An Ap English Literature Refresher: Gender In To Kill A Mockingbird And The Catcher In They Rye

One of the biggest problems with the books we read in high school is that most of them aren't contemporary - in the chronological sense of the word

. We then assume that they aren't relevance in a thematic sense, which takes most of the fun and practically all of the creativity out of how we approach them. With the AP English Literature exam less than a month away, it's high time to start rethinking the old stand-bys. Let's take a look at how Harper Lee and JD Salinger toy with gender identity in To Kill a Mockingbird and The Catcher in the Rye.

Our first task is pretty straightforward, since Scout Finch is THE tomboy of US literature. She idolizes her brother, playing almost exclusively with him and his friends. She refuses to dress femininely for fear of becoming trapped within "the starched walls of a pink cotton penitentiary." When her father is threatened by a drunken mob of full-grown men, it's Scout who throws the first punch. (Symbolically speaking: she actually kicks him right in the spot that, you know, makes him a full-grown man.)

Although Scout makes To Kill a Mockingbird an obvious candidate for a book that pushes gender boundaries, The Catcher in the Rye is a much subtler choice. Holden Caulfield doesn't make a dramatic stand against machismo the way Scout does against sugar and spice, but since consistency isn't really his forte, this hardly disqualifies him from the running. Let's take a look at some of the moments that slip through amidst Holden's many self-contradictions.

Exhibit A: The Last Game of the Year. It's Pency Prep vs. Saxon Hall, and "you were supposed to commit suicide or something if old Pencey didn't win." Suffice it to say Holden doesn't give a damn. Which is not to suggest that people who don't care for sports are automatically feminine, but given the social expectations of the 1950's - not to mention the fact that the novel opens at said game - it symbolically sets Holden waaay apart from the novel's other (enthusiastically cheering) males.

Exhibit B: No Means No. Whenever a girl tells Holden to stop making sexual advances, he stops. Why is this newsworthy? Because most of the guys around him don't. If you're feeling creeped out, remember that this was the 1950's, when, as Holden explains, "no" could mean: 1) yes, but I assume no part of the responsibility for our actions, 2) maybe, but I'm scared, or 3) no way, no how. Holden's dilemma? He won't risk opening Door Number Three, regardless of the collective social permission slip. We like him already.

Exhibit C: Crumby Stuff. On the one hand, Holden doesn't feel you should "get sexy" with a woman you don't like. On the other hand, if you do like a woman, you shouldn't do any "crumby" - i.e. sexual - stuff to her. In more upper-crusty terms, Holden feels that sex requires objectification and is therefore inherently degrading to women. Of course, we might argue over the underlying assumption that sex requires objectification, but the point to be taken from all this is that Holden is big on R-E-S-P-E-C-T at a time when it isn't a cultural norm for men.

So besides the gender-bending, what's the common thread here? Only that Scout and Holden both hate phonies. Just think of the motives behind their behavior: Scout actively chooses to be a tomboy because she can't stand the "polite fiction" of the Southern Belle. She perceives femininity as evasive, inhibited, and artificial and considering what the standards of girliness must have been like in 1930's Mississippi, we can't really blame her. Holden has the same problem in reverse. He's surrounded by images of "hotshot" polo players jumping over fences on horseback and "phony, lean-jawed guys" with ladies at the ready to light their pipes. Of course, Holden accuses everything of being phony, but the macho guy / fawning gal dynamic of 1950's America is by far the worst offender.

Scout and Holden's defiance of gender stereotypes fits nicely under the larger category of testing social boundaries. (Where would coming-of-age novels be without it?) By aligning gender with social convention, Lee and Salinger challenge the idea that gender - not to be confused with sex, of course - is somehow inborn. For books written in the fifties and sixties, that's pretty contemporary stuff.

by: Paul Thomson

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