Evaluating J.D. Salinger’s Female Characters Through Beauvoir's French Feminist Theory

Abstract

J.D. Salinger’s books have brought new and experimental ideas to post-World War II America; for example, the introduction of the adolescent perspective in The Catcher in the Rye. This innovation resulted in a majority of the critical analysis conducted to be based on the adolescent perspective. However, since this criticism is primarily focused on the main character, Holden Caulfield’s, perspective, analysis of Salinger’s female characters’ perspective has been discounted in the academic world. The lack of female perspective recognized in Salinger’s novels makes it difficult for female readers to identify with his characters. This study aims to bring forth Salinger’s most prominent female characters fromThe Catcher in the Rye and Franny and Zooey and evaluate their alignment with Simone De Beauvoir’s French feminist theory. The French feminist theory focuses on how women are taught that they are the “other” sex in comparison with men from a young age, and what situations a woman must be in to transcend subordination. The researcher designed a rubric including the primary ideas of Beauvoir’s French feminist theory as described in the second volume of her book The Second Sex and tested the ideas’ alignment with selected characters. All of the characters chosen aligned with ideas of the theory to some extent, which shows that many of Salinger’s most prominent female characters occupy subordinate positions in comparison to their male counterpart. This research can serve as a basis for how Salinger’s female characters can continue to be studied in the future.