Catcher In The Rye Women

In J.D. Salinger’s, The Catcher in the Rye, the main protagonist, Holden, encounters a spectrum of characters throughout the book— many of whom are women. Holden shows varying attitudes towards these women, mainly because many of these characters are vastly different from the next. The women in the Catcher in the Rye are uniquely illustrated through an assortment of female characters in the book, such as: Phoebe, Sally Hayes, and the Nuns. These specific characters all have their own unique portrayals, and they all play important roles in presenting different themes and ideas, and revealing certain characteristics about Holden.

Of these females characters, Phoebe is surely the closest one to Holden. Phoebe is Holden’s little sister, and she

Although Holden’s encounter with them was very short, the portrayal of the nuns reveal a lot about Holden’s views on equality, charity, and religion. When Holden first sees the nuns, he helps them put away their suitcases. While doing so, he notices that their suitcases were very inexpensive— this led to him going off on a tangent about a roommate that also had inexpensive suitcases, Dick Slagle (Salinger 108-109). To summarize, Holden liked Dick Slagle’s personality, yet couldn’t handle having better suitcases than he did. This is evident when Holden says, “The thing is, it’s really hard to be roommates with people if your suitcases are much better than theirs— if yours are really good ones and theirs aren’t.”(Salinger 109). Holden goes on to say, “It’s one of the reasons why I roomed with a stupid bastard like Stradlater. At least his suitcases were as good as mine.”(Salinger 109). The fact that Holden would rather be rooming with someone he dislikes, so long as they had similar suitcases, really says a lot about Holden’s idea of equality. The way this information can be traced back to the portrayal of the nuns— is best described by the Chicago Journals3: “It was the nuns' suitcases, and their straw baskets, that reminded Holden of Dick Slagle, and the nuns also stir in him reflections about money and the expression of social feeling.“(Ohmann 31-32) Additionally, Holden also compares the women he knows, to the nuns he just met; he pictures his aunt and Sally Hayes’ mother doing charitable acts, and how shallow they’d be while doing so (Salinger 113-114). Consequently, Holden pictured them giving up and going somewhere swanky for lunch instead. Holden expresses that he likes that the nuns are humble, when he says, “That’s what I liked about those nuns. You could tell, for one thing, that they never went anywhere swanky for lunch.”(Salinger 114).