Journeys of the Self in The Catcher in the Rye and A Room with a View - Book Report/Review Example

22 March 2009 Journeys of the Self in The Catcher in the Rye and A Room with a View The idea of the journey plays a central role in both J.D. Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye and E.M. Forster's Room with a View. In both novels, the action is set off by an act of flight, both interior and exterior - Holden Caulfield journeys from his boarding school in Pennsylvania to his home in New York City and then across New York in an effort to escape the "phoniness" of the adult world; Lucy Honeychurch travels from her home in Surrey to Florence, Italy to escape the petty-minded provincialism of her upbringing. The journeys of these two characters are, however, prompted by opposing motivations. Lucy flees to Italy to escape the familiar, only to discover that in spite of her new surroundings, she herself must change in order for the journey to truly mean something. Although the majority of Holden's "journey" occurs in the city of his upbringing, his flights from person to person in search of an emotional connection are in vain. Ultimately, he discovers that in order to truly change he must remain in place and look inside himself. For both protagonists, the literal journey therefore comes to symbolize the interior journey. Both undergo transformations that mark their transition from innocence (in Lucy's case) and self-deception (in Holden's) to self-knowledge, and from childhood to adulthood. And both learn that in the end, it is impossible to flee from oneself. What is perhaps most striking about Holden Caulfield's "journey" during the majority of The Catcher in the Rye is its erratic and undefined nature. Rather than fleeing "to" a specific destination, Holden simply appears to be fleeing "from" - from Pencey Prep, from the hypocrisy surrounding him at school, from Stradlater, from Faith Cavendish, from Sally, from Mr Antolini The list goes on and on as he dashes from Pennsylvania to New York, and back and forth across New York City. In fact, the book is structured as a series of successive flights, as Holden rejects each subsequent attempt at connection with another human being. And rather than gain self-knowledge with each encounter, Holden's journey appears to move in the op in circles: he becomes increasingly disillusioned and frustrated with each successive person's inability to provide him with the emotional fulfilment that he seeks, but that frustration nevertheless fails to deter him from vainly seeking fulfilment again and again. Unable to draw satisfaction from any outside source, and tortured because he recognizes in himself various traits that he finds loathsome in other people, Holden finds nearly everyone and everything - with the exception of his sister, Phoebe - lacking. Holden's journey can consequently be understood as a kind of flight of the soul. His random criss-crossing of New York City, and indeed his movements in general, parallel his psyche's inability to form any solid attachment to his peers or so-called mentors. In fact, Salinger stresses the random character of Holden's movements - he sets himself in motion without aim or reason. Holden's tap-dancing is a clear example of this kind of meaningless movement: I got bored sitting on that washbowl after a while, so I backed up a few feet and started doing this tap dance, just for the hell of it. I was just amusing myself. I can't really tap -dance or anything, but it was a stone floor in the can, and it was good for tap-dancingI was knocking myself out. Tap-dancing all over the place (Salinger 29). In this passage, Holden repeatedly insists on the pointlessness of his decision to tap-dance: he moves "just for the hell of it," and is "just amusing [himself]." Through the phrase, "I can't really tap dance or anything," Holden openly admits that his actions are uncontrolled and meaningless. Furthermore, Holden goes on to perform a wrestling hold on Stradlater without any apparent motivation: "All of a sudden - for no good reason, really, except that I was sort of in the mood for horsing around - I felt like jumping off the washbowl ad getting old Stradlater in a half nelson" (Salinger 30). Again, Salinger draws the reader's attention to Holden's lack of insight into the movements of his own body. This desire to move, to flee, Salinger suggests, is the result of a Holden's unwillingness to confront his emotions directly. For example, when he thinks about his ex-girlfriend, Jane Gallagher, with Stradlater, his anger at the idea of the two of them together can only be expressed through a desire to move: "Every time I thought about it," he comment, "I felt like jumping out the window." Not only does Holden wish to run away, but he also wishes, at some level, to destroy himself. Given his confusion and clearly repressed emotional agony over his brother Allie's death, comments such as these cannot be entirely dismissed as mere exaggeration. This small-scale lack undirected, potentially destructive action is later mirrored on a larger scale by Holden's aimless flights around New York