Introduction
The adolescent is without a doubt the ideal protagonist; he is at the peak of his strength, has the idealist enthusiasm of a child but the experience and rationality of an adult, has burst into the pleasures of fertility, and possibly most importantly, has the inner conflict so necessary to an interesting story. Although so influential in the realm of literature, the word “teenager” is one that Mark Twain or Theodore Roosevelt never used. In fact, it was not until the 1950’s when the post World War Two “baby boomers” reached adolescence that the term was first coined. So, even before he had a class to call his own, the teenager has been the author’s primary choice of provoker, subject, or champion. Why is there such a fascination with the adolescent hero? Why are we, as authors and readers, so drawn to him?
The focal point of characters such as Holden of Catcher in the Rye, Ben of The Fifth Child, Alice of Alice in Wonderland, and Ellen of Ellen Foster is a relatively simple one: each characters relative interactions in his or her environment. The specific interaction that will be the most demonstrative of relationship of society and family, the individual, and the majority and conflicts thereof will be the development of character. For us, the adolescent protagonist will be a litmus test for the success and failure of society. For example, the cases in which society has failed will be seen through Ben of The Fifth Child and Holden of Catcher in the Rye, whereas the exemplary characters of success will be Alice of Alice in Wonderland and Ellen of Ellen Foster. But obviously the development of character cannot be abandoned completely to outside influence, so Holden, Alice, and Ellen will too be used to examine the change brought about based on personal discovery.
The above sources can be compiled in a way that thoroughly explicates the value of the literary adolescent, but as it is, we are left with an incomplete work. Without some practical application or some deeper understanding, the literary adolescent will be left standing as a skeleton, a mere sketch of what he truly is. The authors are generous enough to give us their protagonists in many a perilous predicament in addition to their solutions to said predicament, but we cannot escape that these are imaginary problems as seen by real people (us, the readers). We need something that we cannot just see in our heads, but hold in our hands: studies with people, not just stories with words. So to enhance the work and put some fat on the bones that are our characters, we turn to the psychological theory of Jean Piaget, Lawrence Kohlberg, and Lev Vygotsky.
This multinational group of psychologists heads the field of what we now call cognitive development. Cognitive development is defined as “the process of acquiring intelligence and increasingly advanced thought and problem-solving ability from infancy to adulthood”(www.dictionary.com). It was about this elusive and mysterious process that Jean Piaget, the French psychologist, built the foundation of cognitive development with his two step theory to moral behavior. He explains that children of about eleven years or younger regard rules as “sacred and absolute”(Crain Paragraph 4) to function, but at the age of about twelve a shift in reasoning occurs; the subject no longer sees a problem as components and result or as simply black and white, but begins to judge based on motive and intentions. Piaget presents the following situation:
the young child hears about one boy who broke 15 cups trying to help his mother and another boy who broke only one cup trying to steal cookies, the young child thinks that the first boy did worse. The child primarily considers the amount of damage--the consequences--whereas the older child is more likely to judge wrongness in terms of the motives underlying the act (www.faculty .plts.edu).
And upon the foundation laid by Piaget, the American psychologist Lawrence Kohlberg built his six stages of moral development, narrowed further into three levels, pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional; at the pre-conventional level are stages one and two, at the conventional level are stages three and four, and at the post-conventional level are stages five and six. Stages one and two seem to mirror those of Piaget, containing a shift from authority oriented to judging by merit, but Kohlberg follows these stages into a social atmosphere, and builds out of it stages three and four, where “young people think as members of the conventional society with its values, norms, and expectations”, and stages five and six, where, “people are less concerned with maintaining society for its own sake, and more concerned with the principles and values that make for a good society”(www.faculty.plts.edu). Similarly, Lev Vygotsky, the Soviet psychologist, constructed his theory, but differed from Piaget in that his theory was more based on culture’s influence on childhood development, the importance and significance of language, and that “learning is a necessary and universal aspect of the process of developing culturally organized, specifically human psychological function" (www.simplypsychology.pwp).
Adolescence is, almost uniformly, seen as a period of awakening and enlightenment, a journey from childhood to adulthood. And as a progress-oriented people, we want a story that will begin somewhere and take us somewhere else. Our adolescent protagonists are positioned to fall; there is no doubt our characters will take us places, but they may not be places we want to go.
Chapter 1: Adolescent Psychology
The adolescent, in both the realms of literature and our own lives, is invariably misunderstood. Physically, the adolescent is essentially a bigger, stronger child; but the adolescent is not simply a child in the body of an adult or an adult with the mind of a child; he is a being with an insatiable desire to push the limits of his newly found strength and privileges. And once the barriers of childhood have been breached, the adolescent finds himself in virgin territory, one of experimentation and enlightenment, one where one must question even the most fundamental of his values. But with questioning comes insecurity and with insecurity come challenges, and how one reacts to these challenges is determined by family influence, restrictions of society, and most fundamentally, adolescent psychology.
