Lit Piece: Updike’s “A&P”

    A while back, I was assigned John Updike’s “A&P” for a writing class. I was a little wary. I’d heard Updike had a reputation for not being the most sympathetic writer to women’s perspectives. I was certainly alarmed when I read in the assignment: “Note how the images seem appropriate to the narrator’s age, interests, and character. He ponders if girls have minds in there or ‘just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar’ and says that the smooth plane of skin between a girl’s neck and her bathing suit top is ‘like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light.’ This image conveys the sense that the boy finds girls beautiful but impenetrable…If you are not particularly fond of the similes and metaphors in this story, feel free to choose examples from any other story you’ve read for this course.”

    So okay, we had options if Updike didn’t suit our tastes, but I’ve never been one to back down from at least exploring a new perspective, so I dove into the short story.

    It was easy to see why Updike may not not make the list of favorite short story authors of some readers. The narrator has all the charm of a salivating dog, and cuts through cliches of women as if their overuse could make them true (“She’s one of the cash-register-watchers, a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows…”). A long paragraph is devoted to three girls - hyper sexualized in their bathing suits as they walk through grocery store aisles - includes the two gems mentioned in the writing assignment. There’s a sick sort of predatory interest in the girls, but also a perverse idolizing treatment of them, particularly of the girl he nicknames “Queenie.” A slovenly, adolescent Humbert Humbert might come to mind as a comparison for this narrator, only this narrator’s motives are uncertain. Is his fascination truly sexual, or is it something more - an enchantment with nonconformity and female liberation? And if it’s the latter, then is the narrator perhaps playing with this liberation for his own amusement?

    “The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn’t know which tunnel they’d come out of.” The narrator, in his fascination, watches the girls move about the store like it’s a game. Their movements and actions serve only one purpose in his mind at the time: to entertain him and his libido. He sneers at the man behind the meat counter who was “looking after [the girls] sizing up their joints,” but then victimizes the girls, rather than realizing he propagates the meat counter attendant’s infatuation. “Poor kids, I began to feel sorry for them, they couldn’t help it.” Oh how I bristled to that! But comparing the girls to a pinball that was caught up in the machine simultaneously diminishes and augments the girls. It diminishes them because on one hand they are caught up in the cogs and workings of the game and have no control over where they’ll end up. On the other hand it augments them, because they are central to the game and where they go and what they do is of the utmost importance - to the point of being the utmost power, since what happens to them indicates the outcome of the game.

    This pinball machine simile is also affected by a previous metaphor: “The sheep pushing their carts down the aisle - the girls were walking against the usual traffic (not that we have one-way signs or anything) - were pretty hilarious. You could just see them, when Queenie’s white shoulders dawned on them, kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup, but their eyes snapped back to their own baskets and on they pushed.” The narrator is fascinated with how the girls go against everything traditional and institutionalized. He admires the girls for their rebellion against conformity, even if it is a purely superficial admiration. He even goes so far as to be hypercritical of “the norm,” calling the people who follow the norm “sheep” and “houseslaves.” Yet this is all done within the context of sexualizing and lusting after the girls, and universally punishing the other patrons of the store.

    This is where I had trouble with Updike: is he misogynist in this story? (Or in real life?) I haven’t sampled enough of his works to make a decision on Updike as a whole, and this story and its similes and metaphors are complex enough to be ambiguous on that point. The girls are objectified - fully and completely - but yet the narrator also affords them with a mysterious sense of power; a subverted feminine mystique perhaps. And in fact, the narrator seems to applaud their break from social norms. He admires them for showing up in bathing suits and assuming control over their sexuality (even if that control is ultimately confined within the institutionalized “game” of power), to the point that he too rebels against the establishment by quitting his job after his manager accosts the girls for their attire. But at the same time you can’t help but wonder: did he quit just to satisfy his own pleasure (his sexual desire) in an effort to make the game play on?

    You could write a thesis just on this short story. Is Updike misogynist? Is his narrator misogynist? Can misogyny and women’s liberation coexist - in one person, in one society’s perspective, in one historical era? The narrator clearly experiences all the tension of how he sees the girls as bodies and how he sees the girls as usurpers, but yet you are never certain which perspective holds the majority in his mind, and how he wants to use that perspective.