Childhood Innocence

When we read the short story “To Set Our House in Order” by Margaret Laurence, some of the aspects of the plot reminded me of J.D. Salinger’s “The Catcher in the Rye”, one of my favorite novels that I studied in twelfth grade. Vanessa, the main character of Laurence’s short story goes through a change where she loses her childhood innocence. Likewise, Holden Caulfield, the main character in “The Catcher in the Rye” is obsessed with preserving childhood innocence and refuses to believe that Jane, a childhood friend, is no longer the innocent child he knew. He also does everything in his power to protect his little sister, Phoebe, from the phoniness of adults. He says he wants to be a catcher in the rye so that he can save innocent children from falling off a cliff into the phoniness of the world. 

In “To Set Our House in Order”, Vanessa is an innocent little girl who lives with her parents and Grandmother MacLeod in a small, isolated town in Manitoba. Though she has a family with a new sibling on the way, Vanessa feels very alone and alienated. Her mother and father tell her as much as they think they can as she is still a child, young and innocent. She is coming of age and has a lot of questions she cannot get answers to. This is when her transformation happens: she overhears what really happened to her Uncle Roderick. She realizes her uncle did die at war, but he also tried to get killed. This is when she becomes aware of the imperfectness of the world and loses her innocence.

“The Catcher and the Rye” is a little different than this as Holden, the protagonist, is aware of the imperfectness of the world: he just wants to protect Jane and Phoebe from it. He gets very upset when he hears that his roommate, Stradlater, has gone on a date with Jane because he thinks Stradlater is a “phony”. He tries to protect his little sister from the obscene language he sees written on the wall at the museum as she is very important to him and he wants to preserve her innocence. Initially, he doesn't tell her why he was kicked out of Pencey Prep or where he has been because he doesn't want her to know anything that could potentially damage her innocent mind or her opinion of the world. At the end of the novel, Holden comes to accept that Jane is no longer the “good” girl he loves and respects from his childhood. He is aware that there is nothing he can do now because her innocence has been lost.  When he is watching Phoebe on the carousel, he feels as if he might cry from happiness. He knows Phoebe has not lost her innocence and feels immense gladness because of this.

Both of these plots show a child losing their innocence as they grow up and become of age. Though Vanessa undergoes a transformation that we can see, Jane also undergoes a similar change through Holden’s thoughts and realizations. Vanessa loses her innocence when she realizes the world isn't the perfect place she thought it was while Jane transforms without Holden seeing this change. When the novel ends, Holden still has hope that Phoebe’s childhood innocence will remain preserved for a little while longer. I think this is what kept Holden as sane as he did in this novel because he still had confidence in Phoebe, even if she was only one child.  In both of these stories we can see how children will eventually come to realize the imperfectness of the world and that, unfortunately, no child’s innocence will last forever.

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