ing, Updike still presents this view to the reader (Updike 7). He typically gives “magazine cliches about the woes of being a housewife” and “noisy diatribes about piggish ways of men”, rather than giving the reader “an understanding of their conflicts as women” (Kakutani, par. 9).It is because of these views that characters such as Sammy and the other cashier, twenty-two year old Stokesie, are viewed as male chauvinists. As soon as the girls walked into the store, Sammy immediately lost all concentration. “I stood there with my hand on a box of HiHo crackers trying to remember if I rang it up or not” (147). He continues after that to analyze the girls’ every move and feature, saying that the “bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones” was “more than pretty,” and that ‘Queenie’ “turned so slow it made my stomach rub the inside of my apron” (148). Sammy and Stokesie then have conversation while watching the girls walk. “‘Oh, Daddy,’ Stokesie said beside me. ‘I feel so faint.’ ‘Darling,’ I said. ‘Hold me tight’” (149). Even the man behind the meat counter, McMahon, began to watch and react to the girls by “patting his mouth and looking after them sizing up their joints” (149). Sammy continues with his chauvinistic ways when “she lifts a folded dollar bill out of the hollow at the center of her nubbled pink top. The jar went heavy in my hand. I thought that was so cute” (150), and when he uncreases “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” (151). Through Updike’s descriptions and dialogue, he has made the male characters in “A & P” come across as the stereotypical male pig. After Lengel, the manager...
