Holden & I, Part III: Holden & Salinger

Greetings, lit geeks - and welcome to...wait for it....

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THE LAST EVER INSTALLMENT OF THE HOLDEN & I SERIES!!!!

I don't know who's more excited: you or me! And as much as I want to get straight into today's topic - a miniature biography of Salinger and a mild psychoanalysis of his affinity for women half his age (yep, you read that right!), all in the context of Catcher -  I promised over Twitter yesterday that a full explanation would be provided. So, without further ado...

 Source: Jordan's Furniture

THAT is what I did yesterday! For a girl who's deathly afraid of heights, that's pretty impressive, isn't it? It's a high-adventure course inside the Jordan's Furniture in Reading, and it was completely and utterly awesome, for lack of a more Salingerian word. At first, I've gotta admit: I was being a total pole-hugger and I was scared to walk on anything that didn't have hand ropes. Once I got used to being 12 feet up in the air, though, and kinda got my "air legs," it was actually really fun! 

So, that's why I didn't write yesterday. Jealous? Disappointed? Hoping my answer would be something more like "Orca Attack" or "Field Trip to Hogwarts"? Yeah, me too. Well, the truth is always somewhat boring, isn't it? For real life, I've gotta say: yesterday was probably about as good as it gets! 

Now, for the real reason you're here (unless you just saw my tweet and really, really wanted to know what happened. In which case, that's cool, too - welcome!): J.D. Salinger, Joyce Maynard, and Holden Caulfield, with guest appearances from Ernest Hemingway and Nabokov's Lolita. 

As always, a few brief disclaimers: firstly, I don't own Catcher in the Rye. Obviously, though that would be pretty cool. Secondly, I aim to please, not to plagiarize, so please do e-mail me at chicklitkitchen@gmail.com if anything about my work seems a little fishy, so I can update my citations! Last but not least, I wouldn't plagiarize you, so please don't plagiarize me! A citation in MLA format is available at the bottom of the article for your convenience...so USE IT!!! I mean, come on guys; I've literally handed it to you.

Whew, that was a lot. Let me stop and breathe first....

Okay, I'm good. Ready, set, CATCHER! Cue the bittersweet, histrionic intro music. 

WARNING: This post contains spoilers!

Jerome David Salinger was born in New York on January 1, 1919 to a fairly normal childhood. The only major disturbance in his early years was – gasp! – finding out that his mother was actually a closeted Catholic (he grew up believing he was 100% Jewish, like his father). (the Daily Mail)

It was not childhood that corrupted Salinger’s innocence – “popped his cherry,” so to speak – as adolescence and adulthood. First, it was his doomed love affair with Oona O’Neil in 1941: the 16-year-old girl he once wished to marry eventually ran away to wed Charlie Chaplin (the Daily Mail). And then, of course, there was the Second World War: the reason Salinger’s relationship ended in the first place, and the reason for all of the emotional and psychological turmoil that haunted him – and Holden – ever since (New York Magazine).  

We learned in class that J.D. Salinger saw more combat than perhaps any other classic American writer. While Ernest Hemingway and Tim O’Brien were as cozy as one could be stationed in WWII and Vietnam respectively, Salinger fought on the front lines, stormed the beaches of Normandy on D-Day, and liberated Nazi prisoners first-hand. Salinger touted the first pages of Catcher in the Rye through much of the combat (Vanity Fair).

With the harsh realities of war branded onto his brain, it’s unsurprising that both Salinger and Holden aimed to become “Catchers in the Rye”: preservationists of innocence; protectors and shields from the stark evils of the adult world. Salinger knew even more so than Holden what predators lay in wait for kids who grew up too fast – the draft, for one. War. Death.

