Real Phonies: Performativity in Breakfast at Tiffany's and Mad Men

Abstract

Breakfast at Tiffany's is the book that made Truman Capote famous, launching him not only as a best-selling author, but as a celebrity, a person welcomed into the homes and hearts of the rich and famous. Breakfast ratified Capote's long-standing ambition to make it big as a writer, and it initiated a life that in some ways resembled that of his most famous, or at least his best-loved, character, Holly Golightly. Like her, Capote came from the rural south. His early years were not as desperate as his character's, but they were rough enough to justify our sense that Capote had a personal investment in Holly's escape, in her transition to fast-paced life in New York, and her lingering anxiety about how long the good times will last. One also has a sense that the inner demons that propelled Capote's problems with drink and drugs are somehow figured in Holly's "mean reds." Though Capote seems himself to have provoked his expulsion from his society friends' circles - by transparently using their confidences in his very popular journalism - the anxiety about really belonging that is present in the character of Holly Golightly, and the sense that sincerity is probably an illusion in any case, seems to have been part of Capote's personality. One can see something of Capote the writer in the narrator of Breakfast, a figure who is on the sidelines, observing and learning. But we also imagine Holly as an expression of Capote's sense that the self must be performed, that the great opportunities of life lie in the unlimited possibilities of one's performance. But in Holly we also see the terror of "not knowing what's yours."

-Dr. Bruce Greenfield