City. When Holden arrives, it is significant that the first thing he does is to give the cabbie his home address: "I'm so damn absent-minded, I gave the driver my regular address, just out of habit and add-I mean I completely forgot I was going to shack up in a hotel for a couple of days" (Salinger 60). Far from being an accident, this mistake is highly revealing. Holden does, in fact, want to go home in the sense that he wishes to return to the simplicity of childhood. The emotional and sexual complexity of the adult world terrifies him, causing him to sabotage each potential connection with another person. This fear also lends a degree of randomness to his encounters. His decision to contact Faith is entirely impromptu. One moment he is thinking contacting of Anne Louise Sherman, a "terrible phoney" with whom he had a brief encounter the previous year, but rather than attempt to re-establish contact - risk an act that contains even the slightest possibility of leading to a deeper relationship, Holden instead decides to contain a girl with whom the possibility of a relationship is markedly less likely. Faith, he tells us, "is not a whore or anything butdidn't mind doing it once in a while" (Salinger 63), and his attitude toward contacting her is as apparently as loose as her morals: "I was feeling pretty horny. I have to admit it. Then, all of the sudden, I got this idea. I took out my wallet and starting looking for this address a guy I met at a party last summergave me" (Salinger 63). The use of the phrase, "All of the sudden" echoes Holden's earlier unmotivated decision to jump up and tap-dance. Later on, his idea to contact Jane appears equally randomly and is introduced with the exact same phrase: "All of a sudden, on my way out to the lobby, I got old Jane Gallagher on the brain again. I got her on, and I couldn't get her off" (Salinger 76). Unsurprisingly, this phrase comes to function as a hallmark of his character. Holden's impulsiveness is also indicative of his childishness. Indeed, one of the principal ways in which we can understand Holden's journey is as a "journey" from childhood to adulthood. In Holden's case, his desire to avoid the painful trajectory from childhood to adulthood, and from the immature notion that the world is fixed, predictable, and simple, to the "grown-up" idea that life is full of complexity, unpredictability, keeps him in a sort of determinedly inert state that is halfway between childhood and adulthood. He cannot return to what he imagines as the carefree times of childhood, nor can he bring himself to participate in the world rather than simply judge it. This is why he is so transfixed by the Eskimo exhibit at the Museum of Natural History. The scene is fixed for all eternity, never demanding growth or change: "The best thing, though, in that museum was that everything always stayed right where it was. Nobody'd move" (Salinger 121). If Holden's mind wishes to remain fixed in childhood, however, his body clearly does not. It is therefore noteworthy that Holden continually interrupts his encounters with women: first Faith and later Sally. In fact, his attitude toward his own sexuality represents one of the most conflicted areas of his character. Sex represents the grown-up world, with all its emotional pain and lack of easy answers, that Holden is loathe to enter. His musings about sex mark one of the few moments in the book where, rather than simply judge other people for their "phoniness", he admits to his confusion straightaway: "Sex is something I really don't understand too hot. You never know where the hell you are. I keep making up these sex rules for myself, and then I break them right awaySex is something I just don't understand. I swear to God I don't" (Salinger 63). This ambivalence about growing up also explains why Holden's mind drifts to thoughts of his sister, Phoebe, immediately after his initial conversation with Faith. Through his musings about Phoebe, Holden's idealization of childhood as a time of transparency and clear-sightedness, in contrast to the "phoniness of the adult world": "I mean, if you tell old Phoebe something, she knows exactly what the hell you're talking about..If you take her to a lousy movie, for instance, she knows it's a lousy movie. If you take her to a pretty good movie, she knows it's a pretty good movie" (Salinger 68). Holden's true journey occurs, however, when he is forced to confront the shallowness of his ideas about the simplicity of childhood and the phoniness of adulthood. Ironically, it is his "innocent" little sister who jolts Holden into this realization. When Phoebe asks him to name one thing he "likes a lot" (Salinger 169), he discovers that he is unable to do so. And Phoebe is the one person who sees him for what he is and forces to him to look past his self-indulgence and directly at himself. "Name something you'd like to be", she demands. "Like a scientist. Or a lawyer or something." Furthermore, it Phoebe's decision to follow him as he runs away that forces him to realize that he is not in fact still a child, and that he must take responsibility for his actions. When he