It’s no wonder, then, that Salinger developed severe depression. On May 8, 1945, as the rest of the Western world was celebrating the end of the Second World War, Salinger sat on his bed, staring at a pistol, contemplating suicide. Fortunately, the literary genius was smart enough, diligent enough, and humble enough to seek help. Like Holden, Salinger checked himself into a mental hospital, where he passed time sassing the staff, writing letters to his good friend Hemingway (whom he met in Paris during the war), and generally trying to save face, for he feared the implications of his psychological turmoil on the reception of Catcher in the Rye. (During the 1940s, the stigma surrounding mental illness was considerable.) (Vanity Fair)

Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye was published on July 16, 1951 by Little, Brown – a Boston company, might I point out! Catcher was also banned almost immediately, for its “shocking” use of the f-bomb and candid sexual dialogue, among other matters we high schoolers today would probably consider trivial. (Vanity Fair)

No doubt in relation to his history of mental illness, fame didn’t sit well with Salinger, and so he essentially became a recluse, holing himself up in his house like a hermit in a way that – or so I am convinced – all writers must do at least once (Dead Caulfields). While he did publish later works such as Franny and Zooey, such works were simply republications of. After his death, three short stories of his have been leaked on the internet – none of which I have read; all of which I am sure live up to his high standards of quality narration and intricately-crafted characters. 

Ironically, Salinger himself ended up becoming one of the adult dangers that parents and “Catchers” might try to keep children from. As I touched upon briefly in my first post, Holden & Sexuality, J.D. Salinger was a bit of a creep. He had a fascination with innocence that translated appropriately into his writing and inappropriately into his sex life. He preyed on young girls long into his late life by luring them to his home through letters.

One of his conquests – benignly (and inaccurately) referred to as “muses” by most online sources - claimed that he broke up with her just after taking her virginity: all-too earnest testimony of Salinger’s obsession with the pure, the untouched. The director of the movie “Salinger”, Shane Salerno, perfectly explains how Salinger’s PTSD-driven pursuit of innocence manifested itself in his sex life: the girls he sought “[replicated] a pre-war innocence for him…[he] used very young girls as time travel machines back to before various wounds.” (the Wrap). A second theory attributes Salinger’s sexual insecurities to his lack of a second testicle, but I think I’d rather believe the first one, so I can take at least a little pity on the poor man (Salon).

Most famously, Salinger pursued the eighteen-year-old writer Joyce Maynard after reading her article in the New York Times, “An 18-Year-Old Looks Back on Life” (the Daily Mail). He was so moved by her piece (and by her pixie-like appearance in those photographs, no doubt) that he wrote her a fan letter cautioning her against the dangers of fame (New York Magazine). They exchanged about 25 letters before, in a spectacle straight from a whirlwind Hollywood drama, Maynard forsook her second year at Yale to move in with Salinger, who would trample her heart years later by crushing her dreams of having a family and essentially kicking her out (New York Magazine).

Maynard is frequently referred to as Salinger’s “Lolita,” which lends a curious and inappropriate (I think) shade of literary artistry to their relationship. Their sexual relationship was at first stagnant, later almost nonexistent; its foundation was oral sex, both because Maynard had a condition that made penetrative sex painful and because Salinger feared having more children (he wed his wife Claire, who was sixteen years his junior, in 1955 – he forced her into isolation when she became pregnant, and she gave birth to a daughter, Margaret, and a son, Matthew) (the Daily Mail).

The women in Salinger’s life described him as “sexually manipulative,” “pathologically self-centered,” and “abusive” – yet many former “muses” also describe their relationships with Salinger as weirdly nonsexual, up to a point (New York Times). He was, apparently, also an early New Age philosopher, obsessed with homeopathic medicine, acupuncture, dieting, Zen Buddhism, and Scientology (ibid). If he hadn’t died more than five years ago, Salinger probably would have fit right in with the all-natural health fads sweeping the nation today – I imagine that he and a young Beyonce might have e-mailed over green juices and spin classes. Or would Queen Bey have been too much of a feminist for him? Hmm…

With all the effed-up things he was doing (and that had been done to him), Salinger was understandably desperate to protect his privacy. To be completely fair, the world had been cruel to him – and so he knew it would only continue to become crueler. The one time he let his guard down was in 1953, when he agreed to let a group of local teenagers interview him for what he thought was a small school newspaper. When the article was published as a large feature editorial, Salinger felt so betrayed that he built a six-foot fence around his property and never spoke to the press again. Not only was Salinger privy to his privacy, but apparently he also had tremendous capabilities for holding a grudge. (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/29/books/29salinger.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0)

In his not-so-fine late years, Salinger was known to wield shotguns at strangers on his porch and sue authors for writing his biography (New York Magazine). He died at 91 - bitter, alone, and in no physical pain - in January of 2010 (New York Times).