Sigmund Freud’s theory that adolescent afflictions stem from the traumas of childhood is one that is widely accepted in the field of cognitive development. Ben’s “defining moments” begin even before his birth at the hands of his first adversary, his mother. For the first time in her five pregnancies, Harriet Lovatt, Ben’s mother, decides to indulge in pain killers for herself, and sedatives for the fetus that would be Ben. She becomes an addict, feeling the need to be drugged almost constantly, admitting that she would set aside four to five hours per day, the time between the children’s return from school and their bedtime, to medicate the fetus into submission. The narrator reveals to us that, “for those hours of quiet, if it showed any signs of coming awake, and fighting her, she took another” (Lessing 42). How could she rationalize such negligent treatment of her child? How could anyone simply ignore the most fundamental maternal instincts? The answer for her is quite obvious: Ben is killing her from the inside.
The decision to bury herself in painkillers is ultimately hers, but at this point, doubt may arise as to Harriet’s reliability as a source.
“She went to Dr. Brett at eight months and asked him to induce the baby. He looked critically at her and said, ‘I thought you didn’t believe in it.’ ’I don’t. But this is different.’ ’Not that I can see.’ ’It’s because you don’t want to. It’s not you who is carrying this-’ She cut off monster.(47)
It seems odd that the interpretation of Ben as a monster is not one shared by the teacher and the doctor, the only professionals in the novel. As quoted in www.quotationspage.com “The palest ink is better than the best memory”; a Chinese proverb that in this case refers to the ultimate authority of professionals that in this case is incorrect (www.quotationspage.com). The doctor may mistake Ben’s odd appearance as a simple deformation or mutation, but as for the teacher, her miscalculation is a bit more complicated. The source of her ignorance comes from the fact that she is immersed in the absurdity that is adolescence. Harriet says that by the time Ben had reached the age for schooling, “she had given up trying to read to him, play with him, teach him anything: he could not learn”(97). Ben, as far as we know, is not a rare case, and with this caliber of student, a teacher cannot accomplish much more than endurance of the school day. Even if by gross blunder Ben is placed in a class of exceptional students; it is easier to dilute greatness than it is to improve stupidity, so eventually his surroundings would arrive at mediocrity by any means. At one point Harriet discusses Ben’s strange behavior with the headmistress, Mrs. Graves, and in describing Ben, she says, “He is hyperactive, perhaps? Of course that is a word that I often feel evades the issue. To say a child is hyperactive does not say very much! But he does have this extraordinary energy. He can’t keep still for very long-well, a lot of children can’t”(100). Notably, this meeting does take place while he is in kindergarten, but this kind of behavior exemplifies the years to come. Although the doctor and the teacher do not see Ben as an exception to society’s definition of an adolescent and even though the reader may deduce that Ben’s pre-natal atrocities may be the mere accumulation of the strain of five consecutive pregnancies, the fact is that Harriet is the only one of the group that has felt the pain of his attacks and seen the terror that he has inspired. The pain that he causes her even before his birth is so intense that it drives a reasonable woman to drugs and robs her of nine months with her family. And one cannot assume that once he has been born, she will simply forget the stress he put on her body and love him just as her other children; no, as far as she is concerned, he exits the womb “the enemy” (40), referring to his birth as her victory over him, finally expelling him from her body. But what a hollow victory it must be; with his drug-warped yellow eyes and green skin, he appears to be a little monster.
Ben’s opposition does not stop with his mother; actually, she is his greatest ally. While his father and siblings would gladly leave him in an abusive institution where he is constantly sedated and left to rot in his own filth, she rescues him and brings him home, much to the displeasure of the rest of the family. Although her actions are not necessarily of her own free will but a maternal reflex, she shows the slightest ray of human decency while the rest of the family-really the rest of the world views Ben with the greatest of disdain and indifference. To such a beautiful family, what an abomination Ben is; such a violent, stupid, ugly boy is one only a mother could love. This is the general attitude towards Ben, and it is this prejudice that pushes Ben down a one-way road to destruction. As said by Mrs. Carol Ryan in reference to children, “You can only get what you expect”(class lecture). Practically speaking, this means if you expect your children to do poorly in school, they will do poorly; if you expect your children to be thugs, they will be thugs. In Fifth Child it is undeniably true. Ben is expected to be violent, and he is violent; Ben is expected to destroy, and he destroys. These expectations are so prominent that one could even call them rules, and in the all too impressionable age of childhood, this factor can be that which condemns Ben to a life of malevolence. Jean Piaget, the father of cognitive development, would place Ben in the first stage of development, in which the subject would regard rules as “sacred and absolute.” So, even if Ben does not wish to inflict pain or catalyze conflict, he senses that to do so is what is right and feels obligated to act. He is evil by circumstance, but fundamentally he is a boy without sanctuary.
