Do you ever get that butterfly feeling in your stomach... the one that accompanies a feeling of success or completion or having done the best job you could have, but none of those accomplishments have been covered? It's like foresight or some sort of extra sensory perception that something really good is on the horizon for you, but you're not quite sure what it is?
I've had that feeling all day today. I had it when I finally pulled myself out of bed and began caffeine consumption and daily elimination of yesterday's leftovers. I had it when my lab partner phoned to tell me that he was at the door and ready to complete our lab work for the week. I had it during the four hours we worked on our nursing exam and then moved into our work on Sodium, Potassium, and Calcium ions and heart function, and the effects of temperature fluctuations on the hearts of frogs. I even had it after he left when I was cleaning up and putting everything back in working order and looking over my to-do list of everything that really needs to be finished before I hit the sack tonight and get enough sleep for my early day tomorrow. I have the feeling now... but I'm still not sure what it could be.
It's kind of like the sensation of your ears burning when you know you're somehow being discussed, but it's not the idea that something negative is being said. Who knows...
Just thought I'd write it all out, document the idea, see if my prediction turns out to be accurate.
I can't sit around here chatting all evening, though. I have a bath to take, a mile to walk, some Physiology that I need to cover, Genetics that needs to be read, and a long list of other tasks that keep me chained to my desk every night.
Maybe more tomorrow.
Hopefully good news tomorrow.
We'll see.
08 March 2010
07 March 2010
Something's Coming
"...it can be about the performance and not the politics."
-Mo'Nique, in tonite's speech
To my six fans out there that I'm assuming still read my posts, as intermittently as they have been lately, be on the lookout for a new cyber development that will be arriving in the coming weeks courtesy of one of my closest friends and myself.
The effort will be a combination of the two greatest things on the planet: great movies and great writing.
Interested in knowning what it is?
You'll have to keep up with coming entries to find out...
-Mo'Nique, in tonite's speech
To my six fans out there that I'm assuming still read my posts, as intermittently as they have been lately, be on the lookout for a new cyber development that will be arriving in the coming weeks courtesy of one of my closest friends and myself.
The effort will be a combination of the two greatest things on the planet: great movies and great writing.
Interested in knowning what it is?
You'll have to keep up with coming entries to find out...
06 March 2010
Phoenix Rising Over “A Worn Path”
"We've become a race of peeping Toms. What people ought to do is get outside their own house and look in for a change" --Rear Window
Like many other great female writers from the south, Eudora Welty placed her short story “A Worn Path” in the region of her birth, the surroundings of which she is clearly expert at exploiting to invoke realistic and memorable imagery for her setting. The ease with which Welty sprinkles the details of her story’s landscape is obvious, and one need not read the author’s biography to know that the journey of her main character is one with which both women are incredibly familiar. Only a woman who has walked such a path could so expertly take her readers along for the remarkable and symbol-laden trek through the Mississippi woods. “A Worn Path” is a mosaic of symbols. Every aspect—the path, Phoenix Jackson’s character, the obstacles along her way, the destination, and the reason for her trip—has meaning much deeper than its surface value. All possible discussions accepted, it is Phoenix Jackson herself, as well as the road which she travels, that is the most remarkable of all images in Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path.”
The mere introduction of Welty’s central character, “there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson” (Welty 644), evokes so many ideas that will continue to breathe further inferred meanings into the rest of the story. Although the surname Jackson is undoubtedly a very common title for countless other African American women of Welty’s familiarity, it was more likely chosen by the author to represent her native city (Jackson, Mississippi), while simultaneously insinuating that it is from Jackson that Phoenix will feel as if she has walked.
In a discussion of character titles in the story, one would be totally remiss in not noting the main character’s Christian name, Phoenix. Instantly, one marvels at such an unusual first name for anyone, let alone a black female of Eudora Welty’s time setting for the story. A consideration of the ancient archetype of the Phoenix is entirely appropriate for comparison. Like the Phoenix of mythical essence, Welty’s Phoenix Jackson has a very lengthy lifespan already. In fact, Phoenix Jackson is old, a detail of which either she or her creator fervently remind readers of throughout the story. Welty describes her as “an old Negro woman,” “very old and small,” and “Old Phoenix” (644) within the first four paragraphs alone. In mythology, the Phoenix is a symbol for constant rebirth and regeneration. These are themes that occur multiple times in “A Worn Path,” each time Jackson stops to rest before reclaiming her journey with newfound determination that is born from every respite. According to the commonly accepted description of the Phoenix, one envisions a vibrantly shaded bird with a plumage of various hues and equally colorful feathers. Welty’s description of Phoenix Jackson’s physical characteristics is a color study in itself:
“Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illuminated by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlet, still back, and with an odor like copper” (644).
