A & P By John Updike

Throughout history, men have been considered superior to women. Mothers wish to have sons, fathers favor their male offspring over their female offspring, and women change themselves to cater to their male counterparts. Throughout the past century, people have been wondering why? Is it because that’s just the way it's always been or did something happen to convince men of their higher social standing? In the short story “A&P” by John Updike, the main character Sammy views himself as superior to women because of the way he stands up to his boss in favor of the girls in the swimsuits. So much so that he feels to need to quit his job even though he knows that he doesn’t “want to do this to your [his] Mom and Dad,"(Updike 4). The question is why

Some of the best examples are fairytales and folklore such as Sleeping Beauty or Snow White and the Seven Dwarves however it can also be seen within modern literature such as short stories. In John Updike’s short story “A&P” the main character Sammy sees himself as someone who needs to protect the girls in the swimsuits in the grocery store. When the teenage girls are told to leave by Legner, Sammy’s boss, Sammy says that they are not doing anything wrong and Legner is being unnecessarily unfair to the girls who were just trying to shop, when eventually "The girls, and who'd blame them, are in a hurry to get out, so I say 'I quit' to Lengel quick enough for them to hear, hoping they'll stop and watch me, their unsuspected hero"(Updike 3). Lawrence Jay Dessner in his critical essay talks about how innocence plays a part with Sammy in John Updike’s A&P and how that affects him, especially when he stands up for the girls in the store. He says that Sammy is an “outrageously naive yet morally ambitious teenage hero” (Dessner 2) and that he puts himself “personally at risk”(2) after speaking out against Legner in favor of the girls in the swimsuits. As for why Sammy does this might have to do with how “that pretty girl blush makes me [him] so scrunchy inside"(Updike 4). Enn, the narrator from “How to Talk to Girls at Parties” by Neil Gaiman, parallels Sammy throughout Gaiman’s short story. When Enn and his friend Vic

Instead of deciding their ideas on the girls based on their personalities and expressions, they make decisions based on how the girls look. In her book review of How to Talk to Girls at Parties by Neil Gaiman, Sarah Hunter discusses how when Vic and Enn go to the party that the girls there as not like what the two boys previously thought girls would be like. She talks about how Gaiman used Vic’s absence to show Enn fulfilling his exploration of the other gender which eventually leads to his maturation. At the end of the story, as Hunter notes, the women at the party become something more “sinister” (Hunter 1), and that causes both of “the boys [to] flee”(1). When they first arrived at the party they cared more about how the women looked and how interested they were in them rather than if these people were trustworthy or even not dangerous. Sammy is practically the same in “A&P”, instead of coming to conclusions about the women through getting to know them he prefers to judge women based on either their good looks or in his case “bad looks” as well. The critical essay by Ronald E. McFarland, explains basically what happens in Updike's short story A&P. Although it also helps to further the idea that the main character judges women based on their appearances such as the old woman at the checkout with her “varicose veins and six children” (McFarland) but “Queenie and her friends” also known as girls in their bathing