors,” but there is no doubt that his highly-personal, masculine narratives concern men who see themselves as having been sapped of by their virility by domestic life. Jack is no exception; by lumping Clare and Jo together as women (despite their many obvious differences as people) and fixating on the ways in which he believes they seek to undermine his authority and power, Jack reveals his own overt misogyny toward his female family members, as well as his distrust of and dislike for women in general. Importantly, his misplaced frustration towards—and seeming disgust for—Jo stems from his fear that she will soon grow into a woman like Clare, and therefore continue to malign and abuse him.