One can infer that Phoenix Jackson has seen much in her life, learned much from the world. She is obviously worn with age, clearly visualized in the description of her wrinkled countenance in the colorful writing of Welty.
Like Jackson, the path is equally worn, but for two separate and very distinct reasons. It has been tread back and forth, worn by Phoenix in her multiple journeys across. More profoundly, the path symbolizes so many similar steps walked in the lives of all the other citizens of the world who, like Phoenix Jackson, have been barraged with bad luck and misfortune. However, these countless others, like their representation in Welty’s heroine, have never allowed themselves to accept defeat.
The images of illness, death, and doom accompany nearly every moment of Jackson’s journey, but Phoenix, like the men and women of her character’s ilk, never allows her will to succumb to such frustrations. Phoenix walks “slowly in the dark pine shadows… with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a Grandfather clock” (644)—the images of Death lying in wait, biding its time. The sound of Jackson’s tapping umbrella makes “a grave and persistent noise in the still air” (644). Jackson is wearing “a dark striped dress” and encounters woods that “were deep and still” (644). Along her way, Jackson sees that “down in the hollow was the mourning dove—it was not too late for him” (644), but it seems that it is neither too late for Phoenix. Later on her trip, she encounters yet another bird, another symbol of death, “a buzzard” (645), and “then there was something tall, black, and skinny there, moving before her” (645).
The next encounter mentioned is not of the ornithological variety, though it is yet another image of death. Although Jackson believes that she has come upon a ghost, she soon determines that the solitary black figure is merely a scarecrow. Perhaps to laugh in the face of a cruel and conniving fate as it continually tempts her to give up, Phoenix chooses instead to dance with death before, re-energized in the sheer absurd perversity of the latest encounter, she moves forward. In fact, the closest the woman comes to truly grave danger is in her run in with “a black dog with a lolling tongue [that] came up out of the weeds by the ditch” (646) into which Phoenix falls, only to be knocked into a momentary state of total sensory loss in which she hallucinates.
It is here that “a dream visited her, and she reached her hand up, but nothing reached down and gave her a pull” (646), and Welty treats readers to the story’s second example of Jackson a sort of peaceful reverie that ends with her returning to a reality much more harsh than the tranquility of her fugue-like state. In her previous alteration of consciousness:
“[Phoenix] sat down to rest. She spread her skirts on the bark around her and folded her hands over her knees. Up above her was a tree in a pearly cloud of mistletoe. She did not dare to close her eyes, and when a little boy brought her a little plate with a slice of marble cake on it she spoke to him. ‘That would be acceptable.’ she said. But when she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air” (645).
It seems that in her hallucinatory state, people are caring and compassionate. They are not abrupt, nor sarcastic, nor condescending like the sundry real-life human characters she is soon to encounter.
Neither the white hunter nor the nursing staff at the hospital is particularly sympathetic to the plight of Phoenix Jackson. Neither are any of these characters truly polite. In fact, they verge on being quite rude, but in both cases, she manages to surreptitiously maneuver a nickel from the situation, a symbolic payment for which she feels some guilt, but for which she is obviously due. The nickel is further a symbol of her tough, untarnished spirit, the root of her faith in this arduous journey along “A Worn Path.”
