John Updike's AandP

John Updike - a&P

It should be explained at the outset of this paper that this short story by John Updike "...is a retelling of James Joyce's 'Araby'" (Wells, 1993). Both stories weave a tale of a young man "making the distinction between romantic fantasy and tainted reality," Wells explains in the journal, Studies in Short Fiction. This experience by Updike's protagonist - who works as a checker at an A&P grocery store - leads to "an emotional fall."

Both the Updike and the Joyce characters - like countless young men the world over - are "infatuated with an idealized version of a female," Wells writes, and that female remains out of reach. But regarding Updike's choice of theme, character and plot, which resemble the work of Joyce; Updike does have a "penchant for appropriating great works of literature and giving them contemporary restatement in his own fiction is abundantly documented," Wells explains. And while Updike offers no protest when the comparisons are made between his and previous works by critics and scholars, Joyce is reportedly one of his favorite sources.

There are differences between the two protagonists, Wells asserts. Joyce's boy is apparently younger and more easily "unable to distinguish between the two quite normal impulses" (carnal craving and aesthetic pleasure); and Updike's character is more "anatomically and less ambiguously expressed" than Joyce's character, in Wells' opinion. That having been said, both boys are awestruck by the sheer beauty of the girls they are thrown into the midst of.

Meanwhile, Sammy, the A&P employee, sees three girls "in nothing but bathing suits," and right away he's shook up by the sight of all that skin because he rings a box of HiHo crackers up twice, and catches Hell from a "witch of about fifty" with "rouge on her cheekbones and no eyebrows." Right away Updike has, in the first paragraph, created a contrast (juxtaposition), adding sparks and luster to the young girls who are over in the bread section wearing very little in comparison to other grocery shoppers.

The whiteness of both the Joyce and Updike characters is highlighted to literary perfection; Joyce's protagonist is taken by the "white curve of her neck" and by "the white border of [her] petticoat (Joyce 32) and Updike's Sammy enjoys the "long white prima-donna legs" (A&P 188) and the "two crescents of white" just underneath the chunky girl's bathing bottoms.

And Wells also alludes to the fact that both writers create slow-motion sexiness through "seductive posturing" in the stories; Sammy sees his heartthrob (whom he names "Queenie") turn "so slowly that his stomach is made to 'rub the inside of [his] apron'" (189); and Joyce's character is warmed by the sight of his idealized girl turning the "silver bracelet round and round in her wrist" (Joyce 32).

Not only does Updike's story echo Joyce's story in the sense of the two main characters' reactions to stunning nubile beauty, Updike actually creates in his story a setting in which he "holds the secular materialism" of the 1960s in New England "up for comparison against the slowly imploding, English-dominated Irish Catholicism of the mid-1890s," according to Wells. To wit, in Joyce's story the house of worship in Dublin is seemingly temporary, yet in Updike's tale, the supermarket, what Wells calls "the temple of modern consumerism," has "supplanted the house of worship at the heart of things."

Of course, inside that house of worship known as A&P, Sammy is worshiping some fresh young female flesh instead of a statue of Mary, the mother of Jesus, or the crucified image of Christ himself, as worshippers would have done in Dublin's Araby bazaar.

Having explained to readers of Studies in Short Fiction how similar in theme Updike's story is to the Joyce story, author Wells embraces a story by 17th Century writer John Bunyon, Vanity Fair, and compares the three Updike girls clad only in swimsuits with the provocatively-dressed "pilgrims" in Bunyon's story. Bunyon writes that there was a "Hubbub" created at the fair by those entering who were "clothed with such kind of Raiment as was diverse from the Raiment of any that Traded in that fair" (Bunyan 111).

In A&P, the other shoppers, upon seeing Queenie, would "kind of jerk, or hop, or hiccup...and A few houseslaves in pin curlers even looked around after pushing their carts past to make sure what they had seen was correct" (A&P 190). Also, in both stories there is a religious theme; Bunyon's characters, dressed outlandishly, are confronted and explain they were "just passing through on their way to Heavenly Jerusalem," Wells continues; while Updike's little darlings in beach ware are confronted by the A&P store manager, a Sunday school teacher, and Sammy imagines that the girls "are returning to their own latter-day heavenly city," in Wells' view.