Today, people are still arguing incessantly, uselessly about whether or not Joyce Maynard was the exploiter or the exploited, when I think we all know the answer to that one (New York Magazine). If you’ve read John Green’s the Fault in Our Stars, you probably won’t be surprised to find that J.D. Salinger makes me feel a little bit like Hazel Grace felt about Peter van Houten. Like van Houten, Salinger was “a good writer but a shitty person.” Although I will never be able to simply “forgive” Salinger for his pedophilic victimization of teenage girls, it breaks my heart to wonder why he did it. Was it a result of his wartime trauma? His long history of mental illness? Or was his lifetime of seclusion simply becoming too much? Was J.D. Salinger lonely?

No matter what way you swing it, the fact of what Salinger did remains the same: he nearly committed suicide. He checked himself into a mental institution. He threatened the press. And he harassed girls a quarter of his age. As much as we all want to romanticize our literary idols, the fact of the matter is that had Salinger not been so tormented, so distraught by the shattered pictures of innocence he saw in the world around him, the Catcher in the Rye probably would have been a thin, flimsy piece of mass-marketed literature hardly worthy of sitting on the shelf next to Fitzgerald.

They say it takes one to know one: Salinger was Holden Caulfield. He couldn’t accept that he would never become a “catcher in the rye” and so he tried to vicariously recapture his youth through his pint-sized lovers. Through writing the character of Holden, Salinger inadvertently became Holden: a man desperate to hold onto his innocence even after he knew it was gone – a man who could not let go of his juvenile fixations. Two boys defeated by death, conquered by loss, and shattered by mental illness. Two boys who felt strongly that “you should never tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody.” If that doesn’t explain Salinger’s self-imposed exile, I don’t know what would.

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Well, that's it for me and Holden, Holden and me - or Holden & I, I should say. It was fun while it lasted, 99.9% of the time (the other 1% I spent procrastinating on giant ropes courses and swearing at Salinger under my breath). Welp.

Stay tuned here on the Chick Lit Kitchen for my next big event, coming real soon...my brand-new 30 -Day Challenge! Eek! Whatever could it be about? My lips are sealed. I've locked them and thrown away the key...so you'll just have to keep checking back to find out >:) mwahahaha! How else do you think I'd keep you coming back for more? Wink wink, nudge nudge.

Oh, I'm only teasing - it's been a long day! You know you love me, deep down inside.

XOXO, Haley

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To cite this post (in MLA format): 

The Chick Lit Kitchen. Holden & I, Part III: Holden & Salinger. Blogspot, 2 Mar. 2015. Web. Date you accessed this post.

Holden & I, Part II: Holden & Feminism

Part II: Holden & Feminism

Welcome back, my fellow Holden-ites! I hope you've got your red hunting hats at the ready, because we're going to get right into the second installment of the Holden & I series, Holden & Feminism. In it, I'll be briefly analyzing Salinger's female characters and Holden's relationship to them, in order to further answer the pressing question I touched upon in my last post: is Holden a feminist?

But, per usual, a brief disclaimer first: I didn't write the Catcher in the Rye (oh, if only!) and I don't own any of these characters. I've tried to cite my sources as best as possible, but if you catch something that appears copied, please e-mail me at chicklitkitchen@gmail.com so I can update my citations! Finally, an MLA citation is provided for your convenience at the bottom of this page...please use it! Plagiarism is the Devil of all English classes, and trust me, you will get caught.

In my first installment of the Holden & I series, Holden & Sexuality, I argued that Holden Caulfield was, to some degree, a feminist, because of his noble crusade against date rape. Although I still stand by my word, in true Holden-esque fashion, I’m also going to become a major hypocrite. This post is dedicated to the women in the Catcher in the Rye – in other words, to why Holden Caulfield is decidedly not a feminist.

