OF ALL OF UPDIKE'S EARLY NOVELS, Marry Me (1976) is most clearly set in the realm of fantasy. It announces its position with its subtitle, “A Romance,” and this is an important label. Jeff Campbell delineates two ways that the word romance is typically used. In the most common contemporary usage, a romance designates “a story that draws largely on the author's imagination and makes very little effort to re-create details of the active world, in contrast to the more realistic ‘novel.’” But Marry Me is realistic the way that all of Updike's novels are realistic; it attempts to reproduce the physical world down to its smallest detail. And so Campbell is much more interested in an older usage of the word romance, a term that has “for centuries been associated with medieval stories of knights, kings, and damsels in distress. In contrast to the sterner epics which preceded them, medieval romances were full of fantasy and light-hearted, sometimes aimless, adventures. Above all, love, missing or at least of only minor interest in the epics, was supreme in the romances, and reflected the artificial ideals of chivalry” (163). Campbell points to a number of images from medieval romance that appear in the novel—ogres, knights, castles—and argues that “the whole plot of the novel revolves around Jerry's idealized love for Sally, who is portrayed much like the ‘Unattainable Lady’ of courtly love” (164). In particular, Campbell connects Jerry and Sally's romance to that of Tristan and Iseult—a story dissected by the Swiss theologian Denis de Rougemont in L'amour et l'Occident (Love in the Western World, 1939), a book much on Updike's mind as he was writing Marry Me. Rougemont's influence on the novel has been well established by previous critics; I will therefore focus less on Marry Me's debt to the romantic tradition and more on its connection to Updike's other morality plays about the imagination, though Rougemont and medieval romance will help me to make my case at certain key points.

Marry Me opens with Jerry Conant, our protagonist, on his way to an oceanside assignation with Sally Mathias. Both Jerry and Sally are married to varying degrees of happiness, and so they must build their affair in the cracks of their legal and spiritual commitments.