Another such individual is Holden Caulfield. Because they are only mentioned in passing in the course of the novel, we can assume Holden’s parents do not play a tremendous role in his character development outside of their obvious absence. Instead, in the handful of days in which the novel takes place, it appears that the society in which he finds himself assumes their role, and ergo, has the greatest effect on his person. After being expelled from Pencey Prep, he decides to “go home early”, but instead of telling his parents of his most recent expulsion, he decides to wander around New York City for a few days, and so calamity ensues. To the untrained eye, the remainder of the novel is simply the collective ramblings of a bored teenager; to pass this barrier, one must understand that Holden’s character is a delicious cocktail of irony and hypocrisy. He wants to indulge in the privileges of adulthood but in the purity of a child’s eyes; he wants to drink and smoke but despises those he sees indulging around him (this comes from pages 73-75 of Catcher in the Rye) ; he wants to have sex but finds himself nauseated by its perverted nature as he sees in the hotel and at school (this comes from page 62); he wears his red hunting hat to make himself stand out, but removes it when he is around people he knows; and of course, he uses the word “phony” on almost every page The exemplary scene comes with his encounter with the prostitute, Sunny, after she undresses in his hotel room: “I know you’re supposed to feel pretty sexy when someone gets up and pulls their dress over their head, but I didn’t. Sexy was about the last thing I was feeling. I felt much more depressed than sexy” (Salinger 95.)
He takes every childish desire his teenage brain can muster up, creates a euphoric illusion of what it should be, and has it destroyed before his eyes. This constant stream of hope and disillusionment of the world as he sees it breaks the boy’s spirit, and he ultimately determines that the world as it exists is one of phoniness and perversion.
Although he is theoretically in Piaget’s final stage of development, Holden suffers the same curse of low expectations as Ben. Holden has, in theory, reached the stage in which he can look past the basic implications of “rules” and acts based on a scale of morality, but it is obvious from the plethora of similarities between Ben and Holden‘s respective characters that some provision must be made: neither Ben nor Holden can seem to find a foothold in society: neither Ben nor Holden have a stable family for support: neither Ben nor Holden can find something that he truly enjoys: neither Ben nor Holden can escape their revolutions of destruction and sadness. Although their plights are so comparable, the fundamental difference is that Holden’s negative feedback comes from society. As quoted in www.answers.com, Lev Vygotsky observed,
…how higher mental functions developed historically within particular cultural groups, as well as individually through social interactions with significant people in a child's life, particularly parents, but also other adults. Through these interactions, a child came to learn the habits of mind of her/his culture, including speech patterns, written language, and other symbolic knowledge. (www.answers.com paragraph 5)
Because he had spent the majority of his adolescence in a boarding school, trapped among his fellow adolescent, Holden failed to develop these higher mental functions, and based on his language, society failed to make up for this slip. Holden’s parental foundation is all but absent, and society’s attitude toward his development is utterly indifferent.
Beginning with a poor foundation is almost as bad as beginning with nothing at all. Although to overcome such extraordinary obstacles is a feat unattainable by most, it can be done. However difficult to overcome such circumstances and maintain decency, it can be done as seen by Ellen Foster. Ellen, as we know her, has been in an abusive relationship her entire life, and her misfortune does not even stop at her home. She begins with her suicidal mother and her alcoholic father, and at the age of eleven, her mother consciously overdoses on heart pills, leaving Ellen with her father. After Mama’s death, Daddy slinks even further into the recess of alcohol and basically becomes a venom in what used to be their home. He forces Ellen to pay the bills, shop for groceries, cook for the family, all while he parties with his pedophiliac friends. After a short stint in an uncharacteristically healthy home with her art teacher, Julia, and Julia’s husband, Roy, she is passed to yet another abusive relationship with Mama’s Mama. She is forced to work as a field hand, but it is in this hardship that Ellen meets Mavis. Mavis becomes a guardian for her, and begins to mend Ellen’s issues of segregation. Ellen is never portrayed as a racist, but more a victim of the society in which she lives. For example, her only constant anchor is her friend Starletta, but even her friendship is questionable because Starletta is black and they live in an era of segregation and supremacy. Even when her only other option is to return to a house of abuse, Ellen cannot bring herself to sleep with a black family. At one point, she associates blackness with illness, saying,
As fond as I am of (Starletta’s family), I do not think I could drink after them. I try to see what Starletta leaves on the lip of a bottle but I have never seen anything with the naked eye. If something is that small it is bound to get into your system and cause some damage (Gibbons 29).