Salinger was not a fan of the strong female character; the closest we come to a heroine in this book is the precocious Phoebe, but because she’s technically a child, I don’t count her. There is no dearth of prominent women in the Catcher in the Rye: there’s Sunny, there’s Sally, and, of course, there’s Jane. But of these three principal female characters, none of them defies traditional beliefs about women, and none of them is particularly independent. Jane, for one, is portrayed as extremely vulnerable – and although we can assume that her creepy child molester of a relative is responsible, it does not change the fact that Salinger’s portrayal of her is weak.

In my opinion, the strongest female character in the book is Sunny, the prostitute. She wields considerable control over her sexuality and does not hesitate to stand up for herself when she believes she has been paid less than what she is due. However, Sunny is a prostitute, a position that is both inherently sexual and inherently shameful; this diminishes the significance of her comfortable sexuality. Not to mention, when she sticks up to Holden, she has to drag a man along with her - the piggish Maurice. Although she is the most independent of Salinger’s characters in the Catcher in the Rye, she is still far from it – and although Salinger writes plenty of female characters into the story, the men of Catcher dominate and prevail.

To be fair, the 1950s were not a good era for the feminist movement in general. During WWII, women had held jobs outside the home to compensate for the absences of their husbands. They had become the primary and often sole providers for their entire families. But when their husbands returned from war, bruised, bloody, and high on victory, they were not eager to accept this change. Women were typically fired from the jobs they had held during the war, in favor of the returning male workforce. Reversion was complete and sudden, and those women who protested were targeted with staunch advertisement from the federal government. With the spike in nationalism after the war, these women never would have risked facing the shame of keeping their jobs when the government was telling them it was their patriotic duty to stay home and take care of their husbands. The growing popularity of the suburban lifestyle only helped to further ingrain the role of women as queens of domesticity, as it entwined both familial and social life in a way it never had before: female life encompassed not just chasing the children, but also entertaining house guests at cocktail parties and brunches. (Vanessa Martins Lamb)

Despite the overall helplessness of the females in Holden’s life, Salinger’s view of women through Holden’s eyes is still somewhat positive considering the circumstances of the era. Generally speaking, Holden likes girls more than boys, and is more sympathetic toward women than toward men. When he encounters Ernst Morrow’s mother on the train to New York, his description of her reveals that he is more tolerant of some of her quirks than he might have if she were a man. For example, when Mrs. Morrow leaves her bag in the middle of the aisle, Holden cites this as a reason why he “just likes [women]”. However, if a guy like Ackley or Stradlater had acted similarly in this situation, Holden probably would have responded critically, considering his slander of Ackley’s and Stradlater’s array of habits. Holden takes pity on Mrs. Morrow, deliberately acting like what he would call a “phony” to spare her feelings about her son’s true character. Although Holden seems to take on a kinder, less defensive air toward women, his behavior also shows that he might be less honest with them.

Holden assumes that the women and girls he meets are less intelligent than him, but differently than he does with men. Holden feels himself above the guys at school because he acts in a more “civilized” manner than them. However, around girls, he is deliberately deceitful, yet he snickers at these women for believing him. On page 57, Holden says “mothers aren’t too sharp” because Mrs. Morrow so readily absorbed the false information he fed her about her son, but rather than acknowledge that he has taken advantage of her, he blames this on her intelligence, as if she should have known better. The same angle of portrayal is taken with the three girls Holden meets at the Lavender Room. Holden takes advantage of the girls’ obsession with movie stars (an interest he considers inferior, due to his abhorrence of the “phoniness” of Hollywood) and tricks them into believing that one appeared at the bar, for his own sheer amusement; then he blames the girls for being “dopes.”

The especially strange part is that Holden actually prefers spending time with less intelligent women to women who he might consider his equal (although, considering his exorbitantly high standards, is there really anyone whom Holden would consider his “equal?”). On page 73, he describes the intoxicating air of girls who are merely pretty faces, explaining how regardless of what qualities are underneath, he can fall in love with a girl almost instantly. Hypocritically, this could make Holden naive and a bit of a romantic, while also attesting to the fact that he is, duh, a teenage boy. On pages 70-71, he says that dancing with a smart girl is not as fun as dancing with an air head, because “half the time she’s trying to lead you around the dance floor.” This suggests that Holden has a bit of an inferiority complex about his intelligence; like many boys of old, he would find it embarrassing to date someone smarter than him. Compared to his attitudes about women and sex, Holden’s view of a woman’s intelligence is decidedly traditional – and decidedly misogynistic.  

