The Gendered Power Struggles in “A & P” and “I Want a Wife”

In John Updikes A & P and Judy Bradys I Want a Wife, both authors are showcasing the variant proponent struggles that occur in relationships between work force and wo custody.Both stories are indite with a kind of sarcasmin A & P, the cashier has a very sardonic view of the world which is every(prenominal) the route demonstrated in his narration, and in I Want a Wife, the entire launch is clearly written with a strong sense of irony. Despite the tongue-in-cheek orgasm both of these stories take, both are addressing the a very prevalent favorable issue the gendering of power.In A & P, Sammy (the narrator) spends much of the story describing these three adolescent girls who were brassy enough to walk into the A & P wearing nothing notwithstanding swim efforts, right d possess to their bare feet. Sammy focuses on one girl in particular, the one he refers to as Queenie, who is clearly the leader of the group and who oozes self-confidence.Queenie struts rough the store with a n obliviousness to the attention she is receiving from the men in a way that can only be seeshe is aware that she is being gazed at, as an attractive young fair sex wearing a bathing suit in a grocery store with the straps f tout ensembleing down her arms, up to presently she chooses to ignore the attention, as if it nevertheless wasnt relevant to her.The other manly employees of the store as well as pay careful attention to her, and signal to Sammy about(predicate) the girls, but Sammy describes her in an almost reverential way (as opposed to purely sexual), even down to the way she walks She came down a little expectant on her heels, as if she didnt walk in her bare feet that much, displace down her heels and then letting the weight move along to her toes as if she was testing the floor with every step, putting a little deliberate extra action into it (PAGE ).Queenie presents herself as the fe priapic body to be viewed, have the staminate gaze, yet also rejecting it a s something she does not need. This is her power she permits the men to carriage, but doesnt give them the satisfaction of knowing that she is aware. Sammy falls victim to this power of hers, the power of the intentionally unreciprocated gaze, to the point of quitting his job because he wanted to be their unsuspected hero (PAGE ). In this power struggle, Queenie wins.But thither is another which she failsa power struggle with a man who is unaffected with her presence, whose own permission is of more(prenominal) importance. This man is the store manager, and he embarrasses Queenie and her friends by calling attention to their inappropriate attire. Queenie stands up for herself, getting sore now that she remembers her place, a place from which the crowd that runs the A & P must look pretty crummy (PAGE ).Perhaps the man was simply trying to exert his government agency over his domain perhaps he was intentionally trying to dishonor these young girls because as an adult male he p ossesses the power and authority to do so. Regardless, he made Queenie blushonly a flimsy chink in her armor, but as he was the first to successfully make her self-conscious about her attire, Lengel won that power struggle. And as a result, young Sammy, thus far very much under Queenies spell, quits.In I Want a Wife, Judy Brady takes a much more obvious guess at the power struggle between genders. In this story-essay, Brady begins by noting that her newly-divorced male friend is looking for another wife, which turns her introspective and she herself begins citing all the various reasons why she, too, would like a wife.There is a lot of latent anger and cheekiness in this piecebasically, by taking the narrative form of lauding all the advantages of having a wife, she is in effect creating a highly accusatory scandalise on men and how they take advantage of their wives. The portrait she paints is one of lazy, ungrateful, unappreciative men who appreciate nothing their wives do a nd instead come to just expect it. The recipient man of the wife Brady is describing is really nothing more than an emotional child, with the needs and demands and expectations of a spoiled child.Brady outlines how the wife does all the cooking, cleaning, child-rearing, childcare, shopping, operative to put the husband through school, housework, entertaining, constantly on that point to meet all physical and emotional needs of the children and husband, never questioning anything, doing it all without complaint, be forever loyal and faithful, and expected to just leave quietly when the self-seeking child-like husband decides to replace her with a newer, younger, prettier wife. Here the power struggle is the womans forced silence. Brady is speaking on behalf of many houseslaves (as Sammy in A & P referred to them) who must suffer in silence.The whole point of this piece is to display how much the woman does suffer in silence, while also reiterating the fact that it is and must be in silence because that is the expectation. The woman must bare the burden, because that is her role and that is what is expected of her.Bradys narrator is struggling with this favorable expectation, yet she herself even suffers in silence and still continues to play the role, identifying herself in the very beginning as one of the very wives she is about to describe, align herself with exactly what she is longing for in a wife of her own I belong to that classification of people known as wives. I am a Wife. And, not altogether incidentally, I am a set out (PAGE ).In both A & P and I Want a Wife, the power strugglewhich is rooted, at least in these stories, primarily in mixer inequalitybetween men and women is clearly defined. In both stories, there is the presence of a strong female character who is struggling to drive her proscribed role as a weak, submissive female, yet who is still ultimately still held under the thumb of male dominance. It is still the males power that ul timately reigns supreme, and despite the efforts of the quietly defiant Queenie and the rebelliousness present in the internal musings of Bradys narrator, both women still illogical the struggle.Queenie still went home, embarrassed, her one source of powerpositioning herself as an butt to be looked at, making her power directly dependent upon the attention of the men she then rejectshaving been quashed by a man who refused to let her have it.The narrator who was wishing for a wife of her own was doing so in her spirit only as she continued with her wifely ironing. Both women struggled internally with their own domination, but both remain dominated.