If we seep through 1950s fiction it gives a direct reflection of gender roles. Holden Caulfield the seventeen year old protagonist in J.D.Salinger’s The Cather in the Rye (1951) finds no consolation in his own generation, for him his ten year old sister represents a safe haven. For Holden the teenage world is as fake or phoney as the adult one. Like Franny Glass Holden realises that the truth that going bohemian is as fake as conformity. Holden’s frustration can be equated with the impasse of radicalism in the 1950s. To Sally Robinson Holden’s voice seems ‘gendered’, a ‘masculine protest’ which was fast becoming part of the ‘post-war consensus’ (qtd in Halliwell 67). Despite Mickey Spillane’s portrayal of tough, fast-living and at