The only exception to the rule of intelligence is Holden’s little sister, Phoebe. Holden idealizes Phoebe, constantly describing her with the word “pretty” and characterizing her as “smart.” He also overlooks her interest in the movies, the object of Holden’s deepest hatred. Holden idealized his brother similarly, so I think the reason why he loves and idolizes Phoebe so much has more to do with Phoebe’s similarities to Allie than with the fact that she is a girl. But, he clearly likes Phoebe - a child and a girl - a lot more than most of the guys his own age, and far more than most of the adults he meets on his adventure, attesting not only to his preference for women but to his desperation to retain his innocence.

Even though Salinger’s female characters are far from self-actualized, I still have hope for Holden as a feminist. His respect for female sexuality, particularly his respectful treatment of Jane, plant the preliminary grains of feminism in the reader's brain. Were he born in a different place and time – say, thirty years later - he might have blossomed into a fully-fledged feminist.

It is also worth noting that Holden attends an all-boys’ school, so he has been surrounded by the popular societal opinion of women as sexual objects his entire high school career. Because that is what he has been taught, it is only natural that Holden display shows clear signs of masculine bias. The fact that his brain contains even a seed of feminism is remarkably radical for both the era and for Holden’s situation.

Like Holden’s provocative preoccupation with sex, Holden and Salinger’s treatment of female characters can and should be used to spark dialogue in classrooms and at home. Treating the Catcher in the Rye as a "boys' book" that all girls are simply destined to hate is just as misogynistic as Holden's objectification of Sally's twitchy lil' butt. Believe it or not, girls can - and will - identify with a male narrator, despite his bias against their sex. To catalyze the process, Stephanie Polukis’ Teaching J.D. Salinger’s ‘The Catcher in the Rye’ from Multiple Critical Perspectives features the brilliant idea of asking students to rewrite a scene in the book from a female character’s perspective. Holden’s first-person narration is critical to establishing the voice and tone of the Catcher in the Rye, yes, but it also colors the story with Holden’s – and Salinger’s – male-oriented lens, one that can obstruct a female student's ability to relate with Holden's concerns. 

 As illustrated by the backlash to the feminist movement even today, it is remarkably difficult to combat the bigoted attitudes we have grown up with our whole lives – even if our mind knows we are acting wrongly, the heart can be more difficult to convince (read more about changing your heart and mind in my post "Old Habits Die Hard"...I even quoted Frozen!). However, it is also vitally important to change both hearts and minds in order to achieve true change.  In J.D. Salinger’s the Catcher in the Rye, protagonist Holden Caulfield may not have been a feminist – but he was certainly no misogynist. During the 1950s, when traditional beliefs about women prevailed, this baby-step forward, although tiny, was a notable step nonetheless. 

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Can you believe that after this post, there's only one more left in my Holden & I series? Eek! Stay tuned next Sunday for the third and final edition of Holden & I, Holden & Salinger...and once the series is over, keep checking back for a special announcement of my new 30-Day Challenge! Whatever could it be? (Hint: it has nothing to do with caffeine, despite what I wrote in my "Old Habits Die Hard" post!)

Anyways, thank you all, my lovely lit geeks, for reading - and have a beautiful, magical Sunday afternoon! As for me, today is my last day on vacation, so I'll just be sulking about the house all day trying to make the most of what little time I've got left (and, okay, rushing to meet those homework deadlines...#truelife). I challenge all of you to live your last day of the weekend to the fullest, and send love and sparkles to all of you!

XOXO, Haley

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To Cite This Article (in MLA format):

The Chick Lit Kitchen. Holden & I, Part II: Holden & Feminism. Blogspot, 22 Feb. 2015. Web. Date you accessed this post.

Holden & I, Part I: Holden & Sexuality

Part I: Holden & Sexuality

Greetings, lit geeks – and welcome to the first edition of my long-awaited (and somewhat-delayed) Holden & I series! We’re going to be getting a little bit frisky today, as I’ll be sharing with you my musings on Holden’s sexuality and its deeper implications within the Catcher in the Rye.

