John Updike and Ernest Hemingway struggle to portray women in a positive light; because of this, Updike’s and Hemingway’s readers come away from their stories with the effect that the lead male characters are chauvinistic, which can be defined as “prejudiced devotion to any attitude or cause” (“Chauvinism” 228). In John Updike’s “A & P”, three girls shop in the local A & P and are described head to toe by the nineteen year old cashier, Sammy:“The one that caught my eye first was the one in the plaid green two-piece. She was a chunky kid, with a good tan and a sweet broad soft-looking can with those two crescents of white just under it, where the sun never seems to hit, at the top of the backs of her legs . . . there was this one, with one of those chubby berry-faces, the lips all bunched together under her nose . . . and a tall one, with black hair that hadn’t quite frizzed right, and one of these sunburns right across under the eyes, and a chin that was too long . . . and then the third one, that wasn’t quite so tall. She was the queen . . . She didn’t look around, not this queen, she just walked straight on slowly, on these long white prima-donna legs . . . She had on a kind of dirty pink – beige maybe, I don’t know – bathing suit with a little nubble all over it and, what got me, the straps were down . . . all around the top of the cloth there was this shining rim . . . She had sort of oaky hair that the sun and salt had bleached, done up in a bun that was unravelling, and a kind of prim face . . . The longer her neck was, the more of her there was” (147, 148) .Through Updike’s descriptions of the girls, you can see how critical he is of women. They are merely “wives, sex objects, and purely domestic creatures” (Kakutani, par. 1). While not trying to make his portrayals of women purposefully sexist or patroniz...
