Masculinity And Tranquility In Sunday In The Park By Bel Kaufman

In her short story Sunday in the Park, Bel Kaufman weaves a scene of contentment and tranquility, but it only lasts until a large boy throws sand at the narrator’s son. This action causes a conflict between the two families; a conflict that pits the larger, more masculine father against the intellectual and feminine Morton. The father of the sand-throwing Joe takes a individualistic, extremely brash approach to the conflict while the narrator and her husband rely on societal norms and expectations to live.
The contrast of masculinity and femininity explores the tensions of the conflict. It is no coincidence that the story is written from a feminine point of view, particularly when the only masculine forms in the story are Joe and his father. “The only other people left on the playground were two women and a little girl on roller skates leaving now through the gate, and a man on a bench a few feet away.” (1). Child-rearing is traditionally considered a feminine trait and thus when the narrator looks for Joe’s caregiver she first looks for a woman before settling on the man.
Morton is not a masculine character and is consistently described
For when they engaged with Joe’s father, a decidedly more animalistic man, they stooped to his level of reason. Every human is nothing more than a more reasonable animal, driven by the same instincts of reproduction and survival, so when that veneer of reason is stripped away, the conflict became one of those instincts. In the animal kingdom an extremely feminine man like Morton would never mate, particularly when he is in competition with such a masculine presence as Joe’s father. The narrator feels this primal urge and is both embarrassed by it and angered by it, she wants to feel reason, but in this moment she cannot. Morton is too feminine and there is no collective reason to fix this