Two short (but important!) disclaimers before I begin: firstly, I’ve taken much of my information from sources around the web. I’ve tried to cite as often as possible, but if you recognize material that emulates another publication, please e-mail me at chicklitkitchen@gmail.com so that I can update my citations! The last thing I want to do as a (hopefully) future journalist is plagiarize.

Secondly, to reiterate that theme, please do not plagiarize this source! For one thing, schools are getting ever-savvier about recognizing plagiarized works, and for another, it’s actually illegal. I’ve heard of students who have been expelled from college and essentially been blacklisted because of plagiarism. So, consider yourself warned. For your convenience, I’ve even included the MLA citation of this work at the bottom of the article!

Now that all the awkward, heavy stuff is out of the way, let’s get to the fun stuff: Holden, “flits,” and Jane’s symbolic checkers strategy.

In John Green’s Crash Course video about The Catcher in the Rye, Green remarks that “Holden is famously the first person to pay a prostitute not to have sex with him.” To borrow a phrase from Salinger, that just kills me. I don’t think anyone but John Green could have summed up Holden Caulfield so completely and accurately in so few words.

Like many teenagers, Holden Caulfield is physically mature enough for sex, but emotionally immature and uncomfortable with the idea of it. A man named Sigmund Freud, who did a lot of thinking about sex, had a lot of obscure (and often creepy) theories about the relationship between psychology and sexuality. Freud, for example, is responsible for the bizarre and misogynistic idea of the Electra complex, or the idea that a girl’s primary motivation is envy of her father and brother’s penises (Saul McLeod).  I may not have a PhD in psychology, but as a woman who’s perfectly happy with her vagina, I am pretty sure that “penis envy” is not a real thing. However, Freud was right to emphasize the important of sexuality in development: our relationship to sex is largely how we humans express our physical and emotional maturity.

I think Freud would probably agree with me, then, that Holden’s screwed-up relationship with his sexuality is one of the reader’s first red flags that something is up with his mental health.

Even today, Holden’s attitude toward sex can be considered “feminine”; the concept of needing attachment and love to foster sexual intimacy is one we largely attribute to females. Men, we say, care only about the physical experience of sex. Holden has a strong desire to appear as if he cares about sex in a masculine way, self-identifying as a “sex fiend”; however, Holden is not a “macho” guy at heart. He only tries to become one to avoid being ostracized by society, who is already ostracizing him as it is. Concealing his true ambivalence about sexuality is yet another mechanism for Holden to protect himself, like the red hunting hat he wears to feel more confident. Yet Holden, despite his wish to seem “macho,” clearly attaches value to his virginity. He clings to it as yet another example of his desperation to cling to his childhood innocence.

Which leads me to one of two conclusions: either Salinger was a feminist, or he means for us to think that Holden is gay.

I don’t mean that the way it sounds. I don’t mean to oversimplify exceedingly complex issues of gender or sexuality. Sexuality, in today’s day and age, is not defined only in black and white, gay and straight, male and female. But in Salinger’s day, it was, so let us step into the time machine together and remember what was going on in the world when the Catcher in the Rye was published.

People in the 1940s were, obviously, having sex. And lots of it. (I suspect that “Baby Boom” birth rates would attest to exactly how much, but I’m not here to talk about numbers.) After World War One, old-fashioned opinions about sexuality (i.e. “waiting ‘til marriage”) kind of flew out the window, as we can tell from the spike in single motherhood. But people still weren’t talking about sex – it was simply taboo.

Then the Kinsey Reports were published in the 1940s and 50s – around the same time as the Catcher and the Rye - and slowly, slowly, everything began to change.

The Kinsey Reports – the first national surveys regarding sexual behavior - were revolutionary in that they got sex on the public brain for the first time.  On the other hand, they also revealed that gender-wise, our attitudes were rather old-fashioned. While 71% of men were engaging in premarital sex, only 33% of women did. That kind of leads me to wonder who the heck men were having all of that sex with, but that’s beside the point. The point is, people started to talk.  (Rogers State University)

However, the first and largest scientific studies of sex, the Masters and Johnson studies, didn’t take place until the 1960s – and even then the women observed were prostitutes, as the researchers believed that “respectable” women wouldn’t participate. I’ll reiterate: the sexual revolution occurred S-L-O-W-L-Y. So, basically until the “Free Love” movement during the Vietnam War, women weren’t expected to take pleasure in sex, men were, and no one was allowed to talk about it. Ladies and gentlemen, the 1940s in a nutshell!  

