Franny and Zooey

“Lane had sampled his, then sat back and briefly looked around the room with an almost palpable sense of well-being at finding myself (he must have been sure no one could dispute) in the right place with an unimpeachably right-looking girl—a girl who was not only extraordinarily pretty, but, so much the better, not too categorically cashmere sweater and flannel skirt.”

Lane’s contentment with sitting at a restaurant with an obviously pretty woman like Franny, reflects The Critique of Societal Inauthenticity. Lane’s description of Franny being not too “cashmere sweater and flannel skirt” alludes to Franny’s uniqueness (10). A flannel skirt and cashmere sweater would have been a stereotypical outfit for a college girl in the 1950s; however, Lane feels proud that Franny exists outside of this stereotype, making her the “perfect” woman.

“A section man’s a person that takes over a class when the professor isn’t there […] He’s usually a graduate student or something. Anyway, if it’s a course in Russian Literature, say, he comes in, in his little button-down-collar shirt and striped tie, and starts knocking Turgenev for about a half hour. Then, when he’s finished, when he’s absolutely ruined Turgenev for you, he starts talking about Stendhal or somebody he wrote his thesis for his M.A. on. Where I go, the English Department has about ten little section men running around ruining things for people, and they’re all so brilliant they can hardly open their mouths.”

This quote exemplifies Franny’s frustration with phoniness, especially in academic circles. Franny hates that colleges create hierarchies where section men constantly attempt to outperform their peers and professors. From Franny’s perspective, these types of people ruin learning because she can tell when they are doing it for social prestige rather than for the joy of learning.

“That’s partly what’s so awful. I mean they’re not real poets. They’re just people that write poems that get published and anthologized all over the place, but they’re not poets.”

Franny’s distinction between real poets and people who publish poetry shows that she knows the difference between people who do something because they are passionate and people who do it only to advance themselves. Franny believes that what makes a person a true poet is the desire to create beauty in the world.