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. 

In Enlightenment France, the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814) engaged in a lifelong crusade against nearly all moral or religious restrictions on sexuality. His unfinished erotic novel, The 120 Days of Sodom, documents an array of graphic scenes in which Catholic authority figures are often depicted engaging in taboo or otherwise non-normative sex acts. One character, the Bishop, is sexist and therefore only has anal sex with men. Another priest consumes human excrement. While the sexual stories in Sodom challenge religious sexual norms, they differ from Simone’s story in that they are often cruel and involve nonconsensual and coercive sex. Sade’s male characters often have more in common with Sterling, who views Poppy as an object, than with Tyler, who loves her. The term “sadism,” derived from the name of the Marquis, forms part of the acronym “BDSM”—bondage and discipline, dominance and submission, and sadism and masochism—but modern BDSM communities prioritize consent and mutual respect in a way that the Marquis and his fictional protagonists did not. At Poppy’s urging, she and Tyler engage in some BDSM practices in Priest, but these are always predicated on consent and framed as proof of Poppy’s agency. She tells Tyler, “I’m not a blank slate for males to exert their agency on. I chose to sleep with Sterling. I chose to let you go down on me. I wanted those things, and you don’t get to tell me that I didn’t” (167). The characters in Sodom are, more or less, a “blank slate.” The encounters aren’t powered by choice or a caring relationship. Rather, vicious, unloving characters like the Bishop generate unfeeling sex scenes.

Tyler regularly notes the Catholic Church’s pattern of ignoring or concealing sexual abuse. John Patrick Shanley’s play Doubt (2005) deals with a priest, Father Flynn, who might have sexually abused a young person. Flynn and Tyler have much in common; each character presents themselves as a relatable figure, countering the stereotype of the harsh, out-of-touch religious authority. Tyler regularly ties himself to abusive priests, saying, “I was echoing the departure of my predecessor. Yes, I was leaving to marry, not because I was being arrested, but still” (414). The sweeping connection presents all sex—consensual or predatory—as harmful. Yet Tyler, unlike Flynn, doesn’t face abuse accusations. He violates his vow of celibacy, but he doesn’t violate another person. By the end of the novel, Poppy has helped him see the distinction.