Given the stigma surrounding sex at the time, it’s no wonder that Catcher in the Rye was banned almost immediately upon publication (California State University). I think this shows just how progressive Salinger was in his candid portrayal of teenagers’ conflicted beliefs about sexuality. He wrote the truth, in a time that no one wanted to accept the truth – and I think that’s simply amazing.

Which brings me to my first of two theses: maybe, just maybe, Holden is gay.

Holden Caulfield has an obsessive, homophobic fear of all things “flitty” – yet contradictorily, he behaves in ways that he would condemn as gay in others. A prime example is Holden’s interactions with Luce at the bar. In high school, the boys were riveted by Luce’s sensational stories of sexual encounters – and many of those stories had an undercurrent of “Beware the homosexuals or you’ll become one of them!”Today, we read this about as seriously as our mothers warning us not to swallow the watermelon seeds, or we’ll grow them in our stomachs. But in the 1940s, when being gay was not only a “sin” but also a crime, could you really blame a bunch of teenage guys for being terrified of becoming even the slightest bit gay? I mean, doncha think Chemical Castration would make a great title for a horror movie?

At Pencey, Holden interpreted Luce’s obsession with the sexual as a sign that he was a “flit,” yet when he meets Luce at the bar several years later, it is Holden who presses Luce for raunchy stories and appears obsessed with sexuality. Again, Holden’s paranoia about same-sex sex returns in his questionable encounter with an old teacher, Mr. Antolini, a paternal figure who treats Holden as his protégé. Despite Antolini’s fatherly interactions with Holden, Holden is skeptical about Antolini placing his hand on Holden’s head in the middle of the night, interpreting it as “flitty” and hinting that he has prior memories of molestation. Even today, classrooms debate the significance of this scene: was Mr. Antolini really making a pass at Holden, or is Holden just a rampant homophobic? One of many questions I’d like to send to my man J.D. through the metaphorical time machine.

A friend of mine, in a class discussion about Holden’s awkward preoccupation with sex, argued that Holden’s hypocritical condemnation of his own behavior in others as “flitty” could be a sign of his own homosexuality. In the 1940s, writing a gay character would have been the ultimate taboo – and the ultimate revolution. If we think that gays have limited rights today, then we know nothing about the 40s and 50s. In honor of the great Benedict Cumberbatch, I’ll cite Alan Turing as an example: a British WWII codebreaker and pioneer of Artificial Intelligence – you may have heard of the Turing test? – Turing was convicted (yes, convicted – homosexuality was literally considered a crime) of being gay in 1952 and was forced to undergo chemical castration (CNN).  Due to “sexual deviance,” the United States denied him political asylum (A Working Theory of Love by Scott Hutchins). To summarize being gay in the 40s in one word, I'd probably choose "ouch."

Personally, I don’t think we are expected to believe that Holden is gay. I think that, like a great many teenagers, Holden is simply bothered by the possibility that he could be – he is, as we would say today, “exploring his sexuality,” but he is troubled by what he discovers due to society's overwhelming condemnation of homosexuality.

In short, Holden is a paranoid homophobe. I think he just notices, as we readers have, that some of his attitudes about sex are feminine and could therefore be interpreted as “flitty,” or gay – and because of the social stigma placed on homosexuality, he fights to project himself as an alpha male-type, one whose heterosexuality could never be questioned. Considering the fact that Catcher in the Rye was written in the time of Turing’s court-mandated castration, the simple fact that the issue of Holden’s sexual orientation made into the book at all is a milestone in and of itself.

Which brings us to our second possibility: Salinger was a feminist.

