Similarities Between Catcher In The Rye And The Bell Jar

In both the Bell Jar and Catcher in the Rye, we meet characters whose personalities not only establish their situations but clash with the very foundation of the society that they live in. With both settings in a more conservative time, the expectations upon these young adults are more focused on gender schemas and societal consistency, causing these characters to find hypocritical loopholes through a system structured by privilege, class, and gender. As both stories are set around the early 1950s, it is clear that, in Esther's case, women’s lives are dictated by implicit rules that limit the freedom women have in America to choose their futures and relationships. While in Holden’s case, being a young man in high school approaching the reality of growing up, societal norms pressure young men to leave behind childhood comforts and engage in adult activities and lifestyles. When faced with these pressures to conform, both characters, in their struggle to find
During this time, a woman’s domain was the home and she found fulfillment serving her husband which was the main breadwinner and financial provider. The American Dream of this time was to settle down and have a family, especially for women. The perfect woman was obedient, neat, and submissive, and often expected to be virgin for her husband. Because of this, the democracy, rights, liberties, opportunities, and equality of the American Dream didn’t often apply to women or those who had some form of disability that prevented them from integrating into society. The early 1950s was the very beginning of a new era of psychiatric treatment and, because of this, the medical field still wasn’t properly equipped to treat or understand the mentally disabled. And so, ultimately, women and the mentally disabled were advised, and often forced by societies crushing expectations, to hand their lives over to carers or