Stuck

            In Benji’s eyes, there are two ways that black people in his situation can go: they can either try as hard as they can to avoid every stereotype possible, or they can pick one, embrace it, and dare others to ridicule them. He sees the downsides of both approaches: his parents’ constrained, dissatisfied lives, constantly obsessed with what others are thinking of them, and his peers’ performative stereotypes. The split mostly falls along generational lines: his parents and their friends aim for respectability (to take a word from Mr. Sutton), while his friends see the toll this takes on their parents and try to get as far from that as possible.

One option – embracing the stereotypes – is primarily found among his peers. They are a generation removed from the civil rights movement, and they have grown up hearing that they need to fight for their rights, for their dignity. At the same time, they aren’t growing up with the same hardships that the generations before them had – they are well-off, go to prep schools, have legal equality with white people, and most of the racism they encounter is small acts of microaggression rather than intentional violence. They want to continue the fight, but aren’t sure how to do so. From Benji’s perspective, this is done to provoke a reaction, to push society’s arbitrary limits on what black people “should” be. However, coming from these kids it is artifice, not genuine. At one point Benji says, “Such rebellion was inherently self-conscious, overly determined. It doth protest too much, described an inner conflict as big as that of the watermelon-avoiders. We were all of us stuck, whether we wanted to admit it or not. We were people, not performance artists, all appearances to the contrary”.

It takes a while before we really see the full impact of Benji’s parents’ mindset. As Benji describes them, they make a “Cosby family”. They fit into the same categories as the Cosbys, sure – well-off, educated, professional, respectable to mainstream white eyes. But it goes deeper than that: this is a facade just like Reggie’s “street” style. Benji’s parents and the adults around them are always sure that someone’s watching, scrutinizing everything they do. In reality, they are their own harshest (and often only) critic. This stress manifests itself in different ways – his dad’s need for control, to control what others see in his family, turns into abuse. His mother’s need to maintain a good appearance keeps her from standing up for herself.

Part of his dad’s reasoning for wanting the thick paper plates is he “doesn’t want cheap shit in his house”. He wants to prove that he’s better than the other people around him. Prove to whom? Even his dad’s criteria for finding a good wife seem to be focused on what other people will think – after all, “you don’t want other people talking about how you got a whale for a wife”. Benji, however, doesn’t let himself get caught up in this. He notes that “no one cares about what goes on in other people’s houses. The grubby dramas. It was just us. The soundstage was empty, the production lot scheduled for demolition. They’d turned off the electricity long ago. We delivered our lines in the darkness”.

Benji seems to be taking another path: to just not care. Maybe “not care” isn’t the right phrase, because he says that he is “stuck” just like everyone else. Still, he sees how that both lifestyles can hurt the people that live them, and are both false in much the same way. As he tries so hard to be cool, perhaps his “uncool”-ness is the thing that saves him – as something of an outsider, he can see what others can’t.

One Jason

Most of the second half of Black Swan Green shows Jason’s path to self-confidence. By degrees, he frees himself from his bullying “friends” and lets his real self come out. The culminating scene of this arc is during “Goose Fair”, when Jason visits the Hall of Mirrors.

For much of the book, Jason is preoccupied with hiding his true thoughts, hobbies, and tastes because he’s terrified of how other boys at his school will perceive him. We described this in class as “self-editing”, which is a totally perfect term for it. However, during the fair he finally comes to the conscious realization that this is enormously unhealthy and unsustainable:

“How about an Outside-You who is your Inside-You too? A One-You? If people like your One-You, great. If they don’t, tough. Trying to win approval for your Outside-You is a drag, Jason. That’s what makes you weak. It’s boring.”

It’s interesting that Jason doesn’t just have an Inside-Me and an Outside Me, though. He has multiple individual “inside” voices, too – Maggot, Unborn Twin, etc. They represent parts of Jason that he thinks are shameful, but not in the same way that he thinks poetry and hats are shameful. Those are things that Jason likes, but feels like he can’t acknowledge to other people; Maggot and Hangman are the things he doesn’t want to see as part of himself, so he gives them other names. After the Hall of Mirrors, when Jason has his “one-me” moment, he stops talking about Maggot’s voice in his head, or Unborn Twin’s. There’s just Jason. Hangman’s still there, but Jason begins to learn to work around his stammer – in a way that doesn’t involve trying to fight it ( treating it as a separate entity) but rather accepting it and giving himself permission not to speak like he thinks other people want him to. Jason’s transition to a “One-You” isn’t just reconciling his inward and outward selves, but also learning to deal with his negative thoughts and impulses in a way that isn’t destructive.

