Type-writer (not male, but more than female)

When Juliet first enters Flor and Fingelman, she is ignored by all three clerks. In their “ostentatious unconsciousness” of her presence, “[t]heir talk turned upon that noble animal, the horse” (29). They don’t dwell on the horse, instead they turn to talking about Fleet Street. Yet interestingly, once their attention does turn to Juliet, she describes the “pulpy youth” running his eyes over her “as if [she] were a horse for sale” (30). They have stripped her of her personhood and naturalized her into their discussion of horses. As a response to their impersonal scrutiny, she reverts to style since she cannot be a legitimate person in their eyes. Instead, she is a horse—no different from any other horse from their earlier conversation. In being conscious of their gaze, she subsumes their gaze into her own narrative voice, weighing herself as a scientific specimen with her attractiveness in her little black dress and hat.

Rather than reject their condescending gaze and attempt to persuade the reader otherwise, Juliet allows the reader to read her in the same way. She adopts the clerk's perspective, even though she does not endorse that particular view of herself. Thus, she becomes a detached animal in the eyes of the reader, if only for a short time. In the struggle for life, she permits the episode, showing herself humbled, yet knowing enough to read their reading of her. When the pulpy clerk turns to his fellows and pronounces her “good enough” (30), Juliet suspects it as a reference to her outward face and figure rather than her typing skills. She is powerless at this moment to distinguish herself from a horse. At same time, she ironically turns their own kind of gaze against them as she observes the straight black hair, features modeled after an oysters, hairy hands, and goggle-eyes. In that sense, her retaliation wins back part of her personhood, by using the authoritative objectifying gaze usually reserved for men looking at women to look at men.

Coming from an audacious type-writer (female), the power of narration makes any gaze or pronouncement from the clerks secondary. Though Juliet never achieves the privilege of (male), as the author and narrator of her own story, she can definitely claim the authority of a more than female.