A&P Essay

Female Judgment and Misunderstanding in A&P

The increasingly sexual nature of girls and youthful nature of adult women are two sides of the same coin. Men can pick whatever clothes he wants, yet women have to pick clothes that make them look sexy and slim. Courage for women now gets associated with insanity. There is little incentive for women to break free from the judgmental nature of men that is innate in society. In A&P by John Updike, Updike explores the misunderstanding of women through the thoughts and experience of Sammy, a teenage boy who works at a supermarket. Updike’s use of Sammy’s colloquial narrative presents women as oppressed under society’s social standards by emphasizing female judgment and a lack of male insight and concern.

Sammy’s narrative reveals a misunderstanding of the female characters that comes across as condescending. His ignorance and lack of understanding of women is introduced early when the girls enter the supermarket and Sammy doesn’t “know for sure how girls’ minds work,” asking if “you really think it’s a mind in there or just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar?” (463) Sammy bluntly admits that he does not comprehend the way that girls think, and the question that he asks himself about the mind of the girls reveals that he assumes a lack of understanding and intelligence on their part. The tone in Sammy’s narrative suggests that he is not willing to truly understand the girls who entered the supermarket; the interaction he pursues with the girls is inevitably perfunctory and ephemeral. His ignorance shows when he “began to feel sorry for [the girls]” because “they couldn’t help” getting attention from the store. (464) Thus, Sammy implies that the girls should be ashamed of the attention that they are getting in the store. Sammy views the girls more as sexual objects than decent human beings, for he praises the girls for their flirty appeal but pays no mind to the other female shoppers in the supermarket, who he...