In Holly
Golightly, Truman Capote created a character that was enduring. It was the kind
of character that inspired women from all over America in the 50s to pack up
their bags and travel to New York. As readers we loved her in all her glamour,
in her fifty-dollar tips to the powder room, in her refusal to be tied down by
nothing and nobody. We sympathized with her and forgave all her flaws, because
Truman Capote created a character that reminded us that as humans, we were all
flawed in some way, and more often than not, we had to live with our flaws,
with our issues, with our “mean reds”—so when she ran away in the end, we knew
it was going to happen and we were okay with it.
However,
personally, I struggled with her character. I struggled with her character
because it was a trope. At the time, when Truman Capote first fashioned her out
of the personalities and lives of his glamorous women friends, she wasn’t a
trope; she certainly wasn’t a stereotype either, but as a reader who in the
year 2013 has experienced the characters of Natalie Portman in Garden State,
Kate Winslet in Almost Famous, every role that Zoey Dechanel has basically ever
played, Midori Kobayashi in Norwegion Wood (by Haruki Murakami) and most of the
female characters in John Greene novels, I feel resentful of Holly Golightly
because I’m afraid that her Manic Pixie Dream Girl (MPDG) like tendencies may
have set the stage for that stock character to cement its hold in the world of
literature and film.
However, I only
say MPDG like tendencies because Holly Golightly wasn’t actually an MPDG—when
film critic Nathan Rabin coined that term after watching Elizabethtown in 2005,
it was to describe the bubbly, almost-adorable-in-her-quirkiness woman that
exists solely so that the sensitive brooding male protagonist can re-embrace
life in all of its own imperfections. Obviously that was not Holly,
because while Fred may have been obsessed with her, she didn’t change his life
considering the fact that it never even occurred to him to write about her. But
she certainly had those tendencies with her occasional shop-lifting, her love
for Tiffany’s, her playing the guitar when she thought no one was looking, her
nameless cat (because god forbid you gave a name to “an independent” stray cat) etc. The trauma of the MPDG
like tendencies is what made me resist her in all her charm and charisma.
Because ultimately I could not relate to her character and for me she could
never be real. It is commendable that Capote made sure that she wasn’t just a
superficial character, that she had some depth reflected in her commitment
issues and in her relationship with her brother Fred, but why did she have
those issues? How did she become that “wild thing” that she was? We know that
she had a rough childhood but that was only until Doc Golightly took her in. We
know that that time in her life was good because Holly loved Doc and had no
particular complaints about her life with him—so how did those commitment
issues come up? Capote did not develop her character. He kind of jut picked her
up from East Jesus Nowhere and placed her in New York without ever
explaining why she was the way she was. And then he combined that ambiguity
with personality traits that were too cute to be real (she may not be one, but she obviously had to join the ranks of the MPDGs)—women like Holly
Golightly don’t exist in the real world. So when Holly ran away in the end, I
didn’t just hope that she was happy wherever she was, I wanted her to come back
and deal with the case against her—because
that’s what a real person would’ve done.
--Smriti Bansal
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