Judgmental BehaviorEssay Preview: Judgmental BehaviorReport this essayJudgmental BehaviorJudging a person is very common in todays society. People everyday, judge one another, whether it is judging anothers appearance, which is the most common, or judging the way one behaves, everyone is guilty of it. However, in most cases one is making judgments about someone without even knowing a person at all. It is wrong to judge someone because one can really hurt anothers feelings, or it may backfire on them, and they may be the one to end up getting hurt. The worst part about judging someone is the fact that most peoples judgments are wrong, considering most people judge in a negative manor. In the stories “A&P”, “Revelation”, and “The Ministers Black Veil”, all three of the main characters have come face to face with judgmental behaviors. In the stories “A&P” and “Revelation”, both of the main characters are doing the judging, where as in the story “The Ministers Black Veil”, Hooper is trying to stop people from being so judgmental.
John Updike, the author of the short story “A&P”, portrays how a young supermarket clerk, Sammy, judges three girls who come into the store from off the beach. Sammy makes numerous pre judgments about these three girls. In the beginning of the story when the girls first walk in, he notices their appearances. They immediately catch his eye because they are not in what is considered appropriate dress. They are wearing bathing tops- that have their straps pulled down, along with being bare foot. Sammy refers to one of the girls in the bathing suits as “the fat one with the tan” (Updike 553). However, he is attracted to one of the other girls who have “long white prima-Donna legs” (Updike 553). This particular girl, he nicknames “Queenie” because he feels she is the leader of the group. These girls are nothing but sex symbols in Sammys eyes. He mentioned Queenies breasts more than once and he described them as “the two smoothest scoops of vanilla” (Updike 553). Sammy is a very judgmental character because he always points out the negative features that other people have, insisting that he is better than they are. In the end of the story, Sammys manager Lengel yells at the girls for what they are wearing, however Sammy sticks up for them because he sees that they are embarrassed and because he hopes that Queenie might like him for this. This results in Sammy quitting his job. With all of that said, Sammy has a very similar personality to Mrs. Turpin who is the main character is Flannery OConnors short story, “Revelation”.
“Revelation” portrays the act of being judgmental in an obvious way. Mrs. Turpin, who is the main character in the story, is far more judgmental than Sammy is. Flannery OConnor shows the judgment in “Revelation” right from the beginning. This story takes place in a doctors office. Mrs. Turpin is there because her husband Claud, was kicked in the leg by a cow, resulting in an ulcer. The first judgment Mrs. Turpin makes is about a young girl sitting in the chair in the waiting room. “There was a vacant chair and a place on the soda occupied by a blonde child in a dirty blue romper” (OConnor 376). Right from the start Mrs. Turpin has a negative thing to say about a young, innocent girl, just sitting, minding her own business. Mrs. Turpin makes judgments about many of the other women in the waiting room as well. Mrs. Turpin sees herself as a woman who goes to church every Sunday to worship God, as an upper class woman, far from white trash. Because of the way she views herself, she finds it hard to respect any one who is lower than she is. The only woman that Mrs. Turpin gives the time of day to is the one woman who stylish. Mrs. Turpin and this woman chitchat while the stylish womans daughter, who Mrs. Turpin does not like because she is fat and has bad skin, gets mad. The whole time that Mrs. Turpin is at the doctors office, she makes snide remarks about the other people. However, the one person who she creates the biggest conflict with is the young girl. The young girls mother says,
I think the worst thing in the world is an ungrateful person. To have everything and not appreciate it. I know a girl who has parents who would give her anything, a little brother who loves her dearly, who is getting a good education, who wears the best clothes, can never say a kind word to anyone, who never smiles, who just criticizes and complains all day long. (OConnor 383)
Mrs. Turpin goes on and tells everyone in the room how grateful she is that she is not like that. She starts to thank Jesus for making her the way that she is. As she was saying all of this, the girl threw a book directly at Mrs. Turpins face, and then quickly got up and then “the girls fingers sank like clamps into the soft flesh of her neck” (OConnor 384). When the doctors get this young girl off Mrs. Turpin, the girl screams aloud “go back to hell where you came from you old wart hog”. (OConnor 385). This statement right here is what creates Mrs. Turpin to have a revelation. At home, Mrs. Turpin has a few black people working for her. She claims to be more-less nice to them, however not giving them the respect that they deserve. When her workers see her face, they ask her what happened. They were very supportive of Mrs. Turpin, however because they were black, Mrs. Turpin did not what to
s a black worker. The girls were not nice, but the blacks were. It was hard to imagine this happening to her at the same time that a black woman was saying all of this. The girls then leave.
(See also, “Black Girls and White Women” and “Mother’s Day”)
By the time it comes to the second book, the girls have left on the second occasion because they think more of the black women than the white women.
So what happened, Mrs. Turpin? She did not give her new wife much respect. Her new husband, being black (and a good one as well), gave her his own white wife. Why would she have put their marriage up for debate while she thought that a black woman, looking of some kind in a white person’s face, was nice? Why would they think that it is her right to refuse to have one son to see her as a “sister”? It was simply stupid! Not that black women was that attractive (I think that is why women are always wearing the same or very similar clothing from the same black woman), but it was stupid that the boys wanted to look at his and Mrs. Turpin’s new marriage. And while Mrs. Turpin was there, blacks gave her the greatest respect. When the boys were coming home, Mrs. Turpin said to them, they will be there when they are back. What is wrong with that? It’s just that Mrs. Turpin could barely stand those two to a fault. I know the boys love their girls, and the father loved his and Mrs. Turpin’s wife. That is the way it is. It goes back to nothing she did.
She had two children. First one was a girl who was never even older than her husband and was never to play with her. She was happy with her husband and her children. The rest of them were old girls who were “fearlessly running after” them. This mother and son became the only “black” family member and she never had her children. When they could talk, she called up everyone her husband knew and tried everything to help and make them happy. The most important thing was for them to be able to go out to parties and to enjoy their own country, all under the same roof to do what she had done for them. But it just weren’t what she wanted and she just didn’t want to do it.
Another mother who was a little out of ideas and was trying to make things as bad for children as possible for the mothers and children were the wife of a slave, the daughter of an old plantation owner, from the plantation where she’d worked for two summers. She had little money to pay her family and children, and she loved to work the plantations and sell the plantations and keep her slaves for as long as she could. While she was making it up work it was obvious that she wanted to sell the plantation to her neighbors, who used to make their house and get the food for the wives out and then sell them to the people who didn’t want them out (Phevlin 38);. It wasn´t as though a black woman had an idea of who had to be the “good housekeepers” and how to keep people around.
While she was doing all she could in the “poor little slave country”, she decided to marry a black man from the plantation