In John Updike's short story "A & P," women characters play various major and minor roles. In fact, most of the characters in this story (save for the workers and the manager) are women, and these women all are coming into Sammy's interior monologue for the same two reasons that women come into a lot of people's minds: behavior and appearance.
In this short story, there is a mixture of dominant and submissive female characters that establish themselves in Sammy's mind. For instance, at the beginning when the girls first arrive in the A & P, Sammy first describes the girl in the green plaid bathing suit while he's ringing up an older woman's items. When he rings up an item twice, the woman vocally calls him out for it. In his thoughts, he's categorizing her as a fifty-year-old witch with no eyebrows and rouge who has probably taken great delight in catching him in a mistake at the cash register. He continues to take the witch analogy further by mentioning that if she were born in the right time period in Salem, then she would have been burned. Another character who exhibits dominance in her behavior is "Queenie," the leader of the three girls who find their way into the small grocery store. His thoughts seem to center mostly on her and leave her two friends as more of an afterthought because she gives off an air of power and prestige, which intimidates her friends into being submissive background objects that don't cross his mind quite as much, quite like rocks, perhaps. Dominance is an important way to establish oneself in society, and both the older woman and Queenie, as dominant women, seem to have established themselves in his somewhat long-term memory.
If we examine the behavior of the older woman and of Queenie and compare them, it's pretty clear that if Queenie had treated Sammy the way the older woman did, there would have been less of a complaint and probably no witch analogies. This has to do with Sammy's stage in life compared to the two womens'. The older woman is just that -- older. Had she been younger, like Queenie, the reaction might have been quite different. An important thing to Sammy in this story seems to be for Queenie to notice him, especially as she's walking down the aisles and in his actions at the end when he quits his job, hoping to catch her attention. In fact, as Sammy mentions the "houseslaves" that are in pin curlers and the mothers that have varicose veins and six kids, it occurs to me that he probably wouldn't have quit over the manager treating them like he did the three girls in their bathing suits. I'd even take it so far to say that he wouldn't have quit over the other two girls either. It was how Queenie looked that got his attention and led him to quit his job.
While Sammy's thoughts are probably just that of a teenage boy with little life experience, the fact remains that in this story, women are categorized by their behavior and appearance. Women, in his mind, are less like people and more like objects. He doesn't know the stories behind the "houseslaves" who truly are "house slaves" in more ways than one. He doesn't take the time to understand the caustic older woman, or even of the three girls that he's watching almost hungrily. The truth of these women are unimportant to him, and in the end he quits his job over someone he doesn't know or understand and it was poetic justice in its own way that when he exited the A & P that the girls were gone. And even then it was evident that he was moving on to something else and every last woman in that store was gone from his mind forever.
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