Meantime, having shown that Updike truly enjoys writing parodies to older works of great literature, it is worthwhile at this point to zero in on Updike's story, and some of the themes and subplots that make it among the most written-about short stories in American literature.

The way Updike's imagery creates not only the setting and tone, but the theme of the story, is pure brilliance. "What got me," Sammy, the narrator says, is that "the straps were down" on Queenie, "off her shoulders looped loose around the cool tops of her arms..."

Moreover, Queenie, in Sammy's opinion, was showing the other two lesser beauties with her "how to do it," walk "slow and hold yourself straight." Imagine a young man busily checking customer's purchases and yet finding time to thoroughly check out three girls straight from the beach in his store. With those straps down, there was "nothing between the top of her suit and the top of her head except just her, this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light." Metal? Updike's imagery here absolutely shines as brightly as metal reflecting light.

Updike wrote this story because he's a writer of great talent, and nothing beyond that needs to be justified. But it is fair for a reader to wonder, for example, is the behavior of the girls in swimsuits a kind of rebellion that is perfectly normal for teenagers? Is the fact of their scant garb a point Updike is making about the fact that the Madison Avenue-driven commercial American society is obsessed with the female torso?

Or perhaps Updike is reflecting literarily on the sexual revolution that went on in the 1960s - rock and roll, drugs, anti-war protests and other seeming violations of what until then were considered the accepted norms in American life. Indeed, could Updike's point have been that there were value wars going on in America between an older generation who, in the 1960s, displayed bumper stickers that read, "America: Love it or Leave it!" - and those who wore buttons reading "Peace & Love" and attended psychedelic light show concerts where pot was passed around as casually as the collection plate at a Sunday church service?

Just out the front doors of the A&P "you can see two banks and the Congregational church and the newspaper store and three real-estate offices," Updike writes. Those venues certainly reflect old-line American community values; and the sight of girls strolling through a major chain supermarket in bathing suits butts up against the bank and church images.

And while the girls stroll, Sammy is lost in a fantasy; "The whole store was like a pinball machine and I didn't know which tunnel they'd come out of," he says. Through his description of where the girls might be at any given moment in the store, readers learn about the cheap and corny items for sale - "sixpacks of candy bars...plastic toys done in cellophane that fall apart when a kid looks at them anyway...Diet Delight peaches." This descriptive tactic could well be Updike's way of critiquing the consumer mentality of that day and time.

Meanwhile, every story has its conflict, and this story pits old-fashioned Anglo-Saxon morality up against a scene of modern sensually-driven youth on parade. Just as Sammy has lucked out, and the girls have arrived at his register, store manager Lengel (a friend of Sammy's parents) shows up and announces, "Girls, this isn't the beach."

Now, in the first place, the girls are customers, and have purchased a jar of "Kingfish Fancy Herring Snacks in Pure Sour Cream" (for 49 cents). And in the second place, they're almost out the door, no harm, no foul, so why not let them go? No. Lendel had to push the envelope and express his moralistic view of society's dress code. Queenie explains that she was only there to "pick up a jar of herring snacks," and while she says that, Sammy slides right down "her voice into her living room." He is hurtled out of the store into a fantasy that includes a picture of Queenie's parents "standing around in ice cream coats and bow ties" while herring snacks are being served on "toothpicks off a big plate," and people are drinking martinis.

Lengel says, "That's all right...but this isn't the beach." And after a counter-protest by another of the three girls, Lengel lectures, "We want you decently dressed when you come in here." For all the readers know, Lengel himself is turned on by the lovely young women, and is only ranting at them in order to gaze at the splendor on display. In any event, Queenie says, "We are decent"; she is definitely becoming agitated, and as the narrator reminds readers, she is acutely conscious of her apparent high social standing, and needn't put up with a pious loser manager in a store "pretty crummy" store. The Sunday school pedagogue has his last say; "Girls I don't want to argue with you. After this come in here with your shoulders covered. It's our policy." He turns his back on the girls. Sammy hasn't rung up the herring fillets yet; but the coy Updike leads readers from an awkward, unfriendly confrontation between piety and prettiness, and offers as an escape the image of breasts - between which Queenie's money has been safely kept - as "the two smoothest scoops of vanilla I had ever known..."