Unlike Ben and Holden, she has the advantage of a family beginning; unfortunately, this beginning is laced with violence and hate. Where she does have the opportunity for a beneficial relationship with a healthy family, she suffers from an overwhelming social segregation, a problem unseen by either Ben or Holden. Segregation is a principle that has been driven into her head by the society in which she lives, and this hyperbolic exemplification of Piaget’s first stage causes her to question even the most fundamental of her values.
As defined by the Yale-New Haven Teachers Institute:
Adolescent maturation is a personal phase of development where children have to establish their own beliefs, values, and what they want to accomplish out of life... the self-evaluation process leads to the beginning of long-range goal setting, emotional and social independence, and the making of a mature adult (Lewis paragraph 19).
This paints a picture of enlightenment and accomplishment, notably differed from the aforementioned elements of adolescence; but we know that this is a piece written from the pedestal of adulthood, looking down on those below them, they see as future comrades. Adolescence is not simply a path from childhood to adulthood; but a clashing of two warring worlds. And in straddling the two extremities, adolescence is not a glorious transition, but actually a turbulent push.
Chapter 2: A Period of Introspection
Introspection is an indulgence that should be reserved for the strong of mind and spirit. It takes a brave person to look at his life so carefully, to put in his own hands what he has so long taken for granted, and to dissect and separate it to its most basic forms that he may see an alternate solution to the puzzle that is his life. Whether it be something as broad as a societies preoccupations with race or something as personal as a character’s search for identity, the ideal protagonist tends to flip the horizon on itself or create a new picture altogether. But how shaken one must be when he replaces the world he lives in with the novel lands he has made of his own will and imagination and realize that he might never return to the home that he once knew. For some, the elimination of possible regression is a relief and a privilege, but for others it is an idea that haunts and guides them throughout their journey.
For Ellen Foster, an escape from the ordinary is possibly the best thing that could ever happen. Ellen’s conquest of the color barrier in a racially divided South has already been alluded to, but one passing reference does not do her plight justice. Consider the characters that have mistreated Ellen: Mama’s Mama, Daddy, Rudolph and Ellis, Dora, and Nadine; and weigh them against Ellen’s protectors: Mavis, Starletta and her family, and Julia. When these two groups are held side by side, there is a striking difference not only in disposition, but also in appearance. It becomes instantly clear that the majority of Ellen’s protectors and supporters are black. From our twentieth century pedestal, we can say with confidence that she has no reason to have any pretenses of superiority. How could someone with such overwhelming evidence that good and evil know no race still succumb to the superiority complex that so plagued her time? Why would she not recognize that a person’s ability to perform will exist regardless of color? Ellen is not a bad person, but is simply a victim of her society. It speaks to the strength of this prejudice that a young, innocent girl can be sucked into this culture of hate with no experience to verify its validity. She knows that staying with Starletta would be a quasi-utopia in contrast to her family’s home, but based solely on the matter of their ethnicity, she returns to the hell that is her father’s drunken, pedophiliac friends. “Yours is just about ripe”, says one of Daddy’s friends regarding Ellen, “You gots to git em when they is still soff when you mashum”(Gibbons 37).
The only possibility for the question of race and reason to even to exist in the presence of such overwhelming evidence to the contrary is the fact that Ellen, at the beginning of the story, is a child. Therefore, according to Piaget’s theory on cognitive development, the rules set forth by society are still sacred, even if they are terrible. She is presented with negative feedback on the validity of these rules; the line between rules and reality is blurred by her experience, but in its blurriness, it still exists as a segregating factor. So, as she matures through her course of negative feedback and personal observation, the line becomes blurred further and further to a point that it is beyond recognition, and then she steps into Piaget’s second tier of adolescence. At this level, she has learned to look at the world more objectively and to examine what she believes and why she does so. To recognize the absurdity of belief out of instruction is a fundamental step in the journey to adulthood, and the final pedestal is the realization that the only rational belief is one deduced by one’s own experience. One outstanding gift of humanity is to remember times of suffering more vividly than times of joy; as said by Malcolm S. Forbes, “Victory is sweetest when you’ve known defeat”(en.thinkexist.com). For that reason, the incredible terrors that Ellen Foster endures have enlightened her, and through her learning she has developed into the culturally aware person that we know at the close of the novel, just as Vygotzky would have it.
