The 'Right-Looking Girl' in the Raccoon Coat: How to Read a Cliché, Like Franny Glass

Abstract

The "Right-Looking Girl" in the Raccoon Coat:How to Read a Cliché, Like Franny Glass Laurie A. Rodrigues (bio) Upon the initial release of J.D. Salinger's second, long-form fictional work, Franny and Zooey (1961), Alfred Kazin, Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy, Leslie Fiedler, John Updike, and others in American literary discourse, responded negatively, expressing marked annoyance with the book's Glass family.1 To Salinger's literary contemporaries, the Glasses (first appearing in Salinger's stories for the New Yorker during the 1950s) reflected a creative indulgence, lowering the degree of Salinger's artistic accomplishment.2 Here, I explore another reason for critics' annoyance with Franny and Zooey, one that suggests a new, historically-informed understanding of Salinger's "literary deviance and irony" (Malcolm). Situated at the crossroads of the 1950s' emerging cultural debates on women's rights and institutionalized sexism, Franny and Zooey refuses to critique or promote either sociological or popular theories addressing Franny Glass's narrative-driving breakdown at Sickler's restaurant and subsequent crisis at her family home in Manhattan. This ambivalence made the text difficult to evaluate in its own time; thus, I open a new discussion of Franny and Zooey, examining its commentary on the effects of mass cultural images and representations of women. At a historical moment when feminist discourses were delimited to academe, and mass culture found currency in sensationalizing women's problems, I claim that Salinger used "Franny" and its mass culture-reminiscent narrator to reveal and review the clichés that assemble postwar femininity and womanhood; and in [End Page 120] "Zooey," the near-mythic operations of American cultural clichés are critiqued through a shift in narrative perspective, to the dismissive and mature socio-political point of view of Franny's brother, Buddy Glass. My use of "cliché" refers to the work of literary and cultural critic, Marshall McLuhan. According to McLuhan, the "cultural cliché" appears and proliferates through various media, contributing to the construction of cultural environments: cliché may appear as an homage implied by character wardrobe; in the composition of a letter; or, it may manifest as setting.3 Thus, clichés are pervasive and through the environments they construct, may eventually forge breakthroughs in cultural understanding.4 McLuhan's work on the social effects of mass culture gained prominence around the time of Franny and Zooey's release in 1961, and his work explores paradigm shifts in interpretive values that are stylistically reflected in Salinger's prose. Thus, both McLuhan and Salinger use their work to analyze (and sometimes ironize) the centrality of the cliché to American culture, society, and the relation between the two.5 For instance, Salinger cites Franny's "sheared raccoon coat" as an initial cultural cliché in defining his protagonist. This cliché not only begins to formulate Franny herself, but readers' initial interpretations of her environment and ensuing crisis: [Franny] was wearing a sheared racoon coat, and Lane, walking toward her quickly but with a slow face, reasoned to himself, with suppressed excitement, that he was the only one on the platform who really knew Franny's coat. He remembered that once, in a borrowed car, after kissing Franny for a half hour or so, he had kissed her coat lapel, as though it were a perfectly desirable, organic extension of the person herself. (7) Acclimating readers to Franny and her environment, Salinger adorns his protagonist with an expansive cliché for 1955: the raccoon coat. Franny's date, Lane Coutell, spots her on a train platform where she arrives to spend the weekend of a Yale football game in an unnamed college town. Lane's reaction to Franny's coat sparks Salinger's expression of the cultural capital that the garment signals for his protagonist; the coat's place in [End Page 121] fashion is key to Salinger's expression in "Franny," contributing to the narrative ground in which Franny's crisis unfolds. In 1955, Franny's coat (likely vintage, if not vintage-reproduction) would have been considered very chic.6 Franny's "sheared raccoon coat" recalls Sue Salzman, a New York socialite, whose sudden desire to find "a true raccoon" turned her personal preoccupation with pre-Depression style...