first realizes that Phoebe intends to come with him, he undergoes a moment of pure shock: "I thought I was going to pass out cold. I mean I didn't mean to tell her to shut up and all, but I thought I was going to pass out again" (Salinger 206). As the scene progresses, Holden begins to look beyond himself. He does not discourage Phoebe from coming with him because he is afraid of being punished, but rather because leaving New York would detract from Phoebe's own happiness: "I think I hated her most because she wouldn't be in that play any more if she went away with me" (Salinger 207). Suddenly, his tone changes: he becomes the reasonable adult attempting to talk a child out of an act that cannot possibly be good for her. Furthermore, he suddenly hears his own insolence echoed in Phoebe's words: It was the first time she ever told me to shut up. It sounded terrible. God, it sounded terrible. It sounded worse than swearing" (Salinger 208). Holden's remarks are finally stripped of the irony and pretension that characterizes virtually his entire narration. He finally sees that his repeated attempts to flee are without purpose. Running away solves nothing, he realizes, for in the end he must return to confront himself. Seeing Phoebe on the carousel, Holden finally achieves a moment of true happiness. It is a moment of transformation - subtle but significant. Slowly, painfully, he has begun to grow up. If, at first glace, Holden Caulfield and Lucy Honeychurch appear to have little in common - he is male, she female; he is American, she is English; a deeper look may reveal certain commonalities between the characters. Both are products of repressed, haut-bourgeois Anglo-Saxon cultures, and both seek to escape the hypocrisy of their mundane existences in favour of a more "authentic" way of living. Holden journeys home to New York in search of himself, however, while Lucy's journey takes her far from England in the form of a "grand tour" to Italy: in the European imagination of the time, the destination par excellence for Art, History, Cultureand freedom from more conventional mores. In sending his heroine to Italy, Forster also inscribes himself in a long tradition of nineteenth century writers for whom the escape to the European continent constituted a fundamental plot device. Running from Mme de Stael's Corinne or Italy to Henry James' Portrait of a Lady, this device would come to constitute a fundamental trope of the nineteenth century novel. For these heroines - and, for the most part, these novels concern heroines - the European continent, particularly Italy, is a space of liberation. In running away, however, these heroines are still forced to confront themselves. Even if their surroundings change, they must still struggle with their own growth, as well as the inevitable tensions between their new, liberated existences, and the duties and mores to which they are beholden by their own cultures and by their sex. In the opening scene, it is therefore significant that Lucy finds precisely what she had come to Florence to escape; Forster's presentation of Lucy signals this fact immediately. Finding herself at her first dinner in Florence, Lucy glances around the hotel to discover that her surroundings are in fact far more familiar than she has been expecting. The reader's introduction to Lucy comes just at the moment when she is complaining that the Signora who has shown her room speaks with not only an English accent, but also a Cockney one! Upon making this unfortunate discovery, she exclaims: "It might be London." She looked at the two rows of English people who were sitting at the tableat the portraits of the late Queen and the late Poet Laureate that hung behind the English people, heavily framedCharlotte, don't you feel, too, that we might be in London I can hardly believe that all kinds of other things are just outside (Forster 13). Lucy's utterance is significant on a number of levels. First, it immediately calls into question the entire purpose of her journey. Why, she wonders, should one travel when even a supposedly foreign place is filled with familiar objects and seems to lack any real element of foreignness In addition, we find the presentation of an inside/outside dichotomy, which suggests the dichotomy between Lucy's literal journey to Italy and her figurative journey into her own psyche. Although she has literally escaped London, the inside of the hotel only seems to contain things English - yet outside, things will be unmistakably foreign. Viewed in this context, her words take on a new meaning. Although Lucy herself is English, the outside world is not, and ultimately her actions will come to reflect her altered surroundings. In addition, the entire novel can be seen as a journey from darkness to enlightenment. The first piece of information that the reader receives about Lucy is that she is upset over her room's lack of a view. Symbolically, we can interpret this to mean that she is trapped in darkness - an image that subtly alludes to Plato's "cave allegory," with its implications of self-delusion and ignorance. It is therefore hardly a coincidence