But some protagonists cannot even afford the luxury of a black and white beginning. Alice of Alice in Wonderland is thrust into a world of complete insanity. Although her traumas were not nearly as severe as those born by Ellen, she at least has the privilege to stay within the same realm of existence, for Alice falls, literally, into a world where nothing is as it should be. Obviously a reasonable young lady, Alice cannot help but apply her knowledge of the real world to the problems she faces in Wonderland. For example, when she is presented with a riddle at the Mad Hatter’s tea party, she infers that said riddle has an answer. However, when the Mad Hatter asks Alice, “How is a raven like a writing desk?”(Carroll 50) it is obvious that he has no intention of ever providing closure. Even when confronted with the point of its presentation he responds, “I haven’t the slightest idea” (52). Because the Mad Hatter and the March Hare angered time, resulting from a poorly performed concert, they live in a state of perpetual tea-time, and because they live in a world without the boundaries of time, they have no need for answers. This party lives in the Wonderland of “Why not?” Whether out of some perverted self gratification or simply out of unadulterated boredom, they do things for the sole sake of doing because they have all the time in the world. Their madness stems from a surplus of time and an absence of purpose, but as the Cheshire Cat claims, “We’re all mad here. I’m mad. You’re mad”(47). And when Alice tries to defend her sanity and says, “How do you know I’m mad?”, the Cat rebuts, “You must be, or you wouldn’t have come here”(47). Wonderland is a place where up is left and down is cake; that is to say, Wonderland is not just a mirror image of our world, but an erratic mess with just enough similarity to create a false sense of security. One point that is noticeably absent from this equation is the solution, or more appropriately, resolution; ending anticlimactically as Alice’s dream, we can never know how this experience shaped her life. Did she return to the waking world a citizen of Wonderland, or did she just ignore her adventure altogether and allow her memories to wither with the years? Progress is not a guaranteed characteristic of learning; no matter how far we go and what discoveries we make, there always will exist an established home behind us.
To return to familiar territory is not necessarily an act of surrender or a sign of weakness; it takes a great strength to recognize that one is not ready for the challenges of another sphere. Both Alice and Holden Caulfield can be assumed to be in Kohlberg’s “fifth or sixth stage of adolescence”. Therefore they have come to determine that there are certain rules a society must follow to function, and that just because something is working does not necessarily mean it is right. The respective worlds in which Alice and Holden find themselves are so challenging to conquer because they not only function on a different set of rules, but because they are fundamentally different. The presence of time as no more than a fickle and tyrannical creature as opposed to her rhythmic governor is just as curious to Alice as the sexual escapades of strangers in the hotel as opposed to his naïve illusions are to Holden. Their fascination with their new worlds eases their journey to self-discovery. After all, perverted or not, their new worlds are certainly more interesting than their old ones. But unfortunately, neither character, even in his/her “optimism” and open-mindedness, can seem to gain a foothold in his/her new world. Poor Holden can do nothing more than wander around killing time for days on end until he loses all hope for the adult world and returns home with his little sister, Phoebe; poor Alice is so trapped in her prison of unreliability and sporadic change that her only possible escape is to wake up. So, much like Ellen, they are stressed to a point of collapse, and at their breaking point, take the path of least resistance; therefore, in their returns they may not make as obvious a shift in thought or action, but the fact that they have learned and grown from their ventures is undeniable.
As Mildred Nash says in The English Journal, “Both seek answers to the question, ‘Who am I?’…Holden’s New York City escapades and Alice’s dream are both means of and reactions to growing up”(Nash 31). That question is not one that is unique to Holden and Alice, or even Ellen; the journey to self-discovery is one that should be taken by every adolescent. This journey should not have to end with some world shaking epitome, or even any change in personal thought at all, but simply with a better understanding of oneself and the world in which he lives.
Chapter 3: A Family Affair
The journey to self discovery is integral in personal development, but even more integral to the advancement of character is influence. Creativity does not come from pure novelty, because as said by Jim Jarmusch, “Nothing is original” (www.quotationspage.com). No matter how inventive something may seem, the painter does not invent his color and the sculptor does not invent his clay, but artistic expression, to reiterate, does not come from pure novelty, but from the manipulation of some existing medium to the liking of the artist. But art is not locked in the tomb of fiction and imagination; art exists in the physical world just as much as it does in the halls of museums. Like Dorian Gray, every person that is, has been, or ever shall be is a projection of every person they have ever met, and a child is the physical answer to a blank canvas. “The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography”(Wilde 3). In a social setting, the art is the art of individual life itself and the critic is everything else, or plainly, the cyclical fashion of creation and influence is perpetuated in an analogous fashion between art and society. Immediately after birth, the picture begins to form, typically, first by the family and then by society. The adolescent provides us an ideal view of the conflict. With the painting almost complete, there the battle between society and family is most vivid.
