Priest

Content Warning: The section of the guide includes discussion of child sexual abuse and sexual content.

Simone’s novel is one of many stories that explore The Tension Between Sexual Desire and Christian Morality. Christian doctrine is often seen as attempting to curb the unruliness of human sexuality by imposing strict rules and conditions dividing permissible from impermissible sex. Priest is in conversation—sometimes explicitly—with a long list of works in literature and other media that explore the breakdown of those rules.  

After Sterling meets Tyler, he declares, “Here I was, expecting Alexander Borgia, and instead I find Arthur Dimmesdale” (339-40). This quotation alludes to Nathaniel Hawthorne’s classic novel The Scarlet Letter (1850), in which the Puritan minister Arthur Dimmesdale has an affair with Hester Prynne, leading to Hester’s public shunning. Though he doesn’t immediately stand by her, Arthur, like Tyler, has a conscience, and his guilt makes him physically ill. As Hawthorne’s story develops, Arthur becomes more like Tyler, taking responsibility for his actions and publicly standing with Hester. He puts an “A” on his own chest to mirror the one she has been forced to wear. Simone alludes to The Scarlet Letter to place her novel directly in conversation with a literary tradition in which novelists explore the tension between Christian sexual morality and the unruliness of sexual desire.