SOURCE: "Checking Out Faith and Lust: Hawthorne's 'Young Goodman Brown' and Updike's 'A & P'," in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 23, No. 3, Summer, 1986, pp. 321-23.

In the following essay, Shaw suggests that "A & P" alludes to Hawthorne's "Young Goodman Brown" and emphasizes the story's motifs of repression and eroticism.

While [Hawthorne's] "Young Goodman Brown" has been carefully and frequently scrutinized, John Updike's "A & P" is a story that for the most part has gone unexamined. The several commentaries which have sought to elucidate it are oversimplified and inexact. Such critical imbalance between the stories is hardly noteworthy until we realize that Updike uses Hawthorne's venerable etching of human folly as a prototype and depends heavily upon its well-known nuances to convey and enhance the complexities of his own tale.

First of all, Updike borrows Hawthorne's geographical setting. When Updike carefully sets the action of "A & P" in a town...