that Mr. Emerson, whose son will provide the liberation she is seeking, offers her precisely what she wishes: a room with a view that will allow her to see beyond the confines of her upbringing. For the moment, however, Forster takes care to impress upon the reader the societal restrictions from which Lucy must emerge. Her cousin Charlotte is judgmental, quick to dismiss the elderly Mr. Emerson as "ill-bred" (Forster 15) - a quintessentially English complaint - and entirely by chance, they encounter the clergyman Mr. Beebe, who happens to be Lucy's neighbour in London. Signs of home are everywhere, restraining Lucy and finally causing her to wonder, "Was this really Italy" (Forster 20). If Charlotte clings to her prejudices, unable to adapt, Lucy is far more willing to question conventional behaviour. As an artist, she is already innately susceptible to such romantic fancies. Despite this susceptibility, however, her emotional journey is far from straightforward. When she meets the Emerson's at Santa Croce, for example, Mr Emerson remarks on a key aspect of her personality. To Lucy's insistence that she does not wish to inconvenience him and his son, he replies: "My dearI think that you are repeating what you have heard older people say. You are pretending to be touchy; but you are not really" (Forster 42). Indeed, until this point, Lucy's behaviour has been dictated by what is considered "proper" behaviour in Surrey, not by her own internal desires. The process by which she learns to follow her own desires therefore constitutes an essential part of her journey. Furthermore, Mr Emerson's advice to "let yourself goPull out from the depths those thoughts that you do not understand, and spread them out in the sunlight and know the meaning of them" (Forster 42) could not be better placed. Despite this advice, Lucy remains hesitant to change. As Mr. Beebe observes, "These Englishgain knowledge slowly, and perhaps too late (Forster 112). Like Holden, then, Lucy must make her way in a culture that prizes falsity and propriety over truthfulness and authenticity. Both characters are products of societies with carefully prescribed rules and codes of conduct, and although both recognize the hypocrisy implicit in those rules and chafe against them, they are - however unwittingly - complicit with those rules. For all his rebellion, Holden confines himself to a small group of people with similar upbringing and social status. His acquaintances all appear to attend the same elite group of schools and universities and seem to exist in a sphere entirely untouched by people of a different (lower) social class. But while these social restrictions are a given for Holden - so natural that he does not even think to comment on them - for Lucy, they present a very practical challenge. She is forced to confront - and ultimately to re-examine -her prejudices regarding class and proper behaviour. But it is not easy. The name of her fianc, Cecil Vyse, is highly symbolic: with its connotations of "vice", it implies a locking down, a fixing in place that would make it impossible for her to flee. In the end, however, much like Holden, she makes a conscious decision to turn her back on the mores of her family and peers. Her family, even Cecil notes, prefers to "[sit] in the dark" (Forster 135). But Lucy's journey does fundamentally change her: Life, so far as she troubled to conceive it, was a circle of rich, pleasant people, with identical interests and identical foes. In this circle, one thought, married, and died. Outside it were poverty and vulgarity for ever trying to enterBut, in Italy, where any one who chooses may warm himself in the sun, this conception of life vanished. Her sense expanded; she felt that there was no one whom she might not get to like (Forster 171). Having experienced the world outside Surrey, she is no longer able to settle for such a limited existence. While both Holden and Lucy arrive at new forms of self-knowledge, Lucy's journey therefore forms a far more distinct trajectory from young girl (provincial, sheltered) to mature adult (self-reflective, aware, knowing), while Holden's emotional maturation occurs on a somewhat smaller scale. At the end of the story, she has clearly transformed, and we do not doubt that she will be happier for the knowledge she has gained. In comparison, Holden's transformation strikes the reader as far more tentative. Yet while Lucy's transformation is more clearly marked, it is also in some ways more conventional. Despite Forster's assertion that Lucy's romantic, musical spirit leads her to "want something big" (Forster 68), she ultimately rejects a life of independence and music in favour of a more conventional narrative for her sex. Regardless of how unusual her husband may be, the message is clear: where women are concerned, love always trumps art. While Art may provide temporary fulfilment, the journey of self-discovery can never compare to that of marriage. Works Cited Forster, E.M. A Room With a View. London: A.A. Knopf, 1922. Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. London: Little, Brown, and Company, 1945. Read More