To begin, one who lacks all family ties can be seen in Ben. Since his conception, he has been viewed by the family as the bringer of pain and sadness. He is not treated with cruelty, but more with all too cutting indifference. All influence, whether positive or negative, plays a part in shaping a person, but indifference leaves an empty reflection to be filled by one’s own devices. That is to say, as influence gives a person root in the maelstrom of life, indifference allows said person to float on, and forces him to find root by himself. Ben lacks all typical interaction with his family: he does not speak with his brothers nor his sisters, his father is almost non-existent, his mother and grandmother fear the very sight of him, and as a young child, is even sent away to what appears to be a “baby death camp.” He suffers a terrible, almost inhuman fate; he has all his physical needs provided for, but he is treated with such crushing indifference that he has to fill his time with destruction. He fulfills his childhood in a solitary confinement with nothing to look forward to tomorrow outside of the repetition of today. Left to oneself, boredom tends to set in quickly, so to escape the horrors of independence, one tends to withdraw into the wonderful world of memory. Ben has no such retreat; Ben’s boredom simply leads to destruction, and once everything has been destroyed, what is there left to do?
So, Ben spends his childhood constantly suspended without relief above society. With this in mind, it is quite predictable that he would find refuge in the London riffraff at his first opportunity. Vygotsky, whose theory on cognitive development is deeply rooted in Marxism, would support this idea of a social family. To eliminate the family as we know it all together and allow the community to each individual need of each individual child is something to be strived for in a Marxist’s eyes; as quoted by Vygotsky, “(to) generate and lead development which is the result of social learning through internalization of culture and social relationships”(newfoundations.com) is the goal of education. But Vygotsky does not suffer the same shortsightedness that is so common to similar trains of thought; Vygotsky recognizes that such an integral institution as the family cannot simply be disregarded and rebuilt from scratch, and thereby concludes that “all new knowledge and newly introduced skills are greatly influenced by each student's culture, especially their family environment”(newfoundations.com). But philosophy and judgment aside, the fact is that Ben, after reaching school age, becomes a child of society. To say that Ben is a child of the community may be misleading; with this simple noun substitution comes the implication of caring, respect, and family, but we know that the world that raises Ben has none of these characteristics. The society that Ben calls home is indifferent and cold as the family he flees, but the difference between his home and the world is that in the latter, the potential to destroy is endless; he can break and burn and swear to his heart’s content, but now he has companions. They are likeminded individuals, jilted by some form or another, with whom he can share his desires and conquests; so in a since, they do form some kind of self-perpetuating community. The family provides a shelter from the harsh realness of reality; a fortress against a community of fear and hate. Harriet anticipates,
she would be looking at the box, and there, in a shot on the News of Berlin, Madrid, Los Angeles, Buenos Aires, She would see Ben, standing rather apart from the crowd, staring at the camera with his goblin eyes, or searching the faces of the crowd for another of his own kind. (Hessing 133)
Harriet recognizes that, after his descent, all hope for redemption is lost and that he will be trapped forever in the irony that those raised solely by society become the bane of its existence.
Although we have such an incredible benchmark for the pitfalls of a child reared solely on the merit of society, no such outstanding example exists for the familial front. Because the family is built to, ideally, shelter and protect a developing mind from the horrors and inequities of the outside world, the end result would be a terribly boring character, one that is theoretically so good that he is completely unprepared for the challenges of reality. Also, from a realistic stand point, it is impractical to assume that unadulterated family reflection is even possible. As noted by Mrs. Bridget Clark, today’s society seems to be moving toward a more communized sense of child rearing; with the nationalization of schools, day-care centers, and the swell of women in the working sector, family as we know it is a shadow of its former self, as it was a mere seventy years ago(This comes from a class lecture). And although inconceivable purity is a precipitate of an untainted family influence, a character’s goodness does not imply this lifestyle. It is best to look at this argument as a logical implication: with the hypothesis, antecedent, being pure family influence and the consequent being goodness of the character, one can see by modus ponens the validity that family implies goodness, but to assume that goodness implies family would be a great logical fallacy. Therefore, goodness is not necessarily in a directly proportional relationship with the righteousness of the character. But if it is established that pure social influence can only lead to harm, where does virtue come from?