My definition of “feminist” in relation to Salinger is a very narrow one. In reality, Salinger was – pardon my French, ya’ll – kind of a dick when it came to women. He was attracted to a lot of significantly younger ladies, who he held exceedingly inappropriate relationships with (which I’ll analyze in the series finale, Holden & Salinger) through old-fashioned written correspondence (the Daily Mail). But Salinger did give Holden significant sympathies toward the female race, especially pertaining to sex, that suggest he may have been a feminist at heart.

The Catcher in the Rye was the first book to truly portray date rape for what it was – and Holden the first pioneer against it (Nemo D. Keane). Keane even goes so far as to describe Holden as the first “liberated male” in American literature, but I think that’s a bit of a stretch. Holden’s “when they say ‘stop,’ I stop” attitude is progressive, yes, but Holden is far from “liberated” considering liberation implies self-assurance. Holden actually thinks something is wrong with him because he can’t go through with date rape; because of societal norms, he views this inability to perform sexually as a threat to his masculinity.

While the Catcher in the Rye contains no direct references to female sexuality or female pleasure, apart from the occasional mention of lesbians, Salinger and Holden both hold men accountable for the woman’s experience as well as their own. Salinger portrays the sexual pressure on men to great extent, but largely ignores the pressure on women. However, his feminism prevails over his misogyny in his acknowledgment that it is up to men, not women, to stop sexual abuse like rape.

Holden’s earnest concern for Jane allows Salinger’s inner feminism to shine through. Inferring that a family member has sexually abused her, he strives to protect her from guys like Stradlater, who use their sweetest voices to trick women into putting out. Stradlater’s disregard for Jane’s emotions deeply troubles Holden, who observantly notes that Jane “keeps her kings in the back row.” I’ve heard a lot of interpretations of Holden’s memory of Jane’s checkers strategies – a notable one being John Green’s: that he prefers to remember her as “a talented checkers player,” rather than “a sexual being,” because he fears loss of innocence in her as well as himself – but my theory is that the word “kings” is a metaphor for emotions. A girl who keeps her kings in the back row is emotionally guarded, building thick walls around her inner vulnerability. Holden sees through Jane’s walls into her inner vulnerability, attributes it to negative sexual experiences, and devotes himself to becoming her knight-in-shining-armor when it comes to her emotional well-being. I happen to think that’s incredibly inspirational – and incredibly feminist of him.

Even so, it’s sad that Holden believes himself less of a man, rather than more manly, for it. A man’s responsibility for his sex partner’s safety and comfort is one of the Catcher in the Rye’s many key themes that remains relevant even today. In our modern-day rape culture, it is more essential than ever to teach young men that no means no and only yes means yes. I believe that the Catcher in the Rye can and should be used to spark these critical discussions of man’s responsibility to womankind, both in schools and at home.

So now that I’ve successfully gone off on a tangent, let’s regroup and ask ourselves: was Salinger a feminist or simply a dick? Was Holden a “flit” or simply a paranoid homophobic?

To me, the worst part of analyzing a classic is knowing that you’ll never truly know what ran through the author’s mind as he was writing. What we do know is this: whether or not Holden was gay, his candid observations about a broad degree of sexual preferences were extremely progressive at the time of Catcher’s publication. Despite the threat he thought it posed to his masculinity (and his author’s creepy, predatory ways with women), Holden was a pioneer of consensual sex – and as we can see, this contradicts popular opinion, or at least the behavior of popular, “Yearbook-handsome” characters like Stradlater.

No matter your thoughts on Holden, you have to admit that Salinger was deliberately crying controversy with his progressive stance on sex and sexuality. And that is feminism, and gay rights, in and of itself. 

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Stay tuned into the Chick Lit Kitchen for tomorrow's Marvelous Monday post (in lieu of Sassy Saturday), where I'll share my recipe for Death by Chocolate Cupcakes (adapted from Sally's Baking Addiction), my current style concept, and my newfound love for minimalism.

Until tomorrow, my love doves, keep on stickin' it to the patriarchy and refrain from saying or doing anything too phony (like going to see the 50 Shades of Gray movie, for instance)!

XOXO, Haley

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To cite this article (in MLA format):

The Chick Lit Kitchen. Holden & I, Part I: Holden & Sexuality. Blogspot, 15 Feb. 2015. Web. Date you accessed this post.