It is quite doubtfully coincidental that the antagonistic characters Phoenix meets along her way are white; however, they are portrayed not from a platform rooted in the politics of Welty, but from the point-of-view of Phoenix Jackson, a woman who has obviously lived countless sorrows and hardships at the hands of a predominantly white population. There is the insinuation that Jackson has some degree of familiarity with being captured and being held when, along the path, her feet become tangled in a bush of thorns, and she muses that it “‘seem like there is chains about my feet, time I get this far,’” (645). Jackson even looks back along the way from which she has come, as if somewhat confused by her present circumstances and memories of something she has experienced before as “her fingers were busy and intent, but her skirts were full and long, so that before she could pull them free in one place they were caught in another,” and Phoenix remonstrates: “‘Thorns, you doing your appointed work. Never want to let folks pass—no sir’” (645). The imprisonment of her dress by the thorns, and its temporary prevention of her continuance, is a reminder of something with which she finds places a degree of comparative significance.
There are equal behavioral similarities between the hindrances that pontificate her journey and the forms of skepticism and hatred with which she has been dealing in her adult life. The most intense of these is brilliantly executed in her encounter with the sarcasm, blatantly condescending verbal assaults, and megalomaniacal sociopathic attitude of the white hunter who repeatedly calls attention to her age and belittles the reason for her trip. Finally, there is the ultimate slap in the face, shown in her arrival at the journey’s destination, the hospital, where she is treated to an obvious attitude of segregated beliefs by a staff that holds onto a sort of separate, but equal habituation. Undoubtedly, the behaviors and demeanors Jackson stumbles over in the characters sketches of Welty’s expert pen are far more common than not.
It seems that every moment of her jaunt has been beset with circumstances that could prevent her from persevering, people that might tempt others to simply give up. Fortunately, it is clear that no natural or human deterrent can ever totally break a person’s spirit if he or she refuses to allow their will to be broken. Welty’s story proves that when a person like Phoenix Jackson has love in her heart and goals to pursue, nothing can stop her ambition, even as the journey takes her along “A Worn Path.”
Works Cited
Welty, Eudora. “A Worn Path.” Literature for Composition, 8th ed. Ed. Sylvan Barnet, William Burto, and William E. Cain. New York: Longman, 2007. 644-649.
Like many other great female writers from the south, Eudora Welty placed her short story “A Worn Path” in the region of her birth, the surroundings of which she is clearly expert at exploiting to invoke realistic and memorable imagery for her setting. The ease with which Welty sprinkles the details of her story’s landscape is obvious, and one need not read the author’s biography to know that the journey of her main character is one with which both women are incredibly familiar. Only a woman who has walked such a path could so expertly take her readers along for the remarkable and symbol-laden trek through the Mississippi woods. “A Worn Path” is a mosaic of symbols. Every aspect—the path, Phoenix Jackson’s character, the obstacles along her way, the destination, and the reason for her trip—has meaning much deeper than its surface value. All possible discussions accepted, it is Phoenix Jackson herself, as well as the road which she travels, that is the most remarkable of all images in Eudora Welty’s “A Worn Path.”
The mere introduction of Welty’s central character, “there was an old Negro woman with her head tied in a red rag, coming along a path through the pinewoods. Her name was Phoenix Jackson” (Welty 644), evokes so many ideas that will continue to breathe further inferred meanings into the rest of the story. Although the surname Jackson is undoubtedly a very common title for countless other African American women of Welty’s familiarity, it was more likely chosen by the author to represent her native city (Jackson, Mississippi), while simultaneously insinuating that it is from Jackson that Phoenix will feel as if she has walked.
In a discussion of character titles in the story, one would be totally remiss in not noting the main character’s Christian name, Phoenix. Instantly, one marvels at such an unusual first name for anyone, let alone a black female of Eudora Welty’s time setting for the story. A consideration of the ancient archetype of the Phoenix is entirely appropriate for comparison. Like the Phoenix of mythical essence, Welty’s Phoenix Jackson has a very lengthy lifespan already. In fact, Phoenix Jackson is old, a detail of which either she or her creator fervently remind readers of throughout the story. Welty describes her as “an old Negro woman,” “very old and small,” and “Old Phoenix” (644) within the first four paragraphs alone. In mythology, the Phoenix is a symbol for constant rebirth and regeneration. These are themes that occur multiple times in “A Worn Path,” each time Jackson stops to rest before reclaiming her journey with newfound determination that is born from every respite. According to the commonly accepted description of the Phoenix, one envisions a vibrantly shaded bird with a plumage of various hues and equally colorful feathers. Welty’s description of Phoenix Jackson’s physical characteristics is a color study in itself:
“Her skin had a pattern all its own of numberless branching wrinkles and as though a whole little tree stood in the middle of her forehead, but a golden color ran underneath, and the two knobs of her cheeks were illuminated by a yellow burning under the dark. Under the red rag her hair came down on her neck in the frailest of ringlet, still back, and with an odor like copper” (644).
