Sexual freedom and adolescent rebellion in John Updike's "A&P"
The story of John Updike's "A&P" is a simple one: three girls in bathing suits walk into a supermarket in a 'shore town' that is largely populated by tourists in the summer. The girls cause a stir as they wander through the aisles. In general, the female customers are shocked while the males are rendered speechless with sexual desire. The A&P store manager Lengel tells the girls not to come back unless they are decently attired, apparently humiliating them. The main drama in the story comes from the internal conflict present in Sammy, one of the cashiers. Sammy sees the girls as a representative not just of a sexual fantasy, but of a life and a lifestyle he wants to emulate. By quitting, an apparently meaningless gesture, Sammy hopes to ally himself with the girls, rather than with his parents or his fellow cashier Stokesie who already is anchored to the town and his job as a cashier with a wife and two babies.
Sammy is particularly taken with one of the girls, whom he calls 'Queenie,' because of her regal bearing and the fact he assumes she is the leader of the other two girls. When she speaks, he projects a fantasy image onto her body of what her life is like, in contrast to his own, depressed lower middle-class existence: "Her father and the other men were standing around in ice-cream coats and bow ties and the women were in sandals picking up herring snacks on toothpicks off a big plate and they were all holding drinks the color of water with olives and sprigs of mint in them. When my parents have somebody over they get lemonade and if it's a real racy affair Schlitz in tall glasses with 'They'll Do It Every Time' cartoons stenciled on." Although Queenie is undeniably beautiful in her perfectly-fitting bathing suit and tan,...
Ross (1988) notes the development of Romanticism in the late eighteenth century and indicates that it was essentially a masculine phenomenon: Romantic poetizing is not just what women cannot do because they are not expected to; it is also what some men do in order to reconfirm their capacity to influence the world in ways socio-historically determined as masculine. The categories of gender, both in their lives and in their
Coming of age narratives do not necessarily depict complete struggles, or complete journeys to maturity. Some narratives of coming of age depict a protagonist that reaches maturity only through a great struggle. Other comings of age stories depict a central character that strives to create a new and different form of identity but fails miserably in the process. The best forms of such stories, however, take the reader by surprise.
Victorian literature was remarkably concerned with the idea of childhood, but to a large degree we must understand the Victorian concept of childhood and youth as being, in some way, a revisionary response to the early nineteenth century Romantic conception. Here we must, to a certain degree, accept Harold Bloom's thesis that Victorian poetry represents a revisionary response to the revolutionary aesthetic of Romanticism, and particularly that of Wordsworth. The
Fiction with Documentation "Where are you going, Where have you been When asked this question, teenage girls like Connie -- past and present -- are faced with few options Perhaps one of the great hallmarks of a great work of fiction is its ability to appear to have been written for the age during which it is being read, regardless of how far back in time it was written. In other words,
Isaac and Rebekah seemed to have a happy and healthy functional marriage. While it is never overtly stated in the text, the implication is that the two love one another. However, despite what one assumes is a fairly active sex life, Rebekah is unable to conceive and they do not create a child during Rebekah's childbearing years. She passes into old age, which makes one believe that she will
Censorship in Music Censorship Under the Guise of Protecting the Children Rock and Roll Culture Hip Hop Culture Is Censorship in Music Viable and Does it Make a Difference? There have been many attempts by society control music. Governmental statutes, agency regulations, business controls and parents have all tried to censor the music. Sometimes they have succeeded and sometimes they have not. The examination of various aspects of rock and rap music censorship involves general
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