Virtue, as we see it through Catcher in the Rye, appears to come from a meticulously prepared cocktail of family influence, selective social experience, and most importantly, a stable and mature grasp of reality: the poster child for virtue in Catcher in the Rye is Phoebe. Phoebe, as we know her, is not technically an adolescent; but based on her experience with Holden, she provides a perfect vantage point for the development of ideal character. Although one could arguably present that the better part of her goodness comes from innocence and simple ignorance, it is obvious that her personal maturity has surpassed the generic standard for her age. As a child, she should be in the pre-conventional stage of development, according to Kohlberg’s theory, but through the course of the novel, she exhibits judgment reserved for the conventional and occasionally post-conventional tiers. At the pre-conventional level, the individual supposedly acts based solely on some level of self-gratification and punishment, and later on the principle of mutual exchange, but Phoebe has a nobler agenda than that (Kohlberg). At the close of the novel just before Holden’s “planned” escape to the wilderness, he meets Phoebe at the Museum of Natural History in New York City for some kind of farewell meeting. Upon her arrival he notices that she is carrying a suitcase, and the following exchange occurs:
’What the hell’s in the bag? I don’t need anything. I’m just going the way I am. I’m not even taking the bags I got at the station. What the hellya got in there?’ She put the suitcase down. ‘My clothes,’ she said. ‘I’m going with you.’(Salinger 206)
What satisfaction could she possibly receive from this sacrifice? What should she expect as a favorable rebuttal for her kind gesture? To these questions, there is no answer. She is aware that there is and there will never be a reward for her actions, but she acts out of a genuine concern for the well-being of her brother. When Phoebe sees her brother, she sees him on a treacherous path to self destruction, and selflessly steps in his way. Mr. Antolini says to Holden,
I have a feeling that you're riding for some kind of terrible, terrible fall. . . . The whole arrangement's designed for men who, at some time or other in their lives, were looking for something their own environment couldn't supply them with. . . . So they gave up looking’(186).
Although she lacks the ability to put her feelings into so many words, she recognizes his humanity even though he cannot. The comprehension of the humanity of all humans is something said not to be achieved until the final stages of moral development, but Phoebe apparently grasps it quite well.
If Phoebe is the exemplary essence of virtue, then her equal but opposite force can be seen in Holden. Holden is apparently trapped between the conventional and post-conventional stages of development; so commonplace is this slippage of morality that Kohlberg actually provides for its existence with stage 4.5. As quoted in www.aggelia.com, stage 4.5 is,
College-age students that have come to see conventional morality as relative and arbitrary, but have not yet discovered universal ethical principles, may drop into a hedonistic ethic of ‘do your own thing.’ … Disrespect for conventional morality was especially infuriating to the Stage 4 mentality, and indeed was calculated to be so. (Paragraph 11)
So as much as Holden wants to escape the perversions and “phoniness” of reality, he fails to realize that he is just like everyone else; just like everyone else, he has had enough of the existing society and will start his own based on purity and peace, but he gets drunk and falls asleep instead. At adolescence, one has reached a period of self-reliance, in that one finally has escaped the memorized limericks of childhood and has begun to think for oneself. And with this freedom of thought comes the illusion of originality, and with this illusion of originality comes an impossibly ambitious hope that the world and life as we know it will progress to utopia because of my thought. But almost instantaneously, such hopes are dashed to oblivion, and so comes the understanding of insignificance and anonymity; so why not live to make oneself happy with the existing vices and pleasures of the world once hated? After the acknowledgment that to change is to work, it seems easier to just fall asleep.
Although they are close in moral maturity, what would account for the difference in character of Phoebe and Holden? Once again, for this answer, we can look to the proportional influences of society. Though both Holden and Phoebe have to endure the death of their brother Allie, Phoebe has the luxury of mourning with her family; whereas Holden has spent the years since hopping from boarding school to boarding school. Where Phoebe lives in a cradle of protection and support, Holden suffers the same fate as Ben: he is left to the castaways of society. Vygotsky coined the term, “Zone of Proximal Development”, to refer to the aspects of society and function that are learned. The zone of proximal development is
the concept that a child accomplishes a task that he/she cannot do alone, with the help from a more skilled person. Vygotsky also described the ZPD as the difference between the actual development level as determined by individual problem solving and the level of potential development as determined through problem solving under adult guidance or collaboration with more knowledgeable peers(www. .muskingum.edu).
While he does provide that the lower levels of ZPD can be learned from other children or simply derived, an able mentor is a requisite for reaching the upper limits. The boarding schools in which Holden reside, however briefly, should more suitably be called an asylum for the criminally adolescent as he is quarantined to the center of frustrated and “homeless” teens, and even after his escape from these institutions, no relief can be found in the outside world. Phoebe is not raised exclusively by her family, but even though she does venture occasionally from her stronghold of morality, she does so with optimism and good intentions. While Holden cannot wander anywhere in the city without seeing or hearing profanity, these defamations seem to pass over Phoebe unnoticed. Perhaps the impurities that plague Holden are not as rampant as he believes, but he simply is looking for them. Lastly, Holden cannot seem to find any purpose outside of some perversion of self gratification. While he would probably say that to do anything to the contrary would be to be a phony, the reality of his philosophy comes from his generic location in a predetermined order of stages that states with alarming accuracy that his thoughts are little more than average. Phoebe, on the other hand, has a genuine concern for her brother and others, and it is these differences in maturity that play the greatest parts in their differences of virtue.
