Male Chauvinism in John Updike and Ernest Hemingway

Male Chauvinism in John Updike and Ernest Hemingway

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 patronizing, 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 walk...

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...Ernest Hemingway, the male protagonists are viewed by the readers as chauvinistic pigs. Men who are so self-absorbed with themselves that they do not take into consideration the feelings and thoughts of anyone around them, including the females in their lives at the moment. These views of the readers’ are accomplished by the authors’ struggle to portray their female heroines in a positive manner, and thus their inability to portray their male protagonists as anything but the unsympathetic male chauvinist.

Bibliography:

“Chauvinism.” The Random House College Dictionary. 1975.

Essays on Hemingway. 9 Sep. 2000. http://hemingwaypapers.com/list.html.

Grebstein, Sheldon Norman. Hemingway’s Craft. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1973.

Hemingway, Ernest. “Hills Like White Elephants.” Literature: Structure, Sound, and Sense. Eds. Perrine, Laurence, and Thomas R. Arp. New York: Harcourt Brace College Publishers, 1993. 171-174.

Kakutani, Michiko. “Updike’s Long Struggle to Portray Women.” New York Times 5 May 1988: C29.

Updike, John. “A & P.” In-Class Handout. 30 Aug. 2000.

Updike, John. Interview. SALON 24 Feb. 1996: http://www.salon.com/08/features/updike2.html.