One can infer that Phoenix Jackson has seen much in her life, learned much from the world. She is obviously worn with age, clearly visualized in the description of her wrinkled countenance in the colorful writing of Welty.
Like Jackson, the path is equally worn, but for two separate and very distinct reasons. It has been tread back and forth, worn by Phoenix in her multiple journeys across. More profoundly, the path symbolizes so many similar steps walked in the lives of all the other citizens of the world who, like Phoenix Jackson, have been barraged with bad luck and misfortune. However, these countless others, like their representation in Welty’s heroine, have never allowed themselves to accept defeat.
The images of illness, death, and doom accompany nearly every moment of Jackson’s journey, but Phoenix, like the men and women of her character’s ilk, never allows her will to succumb to such frustrations. Phoenix walks “slowly in the dark pine shadows… with the balanced heaviness and lightness of a pendulum in a Grandfather clock” (644)—the images of Death lying in wait, biding its time. The sound of Jackson’s tapping umbrella makes “a grave and persistent noise in the still air” (644). Jackson is wearing “a dark striped dress” and encounters woods that “were deep and still” (644). Along her way, Jackson sees that “down in the hollow was the mourning dove—it was not too late for him” (644), but it seems that it is neither too late for Phoenix. Later on her trip, she encounters yet another bird, another symbol of death, “a buzzard” (645), and “then there was something tall, black, and skinny there, moving before her” (645).
The next encounter mentioned is not of the ornithological variety, though it is yet another image of death. Although Jackson believes that she has come upon a ghost, she soon determines that the solitary black figure is merely a scarecrow. Perhaps to laugh in the face of a cruel and conniving fate as it continually tempts her to give up, Phoenix chooses instead to dance with death before, re-energized in the sheer absurd perversity of the latest encounter, she moves forward. In fact, the closest the woman comes to truly grave danger is in her run in with “a black dog with a lolling tongue [that] came up out of the weeds by the ditch” (646) into which Phoenix falls, only to be knocked into a momentary state of total sensory loss in which she hallucinates.
It is here that “a dream visited her, and she reached her hand up, but nothing reached down and gave her a pull” (646), and Welty treats readers to the story’s second example of Jackson a sort of peaceful reverie that ends with her returning to a reality much more harsh than the tranquility of her fugue-like state. In her previous alteration of consciousness:
“[Phoenix] sat down to rest. She spread her skirts on the bark around her and folded her hands over her knees. Up above her was a tree in a pearly cloud of mistletoe. She did not dare to close her eyes, and when a little boy brought her a little plate with a slice of marble cake on it she spoke to him. ‘That would be acceptable.’ she said. But when she went to take it there was just her own hand in the air” (645).
It seems that in her hallucinatory state, people are caring and compassionate. They are not abrupt, nor sarcastic, nor condescending like the sundry real-life human characters she is soon to encounter.
Neither the white hunter nor the nursing staff at the hospital is particularly sympathetic to the plight of Phoenix Jackson. Neither are any of these characters truly polite. In fact, they verge on being quite rude, but in both cases, she manages to surreptitiously maneuver a nickel from the situation, a symbolic payment for which she feels some guilt, but for which she is obviously due. The nickel is further a symbol of her tough, untarnished spirit, the root of her faith in this arduous journey along “A Worn Path.”
It is quite doubtfully coincidental that the antagonistic characters Phoenix meets along her way are white; however, they are portrayed not from a platform rooted in the politics of Welty, but from the point-of-view of Phoenix Jackson, a woman who has obviously lived countless sorrows and hardships at the hands of a predominantly white population. There is the insinuation that Jackson has some degree of familiarity with being captured and being held when, along the path, her feet become tangled in a bush of thorns, and she muses that it “‘seem like there is chains about my feet, time I get this far,’” (645). Jackson even looks back along the way from which she has come, as if somewhat confused by her present circumstances and memories of something she has experienced before as “her fingers were busy and intent, but her skirts were full and long, so that before she could pull them free in one place they were caught in another,” and Phoenix remonstrates: “‘Thorns, you doing your appointed work. Never want to let folks pass—no sir’” (645). The imprisonment of her dress by the thorns, and its temporary prevention of her continuance, is a reminder of something with which she finds places a degree of comparative significance.
