Capote Doesn't Get To Call Me A Swan Or Sparrow

For me, reading Truman Capote’s metaphoric tale relating women to birds made me think I was reading a dictate from Jane Austen’s Mrs. Bennet to her young daughters on how to act properly in front of high-society men. Capote seems to assume that all women are in the same situation as the Bennet daughters—their sole goal is to please a man, in every outfit they wear and in every word they speak. I find much of Capote’s points degrading to all women; he writes with a pompous and pedantic voice on how to judge the worth of a woman. He uses terms like “authentic swans” to draw a divide between women who he deems better than the rest and those who are merely a “population of sparrows” (218). Capote essentially declares what characteristics give way to an ideal woman, taking this charge merely because he is a man and therefore has this right. Furthermore, Capote drives a belief embedded in class-consciousness and respect for the upper class: this ideal woman is, according to him, “[given] good bones…blessed with that best of beauty emollients, [given] a splendid bank account.” Capote claims that beauty, in his eye, is an expensive expenditure.

Previously only ever having read “In Cold Blood” by Capote, this reading shed new light onto the kind of person he was; what surprised me most is the fact that he lived in a period when the women’s rights movement came alive, encouraging women to leave old-aged ideas of domestic life and engage in work and politics just as men do. Perhaps if one read this article in context of the time period when Coco Chanel was young, one would be more understanding of Capote’s thoughts. Coco’s aspirations to open her own business seemed absurd to the men who surrounded her and her friend Etienne Balsan even offered to marry her in order to solve all her problems. There was an assumption that Coco needed a man to elevate her status in the world, despite the fact that marriage would only push Coco into a permanent place of male dominance. Today, I think most men and women would find Capote’s thoughts to be an archaic idea of what women need to be. In fact, I find that even placing any expectations at all on how to be worthy as a woman is a kind of mindset that needs to be eradicated if our society is to progress and claim full equality between sexes.

Capote’s line about certain women being able to hold a “swan-illusion” with a great measure of genuineness seems to me a good description of what Coco needed to do for the majority of her time as Balsan’s mistress. Coco came from neither wealth nor social standing, and had only her inner drive and confidence to penetrate the glass ceiling of the rich and upper class. There is no denying that Coco had “inner vision of [herself]” that was undeniably and stubbornly fixed—it is what captured the attention of Balsan in the first place. Coco succeeded in building herself a life of success because she dared to disregard the expectations and assumptions that society pushed on her and all women of that time. Coco’s character seems to recall the kind of attitude that Ines de la Fressange emanated in the videos we watched of her last week.