CAPOTE’S FROZEN CATS

Abstract

In this late story, Truman Capote celebrates a peculiar form of object relations to expand definitions of sexuality beyond conventional identity categories and thus suggest a more expansive model of social inclusion and civil rights. Building on work in animal studies, queer theory, and the new materialities, I argue that the literalism of these object relations decenters the human and reimagines a wider ethics of belonging. The story describes an elderly widow who keeps all of her deceased cats in a freezer because she cannot bear to be parted from them. Although the story prepares us to expect that the frozen cats could be symbols or surrogates for her dead husband, it becomes clear that she loves her cats literally as cats and nothing more. Capote pushes us to acknowledge and accept this love for her cats just as it is. And by doing so, he invites us to imagine a more hospitable world in which we accommodate other kinds of object-choice beyond the confines of heterosexual marriage, including but certainly not limited to his own homosexuality.

Keywords:

• Truman Capote
• sexuality
• marriage
• queer
• literalism
• animals
• materiality
• hospitality
• civil rights

disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

I thank Chris Barrett, Benjy Kahan, Pallavi Rastogi, and Isiah Lavender III for their help with this essay.

1 Although the story has been collected in Portraits and Observations: The Essays of Truman Capote, thus marking it as a piece of non-fiction, I choose to call it a short story rather than an essay in order to focus more intently on the text itself and not on the question of whether the encounter ever actually happened – the most common, and boring, approach to most of Capote’s writing.

2 I am borrowing this term “domain of sexuality” from Peter Coviello, who argues for a more expansive understanding of sexuality that extends beyond erotic “acts and practices” and encompasses all of the “habitable forms and dimensions” that “may seem extravagant, naïve, oblique, or even scarcely legible as ‘sex’” (4).

3 Tora Holmberg offers a more developed critique of the research and policies devoted to identifying, addressing, and policing animal hoarding. This research, she argues, may partially obscure other dynamics about human–animal crowding in urban spaces beyond discourses of mental health and social and biological transgression.

4 For news about the program, see Serwer; Associated Press. For discussion about how anti-LGBTQ conservatives reacted to this program, see Duffy.