There are equal behavioral similarities between the hindrances that pontificate her journey and the forms of skepticism and hatred with which she has been dealing in her adult life. The most intense of these is brilliantly executed in her encounter with the sarcasm, blatantly condescending verbal assaults, and megalomaniacal sociopathic attitude of the white hunter who repeatedly calls attention to her age and belittles the reason for her trip. Finally, there is the ultimate slap in the face, shown in her arrival at the journey’s destination, the hospital, where she is treated to an obvious attitude of segregated beliefs by a staff that holds onto a sort of separate, but equal habituation. Undoubtedly, the behaviors and demeanors Jackson stumbles over in the characters sketches of Welty’s expert pen are far more common than not.
It seems that every moment of her jaunt has been beset with circumstances that could prevent her from persevering, people that might tempt others to simply give up. Fortunately, it is clear that no natural or human deterrent can ever totally break a person’s spirit if he or she refuses to allow their will to be broken. Welty’s story proves that when a person like Phoenix Jackson has love in her heart and goals to pursue, nothing can stop her ambition, even as the journey takes her along “A Worn Path.”
Works Cited
Welty, Eudora. “A Worn Path.” Literature for Composition, 8th ed. Ed. Sylvan Barnet, William Burto, and William E. Cain. New York: Longman, 2007. 644-649.
Normal Adolescent Thoughts Do Not a Chauvinist Make
"You know what I think... I think that we're all in our private traps-clamped in them-, and none of us can ever get out. We scratch and... and claw, but only at the air, only at each other, and for all of it, we can never budge an inch."
-Norman Bates
When one considers the many general and personal traits of behaviors that imply a man has chauvinistic tendencies, there are countless examples that come to mind. The most renowned form of chauvinism comes in the form of the most typically acknowledged type: the male chauvinist pig, any man who believes in the marked, definitive, and irrefutable superiority of his own gender to the fallibility and weakness he has pompously designated to what he considers to be the fairer sex. A man who imbues characteristics of a chauvinistic pig traditionally has the equally detestable facets of being a sexist, a bigot, one with great prejudice, and one who discriminates unfairly in all his life’s endeavors. There may be some remarkable arguments by those who view the character Sammy in John Updike’s “A&P” as a chauvinist, but a close reading of his narrative ultimately proves otherwise. Sammy is merely a normal adolescent male whose natural response to an awakening sexual appetite is to discuss his innate responses to the equally natural allure female protagonists in the story in the best language he has mastered for such an occasion.
First, compare the small group of females (coming into the market in attire obviously more fitted for an afternoon on the beach) to the other female customers Sammy is more familiar with encountering. Upon first noticing the blossoming three girls, Sammy is initially interacting with “a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows” (Updike 375). Obviously much older in both countenance and demeanor, the attention of the reader is instantly compelled to note the customer’s time-bided anger that is elicited when Sammy mistakenly charges her for one of the purchases twice – interestingly, “a box of HiHo crackers” (375) is the item in Sammy’s hand when his attention is drawn away from his task to the three scandalously dressed females entering the store, an early example of Updike’s frequent utilization of common items as tongue-in-cheek symbols of sexuality. Aside from the clothes the girls are wearing (or lacking, from the perspective of Mr. Lengel, the store manager), Sammy marvels over their general, physical contrast to other customers who “are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs” (377).
The dissimilarities between the intrigue brought about by the girls and the regular “sheep…all bunched up” (378) is palpable not only in Sammy’s reaction to their presence, but in the more blatant and sexually inappropriate reactions of Stoksie, Sammy’s married friend and co-worker, and the older butcher, “McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints” (377). In fact, even the store manager has his own reaction to the girls, albeit one of both parental and managerial disapproval. In fact, in order for one to argue that Sammy is a male chauvinist pig, one would have to give equal attention to the same description befalling Stoksie, McMahon, and even –for entirely different, but equally arguable reasons—Lengel with his “sad Sunday-school-superintendent stare" (378). At least Sammy’s dalliance from PG-rated thoughts is rooted in his natural desire to respond sexually to that which he finds exciting.