While society does not provide for virtue by its own devices, it does provide the opportunity for virtue to exist. The existence of goodness is possible, but in the all to crucial years of childhood and adolescence, a balance of nurturing and censorship are instrumental. It may be true that nothing is original, but although the family and society are accredited with shaping one’s character, it is ultimately the individual that chooses right or wrong.
Conclusion
A perpetual citizen of the intersection of two worlds, the adolescent’s painful straddling of two extremes is a spectacle fascinating to all. As John Ciardi has said, “You don't have to suffer to be a poet; adolescence is enough suffering for anyone.” Adolescence is almost invariably a point of conflict and difficulty for any character, but it becomes obvious that although the challenges, obstacles, and burdens of adolescence may be similar, the experience is notably differed. To have an equation that arrives at multiple answers is something regarded in any science as an unacceptable and fundamentally incorrect result, but with the categorizations provided by Piaget, Kohlberg, and Vygotsky, there is overwhelming evidence for this fallacy. So the rational man’s explanation is that there is some variable missing; some minute, yet crucial element absent that would create a balance from a chaotic foundation. In the cases of Ben, Holden, Alice, and Ellen, what is the factor that so vividly divides their respective ends?
The shortfalls of the theories of Piaget and Kohlberg exist because they are formulated in an ideal world of uniform maturation and uniform influence. Remarkably ironic, the one among these philosophers most in touch with a communist society is the one who most directly recognizes the individuality in adolescence. His “Zone of Proximal Development” recognizes the impact of society and the necessity for a mentor in the early years of adolescence; he ventures beyond the simple categorization of age, and by this distinction, Vygotsky makes the first differentiation between our characters. Both Holden and Ben suffer from a terrible absence of guidance, and as a result, become incessantly destructive beings, in both the sadistic and masochistic senses. To the contrary, Ellen does have a mentor, but not by the most traditional circumstances; this mentor is not Julia, or Roy, or New Mama, or Mavis, but the one who started her on her journey to maturity. Ellen’s mentor is Daddy. Even though the opening line of the novel is “When I was little I used to think of ways to kill my daddy” (Gibbons 1), he is her mentor. He is her mentor, not because he lightens the weight of existence and paves the road to happiness over obstacles he has overcome, but because he shows her everything that is bad and terrible about the world and traumatizes her to a point of thorough reversal of his actions. Although he is an abusive, terrifying figure, he does provide Ellen with a clear picture of right and wrong, however incidentally he may do so. If he had treated Ellen with support, respect, or even basic humanity, she may not have made her triumph over the social inequities of racism.
Though she has to wrestle a positive result from negative feedback, Ellen’s “mentor”, however tragic, is a luxury that Ben and Holden do not have. Both Holden and Ben are quarantined to a society of unending chaos; these outcasts retreat to a sea of still more outcasts that perpetuate the same neglect that caused their withdrawal. This chain reaction of neglect and withdrawal creates a system of individuals, each pulling in his/her own direction, yet each searching for guidance, leading to an unavoidable result of an overpowering structure of conformity. The overwhelming group culture becomes a cloak behind which the weak may hide and the mediocre may flourish. It becomes a place where decision is based on nothing more than majority, and what is different automatically becomes synonymous with what is evil. The group culture is one that frees its citizens from thought and responsibility, and in which what is accepted and what is correct may not be the same. Holden may earnestly disdain this world of “phonies”, but like Ben, he does not have any other options.
The existence of outside influence does play a pivotal role in development, but still more variables contribute to the final resolution, and for these, we turn our focus to Alice. Alice’s predicament may not be as toxic as that of Ben, Holden, and Ellen, but it is by far the most unusual. Her world is one of complete insanity and almost constant change; she may find a foothold for a moment, but before she has time to progress further, the landscape tends to turn on its head, causing her to fall flat on her face in the process. Her only real guide is the Cheshire Cat whose speech is so erratic, he cannot keep his mouth attached to his head. The convoluted hints and sporadic fits of shrinking and growing should by any means drive a person insane, but throughout her adventure Alice maintains her dignity. Her ability to keep her composure in the most peculiar of circumstances by a simple state of choice leads one to question the actions of the other protagonists: were their actions too not determined by some degree of choice? Daddy abuses Ellen, and she chooses to live contrary to his example. Holden despises the vice of the world, yet he chooses participate in the vices he condemns. Ben lacks all basic social nuances, but he is the one who ultimately chooses to destroy his home. Ergo, as much as we may try to free ourselves by hiding behind the defense age or influence, however relevant they may be, the responsibility of action does ultimately end with choice.
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