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Teaching "A Er P" to treat issues of class and gender provides practice in reading for multiple meanings.
Introduction
John Updike's "A & P" is one of the most anthologized short stories in English. Thus, it often finds its way into general education literature courses. "A & P" recounts the actions of Sammy, a teenaged supermarket cashier who quits his job in protest when Lengel, his boss, berates three upper-class girls for entering the store wearing bathing suits.
A typical reading of "A & P" (one I was taught as an undergraduate and instructed to adhere to as a teaching assistant nearly twenty years ago) celebrates Sammy as a romantic hero, a working-class youth who senses a world of possibility beyond his humdrum job as a result of his exposure to Queenie, the girls' leader, who represents "a place from which the crowd who runs the A & P looks pretty crummy" (194). Sammy's characterization of Lengel, coupled with his rendering of the store itself as tacky, mundane, and repetitious informs such a reading of the text. Add to the textual evidence Updike's usual sympathy toward male questers, and this reading seems incontrovertible.
Critics have routinely advanced this view of Sammy In fact, in a 1971 essay, M. Gilbert Porter argued that Sammy is an Emersonian hero who "has chosen to live honestly and meaningfully" (157). Likewise, Rachael Burchard called Sammy "a young individualist who loves life's unconventional-if infrequent-moments of excitement" (139). However, more recent critics-such as Patrick Shaw, comparing "A & P" to "Young Goodman Brown," and Walter Wells, comparing it to "Araby"-attribute Sammy's motives to lust and vanity rather than heroism. Ronald McFarland reads Sammy's supposed heroism as ironic, crediting him with "a degree of heroism" but pointing to his "insensitivity and immaturity" to argue that the story is ultimately ambiguous (99).
That "A & P" can support multiple readings makes it an ideal work to teach beginning college students about postmodern strategies for reading. Such reading challenges canonical assumptions and enables students to experience the ways in which meaning can be as diverse as the politics and values readers bring to the text. Meaning is thus not something to be transmitted generationally and pedagogically but an indeterminate and contested encounter of...