Regarding such intrinsic thoughts such as those concerning the language Sammy uses throughout the story, one would best sum these multiple examples up as the language of a nineteen-year-old male living in a town where the appearance of three attractive girls such as these is obviously a rarity. His initial summations of the females as ranging from “chunky” to “‘striking’ and ‘attractive’” quickly turn to more overt and brazen when he describes Queenie’s bathing suit and notes “what got me, the straps were down” (375). This unexpected surprise and all the unspoken promises of the implications of her determined movement inspire even further physiological responses in Sammy. When Queenie “stopped, and turned so slow,” Sammy mentions, “it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron” (377). One could infer that if Sammy were truly a male chauvinist, he might be more likely describing all the graphic images of the activities the girls have led him to consider. Instead, Sammy notes that it usually takes an extreme situation such as that which is at hand for him to draw the attention of regular customers away from their mental shopping lists. It seems only fitting here that the two items mentioned as being forgotten from the list of memorized items are the phallic symbol “asparagus” and the major double entendre that comes with the second purchase: “ah, yes, applesauce!” (377).
Despite the myriad examples of somewhat subliminal archetypes and symbols of sexuality, Sammy, like most other normal adolescent males, saves his most passionate language for the later part of the story. Not chauvinistic, his passage describing his personal interaction with the girls is Sammy’s sample of his most lustfully laden. Although the words have an obviously intended and thinly disguised sexual undertone, Sammy’s description is far more amorous and amusing than aggressive and apoplectic a la male chauvinism:
“I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking” (379).
Sammy is clearly likening this financial business transaction to the way he imagines a sexual act between the two of them would progress, tenderly and virginal. Are these really the words and phrases of a male chauvinist pig, or are they more likely the words of a respectful, but impassioned nineteen-year-old heterosexual male who has awakened urges to the impulses of sexual frankness?
The ultimate argument against calling Sammy something as decisive as a chauvinist is his decision to act as best he can on the only appropriate subject: his manager. Although he is clearly hoping that the girls will overhear his resignation from the position, and thus be deemed their “unsuspected hero” (379), Sammy does have some degree of altruism in his decision to quit as he remembers “how [Lengel] made the pretty girl blush” (380) before leaving the store in the middle of his shift. A true chauvinist would never have wanted to display some moral remonstrance of the situation. Instead, a real male chauvinist pig would have outwardly agreed with his manager’s public humiliation of the girls while silently engrossing himself in the nubile flesh he has just seen disappear around the corner.
Works Cited
Updike, John. “A&P.” Literature for Composition, 8th ed. Ed. Sylvan Barnet,
William Burto, and William E. Cain. New York: Longman, 2007. 375-380.
-Norman Bates
When one considers the many general and personal traits of behaviors that imply a man has chauvinistic tendencies, there are countless examples that come to mind. The most renowned form of chauvinism comes in the form of the most typically acknowledged type: the male chauvinist pig, any man who believes in the marked, definitive, and irrefutable superiority of his own gender to the fallibility and weakness he has pompously designated to what he considers to be the fairer sex. A man who imbues characteristics of a chauvinistic pig traditionally has the equally detestable facets of being a sexist, a bigot, one with great prejudice, and one who discriminates unfairly in all his life’s endeavors. There may be some remarkable arguments by those who view the character Sammy in John Updike’s “A&P” as a chauvinist, but a close reading of his narrative ultimately proves otherwise. Sammy is merely a normal adolescent male whose natural response to an awakening sexual appetite is to discuss his innate responses to the equally natural allure female protagonists in the story in the best language he has mastered for such an occasion.
