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Breakfast at Tiffany's Section 11: Difference between revisions
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Second, when Holly tells the narrator that she will not testify against Sally Tomato, she calls the narrator a name laden with queer meaning:" Well, I may be rotten to the core, Maude, but: testify against a friend I will not." In homosexual slang, "maude signifies a male prostitute or a male homosexual.The narrator himself makes a veiled reference to his homosexuality when he compares his rain-soaked trip from Holly's apartment to Joe Bell's bar to another difficult journey he had made years ago: "Never mind why, but once I walked from New Orleans to Nancy's Landing, Mississippi, just under five hundred miles. Nancy's Landing is Capote's creation; it does not exist geographically. According to A Dictionary of the Underworld, "Nancy" refers either to the posterior or to "an effeminate man, especially a passive homosexual." "Nancy's Landing," then serves as Capote's code phrase for a homosexual. Thus, the narrator's coy rejoinder that the reader should "never mind why" he made the trip appears as a subtle move to direct attention away from his self-confession (Galenet 2). | Second, when Holly tells the narrator that she will not testify against Sally Tomato, she calls the narrator a name laden with queer meaning:" Well, I may be rotten to the core, Maude, but: testify against a friend I will not." In homosexual slang, "maude signifies a male prostitute or a male homosexual.The narrator himself makes a veiled reference to his homosexuality when he compares his rain-soaked trip from Holly's apartment to Joe Bell's bar to another difficult journey he had made years ago: "Never mind why, but once I walked from New Orleans to Nancy's Landing, Mississippi, just under five hundred miles. Nancy's Landing is Capote's creation; it does not exist geographically. According to A Dictionary of the Underworld, "Nancy" refers either to the posterior or to "an effeminate man, especially a passive homosexual." "Nancy's Landing," then serves as Capote's code phrase for a homosexual. Thus, the narrator's coy rejoinder that the reader should "never mind why" he made the trip appears as a subtle move to direct attention away from his self-confession (Galenet 2). | ||
Holly labels José "a rat" like all the others, although she finally agrees bitterly with the narrator that José's reasons for giving her up | Holly labels José "a rat" like all the others, although she finally agrees bitterly with the narrator that José's reasons for giving her up, his religion and his career, are valid for the type of man he is. Holly then decides to flee the country, using the ticket for Brazil that José had brought her. For a time it seemed that Holly had found her dream, her "place where me and things belong together." Her relationship with José might have been like her vision of Tiffany's, with "quietness and the proud look of it; nothing very bad could happen to you there" (Garson 84, 85). | ||
In his book, ''Truman Capote'', Kenneth Reed states that ''Breakfast at Tiffany's'', shares with most of Capote's other fiction a concern for people who are liberated from the more commonplace moorings of social and cultural life, and who are scarcely concerned with such things as family relationships and middle class notions of respectability.For example, when the narrator warns Holly that if she jumps bail, she will never again be able to come home, it impresses her not at all (Reed 92). | In his book, ''Truman Capote'', Kenneth Reed states that ''Breakfast at Tiffany's'', shares with most of Capote's other fiction a concern for people who are liberated from the more commonplace moorings of social and cultural life, and who are scarcely concerned with such things as family relationships and middle class notions of respectability.For example, when the narrator warns Holly that if she jumps bail, she will never again be able to come home, it impresses her not at all (Reed 92). | ||