Darkness is the Only Solvent

The first quote from Housekeeping that really stood out to me was the part when Ruth and Lucille were out by the lake, and Ruth feels the night all around her:

“Lucille would tell this story differently. She would say I fell asleep, but I did not. I simply let the darkness in the sky become coextensive with the darkness in my skull and bowels and bones. Everything that falls upon the eye is apparition, a sheet dropped over the world’s true workings. The nerves and brain are tricked, and one is left with dreams that these specters loose their hands from ours and walk away, the curve of the back and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world, when in fact nothing is more perishable.”

This is one of those things that I’ve felt before, but never been eloquent enough to put into words. Ruth’s use of the phrase “walk away” ties her perception of the world/universe in general together with her own life experience. Her grandfather, her mother, her aunts, Lily and Nona – nearly every adult in her life has walked away. Her specific mention of “swing of the coat” reminds me of Sylvie, and of the archetypal hobo who would supposedly come into town and steal children away.

                The way that Ruth says, “...and the swing of the coat so familiar as to imply that they should be permanent fixtures of the world” shows that she has come to trust Sylvie despite everything else in her life, even though she still rationally knows that Sylvie will leave her some day (whether by abandonment or death).

“Darkness is the only solvent.”

This was the part that really got me – I know when I’ve gone outside at night, and I’m by myself, I’ve felt exactly what Ruth is feeling in this passage. The world feels much larger, somehow.

Esther and Holden

Esther Greenwood and Holden Caulfield are two characters in similar settings – 40s-50s New York – but beyond that, their stories are remarkably similar. However, despite their common mindset they have many differences, due to their differing gender expectations and social class.

Both Esther and Holden are obsessed with the idea of sex, but are apprehensive when faced with the opportunity to lose their virginity – compare Holden’s experience with Sunny the prostitute to Esther’s disgusted reaction to seeing Buddy naked. However, while Holden feels societal pressure not to be a virgin (and doesn’t fight that expectation to a large degree), Esther seeks to deliberately subvert society’s expectation for her to “remain pure”. Both of them see their virginity as a burden, but they approach it from different cultural contexts.

In their own ways, both despise “phonies”: while Holden seems to see them everywhere he goes, Esther’s disdain is focused primarily on Buddy Willard. Her hatred of Buddy comes from her perception of him as a hypocrite, one who projects an image of innocence and purity but really has been sexually “corrupted”. I wonder what Holden would think of this particular type of hypocrisy, particularly because of his obsession with childhood innocence.

One difference between Holden and Esther is their attitude towards wealth. Holden comes from a very affluent family, and while he knows it in theory, he doesn’t seem to totally grasp how privileged he is. On the other hand, Esther is only able to afford her expensive (Smith?) college because of a scholarship. This is perhaps the only reason Esther didn’t end up like Holden sooner: while he doesn’t think he has any skin in the academic game, so to speak, Esther is keenly aware that her intellectual ability is the only thing that could give her a shot at the life she wants. She doesn’t have the option to protest-flunk her way out of school after school, because if she can’t afford college then she can’t get the degree she needs to travel the world and write. As a result, she ignores her feelings of discontent and buries them in her studies until her mental state finally gets so bad that that option is taken away from her.

This points to a more general difference between them: while Holden feels relatively free to express his discontent with society, Esther feels like she must keep up the facade – at least, the Esther we see at the beginning of the book. Salinger frames Holden’s behavior as more of a choice (or series of choices), while Plath portrays Esther as having an illness that takes her over and warps her judgment. We don’t get a chance to see Holden when he (presumably) has his own breakdown and ends up institutionalized – it would be interesting to see how his story compares to hers then. In some ways, Holden and Esther have similar arcs, but we see them at different points: Holden is the “before” and “after” while Esther is the “during”. The bulk of Catcher leaves off where The Bell Jar starts to get intense: Holden returning home after a transformative experience. The frame narrative picks up where The Bell Jar ends: with Holden talking to a doctor, hoping to be released into the wild again soon.