First, compare the small group of females (coming into the market in attire obviously more fitted for an afternoon on the beach) to the other female customers Sammy is more familiar with encountering. Upon first noticing the blossoming three girls, Sammy is initially interacting with “a witch about fifty with rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows” (Updike 375). Obviously much older in both countenance and demeanor, the attention of the reader is instantly compelled to note the customer’s time-bided anger that is elicited when Sammy mistakenly charges her for one of the purchases twice – interestingly, “a box of HiHo crackers” (375) is the item in Sammy’s hand when his attention is drawn away from his task to the three scandalously dressed females entering the store, an early example of Updike’s frequent utilization of common items as tongue-in-cheek symbols of sexuality. Aside from the clothes the girls are wearing (or lacking, from the perspective of Mr. Lengel, the store manager), Sammy marvels over their general, physical contrast to other customers who “are usually women with six children and varicose veins mapping their legs” (377).
The dissimilarities between the intrigue brought about by the girls and the regular “sheep…all bunched up” (378) is palpable not only in Sammy’s reaction to their presence, but in the more blatant and sexually inappropriate reactions of Stoksie, Sammy’s married friend and co-worker, and the older butcher, “McMahon patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints” (377). In fact, even the store manager has his own reaction to the girls, albeit one of both parental and managerial disapproval. In fact, in order for one to argue that Sammy is a male chauvinist pig, one would have to give equal attention to the same description befalling Stoksie, McMahon, and even –for entirely different, but equally arguable reasons—Lengel with his “sad Sunday-school-superintendent stare" (378). At least Sammy’s dalliance from PG-rated thoughts is rooted in his natural desire to respond sexually to that which he finds exciting.
Regarding such intrinsic thoughts such as those concerning the language Sammy uses throughout the story, one would best sum these multiple examples up as the language of a nineteen-year-old male living in a town where the appearance of three attractive girls such as these is obviously a rarity. His initial summations of the females as ranging from “chunky” to “‘striking’ and ‘attractive’” quickly turn to more overt and brazen when he describes Queenie’s bathing suit and notes “what got me, the straps were down” (375). This unexpected surprise and all the unspoken promises of the implications of her determined movement inspire even further physiological responses in Sammy. When Queenie “stopped, and turned so slow,” Sammy mentions, “it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron” (377). One could infer that if Sammy were truly a male chauvinist, he might be more likely describing all the graphic images of the activities the girls have led him to consider. Instead, Sammy notes that it usually takes an extreme situation such as that which is at hand for him to draw the attention of regular customers away from their mental shopping lists. It seems only fitting here that the two items mentioned as being forgotten from the list of memorized items are the phallic symbol “asparagus” and the major double entendre that comes with the second purchase: “ah, yes, applesauce!” (377).
Despite the myriad examples of somewhat subliminal archetypes and symbols of sexuality, Sammy, like most other normal adolescent males, saves his most passionate language for the later part of the story. Not chauvinistic, his passage describing his personal interaction with the girls is Sammy’s sample of his most lustfully laden. Although the words have an obviously intended and thinly disguised sexual undertone, Sammy’s description is far more amorous and amusing than aggressive and apoplectic a la male chauvinism:
“I uncrease the bill, tenderly as you may imagine, it just having come from between the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known were there, and pass a half and a penny into her narrow pink palm and nestle the herrings in a bag and twist its neck and hand it over, all the time thinking” (379).
Sammy is clearly likening this financial business transaction to the way he imagines a sexual act between the two of them would progress, tenderly and virginal. Are these really the words and phrases of a male chauvinist pig, or are they more likely the words of a respectful, but impassioned nineteen-year-old heterosexual male who has awakened urges to the impulses of sexual frankness?
The ultimate argument against calling Sammy something as decisive as a chauvinist is his decision to act as best he can on the only appropriate subject: his manager. Although he is clearly hoping that the girls will overhear his resignation from the position, and thus be deemed their “unsuspected hero” (379), Sammy does have some degree of altruism in his decision to quit as he remembers “how [Lengel] made the pretty girl blush” (380) before leaving the store in the middle of his shift. A true chauvinist would never have wanted to display some moral remonstrance of the situation. Instead, a real male chauvinist pig would have outwardly agreed with his manager’s public humiliation of the girls while silently engrossing himself in the nubile flesh he has just seen disappear around the corner.
Works Cited
Updike, John. “A&P.” Literature for Composition, 8th ed. Ed. Sylvan Barnet,
William Burto, and William E. Cain. New York: Longman, 2007. 375-380.
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