Sweet Jane |
 Nov 21 2009, 10:23 AM
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DDD's Protege  Posts: 769 Joined: 10:49am March 13, 2009 Location: On the Horizon   |
It would be hard to deny that girls are at the forefront of the thoughts of many 16 year-old boys, and Holden is no different. And he's surely not the first teenager to be unsure of the appropriate way to relate to women. With most of the women or girls we see him meet, he's mainly focused on making himself attractive to them. From his classmate's mother on the train, to the ladies in the hotel bar, to Sunny the sullen young prostitute, he keeps trying to pass himself off as something he's not, usually lying about his name or age (or both) in the process. He even gives his sometime girlfriend Sally a line, telling her that he loves her when they're making out in the cab, but later confessing that he thinks she's a "royal pain in the ass" (Ch. 17). It seems that the only females that he can have an honest, uncomplicated conversation with are those that he has no attraction to (eg. the headmaster's daughter, his sister's schoolmate, the nuns in the diner).
And then there's Jane. It seems that they formed an honest, genuine friendship two summers ago, but they have not stayed in contact much since then. Holden is very excited to hear that she is at Pencey, until he gives further thought to the fact that she's on a date with his slick roommate Stradlater. Believing that Stradlater has been successful at seducing young women, Holden gets extremely nervous thinking about his sweet friend Jane (who is described as having had a "rough childhood" with an alcoholic stepfather) with Stradlater in the back of Ed Banky's car. So much so that he ends up picking a fight with him when he returns from his date with Jane, and gets his nose bloodied. Not long after this, Holden decides to leave Pencey in the night. Is Jane really the catalyst for Holden leaving Pencey, or would he have found some other reason to leave? Holden has the impulse to go to the annex at Pencey and say hello to Jane, but he doesn't. Nor does he contact her when he is in New York City (often saying he "isn't in the mood"), although he thinks about doing so often. Why not? What might have happened to Holden if he had gone to see Jane when she was at Pencey? Or if he'd met with her in NYC? Why hasn't Holden stayed in touch with Jane, as he obviously formed a real friendship with her? If he was attracted to her, why didn't he choose Jane as a girlfriend instead of Sally? How does Holden's friendship with Jane compare to the relationships that he has with other girls/women? Has Holden's inexperience at relating to women socially led to some of his poor choices, and gotten him deeper into crisis? Should someone in Holden's life have helped him understand his adolescent desires and how to deal with them? --------------------  Join us in Jo's Book Nook to discuss The Little White Horse by Elizabeth Goudge and Skellig by David Almond ........... "Only love...can leave such a mark / But only love...can heal such a scar" -U2 |
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I also had the thought that Phoebe and Jane were like Holden's innocents. But whereas Phoebe comes to Holden with unconditional love and no strings attached, Jane is laden with her own emotional baggage. I've wondered if Jane's possible troubles with her stepfather shaped her to make her either more or less susceptible to the advances of someone like Stradlater, and if Holden's knowledge of her background stressed him out even more when he thought about them together. Do you think that maybe he felt guilty that he felt powerless to protect Jane, and that that contributed to him picking the fight with Stradlater?
