Holden Caulfield Women

Words: 1885
Pages: 8

Society's Depiction of Women in The Catcher in the Rye: Why do men try to protect women when all they’re doing is adding to the problem? In the book The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger, it is conveyed that women need to be protected from the world's harshness. The main character, Holden Caulfield, a teenager who just got kicked out of boarding school, goes to New York for a few days. As he travels around the city, he has many interactions with women. Whenever something bad happens, Holden has the automatic response to make the situation better and keep the truth from them. Holden sometimes ends up hurting the girls he interacts with instead of helping them. Through Holden's protective attitude towards women and girls, Salinger shows that …show more content…
The second he does, he regrets it. Once the girl arrives, he starts talking to her. He finds out her name is Sunny and he notices that: “She crossed her legs and started jiggling this one foot up and down. She was very nervous, as a prostitute. She really was a snob. I think it was because she was young as hell. She was around my age”(94). First, Holden acknowledges the fact that Sunny looks young. Holden also notes that she seems nervous and that probably relates to how young she is. Being as young as Holden and a female prostitute is not easy. Even someone like Sunny is shown to be nervous and innocent and in need of saving. Holden feels bad because he can’t do much to help, and he hates that Sunny has been exposed to things that have ruined her innocence. Women are typically depicted as weaker than men. The next morning, Holden meets two nuns while eating breakfast. As they talk about life and his school, they bring up the play Romeo and Juliet. Holden says, “To tell you the truth, it was sort of embarrassing, in a way, to be talking about Romeo and Juliet with her. I mean that play gets pretty sexy in some parts, and she was a nun and