In reviewing a West End revival of Arthur Miller’s witch-hunt play, The Crucible, critic Ingrid D. Rowland bristled at another critic’s notation that “there were more women than men in the Old Vic audience for The Crucible.”
That led her to take exception with Updike’s “irksome insistence on calling women’s sitting bones ‘haunches'” and to name him, along with Norman Mailer, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, as standard bearers for the “apogee” of novelists whose works command a largely male readership. Here’s what she wrote in response to fellow theater critic Quentin Letts:
“Evidently, a large female spectatorship by definition diminishes the importance of the performance, just as female readership is still thought, in many quarters, to diminish the importance of books more than a generation after the apogee of Mailer, Bellow, Roth, and Updike (consider the last of these writers’ irksome insistence on calling women’s sitting bones “haunches”)—or their Britannic counterparts, Amis (Kingsley) and Fleming (Ian). Yaël Farber, The Crucible’s director, is guilty, for her part, not only of that feminine specialty, self-indulgence (so often termed “artistic license” in the hands of male counterparts, beginning with Paolo Veronese when he appeared before the Venetian Inquisition in 1573 in an unsuccessful attempt to defend the presence of two drunken Germans and a dog in a painting of The Last Supper), but indeed of elitist self-indulgence, keeping the people from their commuter trains in heedless pursuit of her artistic vision.”