A&P

Sammy uses a simile here when wondering if the inside of a girl’s mind is “just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar.” This simile captures Sammy’s sexist belief that women have less intellectual capacity or interior complexity than men. Though these girls clearly have power over Sammy in the story (they are the reason he impulsively quits his job, after all), he also has power over them by virtue of being a man in a patriarchal society.

This passage is the first of several in which Sammy relates the girls to bees, forming a motif in the story. In another line Sammy describes how the leader of the girls “buzzes” to the others and later describes her as “the queen” (going as far as to refer to her as “Queenie” in his mind), a likely reference to how she is the “queen bee” of her small group. These statements both reinforce Sammy’s sexist views of women—dehumanizing them by comparing them to insects—and also suggests that he recognizes the power that “Queenie” holds as a young woman boldly leading her friends into the A&P without clothes on, knowing that this is against the social norms of the time.