Truman Capote’s Decadent/Campy Parody of Southern Gothic: Aesthetic Self-Distancing in Other Voices, Other Rooms

Abstract

This article explores Truman Capote’s parodic/reconstructive exploitation of decadent aesthetics in his “Southern Gothic” novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (1948), as dissident self-distancing from postwar conservatism. Modernist Southern Gothic writers owe European decadent culture for their thematization of the sociocultural decay of the antebellum South and characterization of dandiacal dissidents, while often reiterating the claustrophobic mood of the patriarchal and racist society and excluding/villainizing those dandies. Critically analogizing the nationalist heteronormativity of the early-Cold War American society with the oppressive patriarchy of the South, OVOR playfully deconstructs the tragic narrative of Modernist Southern Gothic by foregrounding the reparative aspect of decadent aesthetics mainly through the pedagogic relationship between a Wildean dilettante, Randolph, and a young protagonist, Joel. Simultaneously, with the ironical self-satire against the potential authoritarianism of white bourgeois decadence, Capote democratizes decadent aesthetics as a non-normative survival method through the exposure of Randolph’s vulnerability and the parodic adaptation of his dilettantism by the non-white characters. I argue that OVOR marks the vacillating but inevitable transition from decadence to camp as a seemingly non-political but necessary survivalist strategy in the Cold War/Pre-Stonewall American society that conducts surveillance of, persecutes, and stigmatizes as “decadence” non-normative genders and sexualities.

1. Introduction

Truman Capote’s first novel, Other Voices, Other Rooms (Capote [1948] 2012), was far from a great success, at least for the young author1. Despite its sales of “more than 26,000 copies, a figure which, if not sensational, was considered extremely good,” and some admiring reviews, not a few bitter critiques deeply shocked him. A tabloid reporter who interviewed him several weeks after the novel’s release recalled the author’s lament:

“I did not expect it to be the way it was. Some of the reviews seemed to be so blind. They call it a fantasy—decadent—they say I’ve written a book about homosexuality. I did not, nor did I intend to and I ought to know what I wanted it to be—I wrote a book.”

(Clarke 2010, pp. 158, 161, italics mine)

As Capote complains, some early reviewers, usually while pointing out the novel’s Southern Gothic features, frowned with terms like “decadent” or “immoral” at its queer themes.2 The story of Joel Harrison Knox, an effeminate boy who, after losing his mother, comes to a ruined Southern plantation to live with his long-lost father, must have looked morally unpleasant to the normative readers in the post-WWII American society: Joel’s father, Mr Sansom, turns out to be neither an honorable Southern gentleman nor a hypermasculine plantation owner but a bedridden patient, who was once just a petty event promoter; with the disappointment with his father, the young protagonist starts to live with his mentally unstable stepmother, Miss Amy, and her queer cousin, Randolph, who tries to seclude him from the outside world and lure him into an esoteric escape; his new tomboyish friend, Idabel, refusing to be tamed into an traditional heroine, demasculinizes Joel and falls in love with Miss Wisteria, a little person from a circus, who ironically desires the boy; Joel temporarily finds a mother figure in the Black servant Zoo Fever, but she suffers from terror of her abusive husband and eventually leaves the plantation, only to fall victim to rape by a racist gang; against the typical finale of heteronormative Bildungsroman, Joel finally seems to embrace his queerness and enter the pederastic relationship with the transvestite gay cousin. The reader finds here the exaggerated themes of Southern Gothic, such as the decline of the traditional values of the South, ingrained racism and sexism, and “grotesque” characters, all of which J. Douglas Perry (1973) argues to make a “gothic whirlpool” that draws the adolescent protagonist into corruption (p. 157). John M. Thomson of Hilltop: A Literary Magazine mockingly states, “The book will delight the Marxists. As Exhibit A it is an almost perfect example of Western Civilisation’s [sic] hopeless decadence” (Thomson 1949, p. 37). For the reviewers restricted by heteronormativity/homophobia, which was widely shared in the post-WWII/early-Cold War period, Capote’s seemingly positive thematization of queerness and other forms of non-normative gender and sexuality meant nothing but the deprecation of the American society, even though they understood the novel adapted the local literary genre famous for its frequent use of the grotesque and dramatization of moral/social decadence.

Decadence has always been one of the most ubiquitous themes in Southern Gothic. Justin D. Edward (2003) includes as the subjects of “the nation’s gothic literature,” including Southern Gothic, “gender, homosexuality, incest, genocide, rape, war, murder, religion” (xxvii), all most of which many of the fin de siècle decadent canons also dramatize. Charles L. Crow (2017) adds to this list more explicitly decadent topics such as “disease, addiction, physical deformity, and degeneration or atavism” (p. 141) and even uses the word “Decadence” as an umbrella term for these factors (p. 152). Just as fin de siècle European decadents (self-)deprecatingly exposed the corruption of the traditional values through immoral, (pseudo-)aristocratic hedonists such as Jean des Esseintes or Dorian Gray and simultaneously questioned the too-optimistic modernity or the sense of progress, many post-WWI Southern writers criticized the often beautified but actually dark legacy of the Old South as well as the frustrating reality of the postbellum South: that is, for example, the disintegration of traditional plantation economy, downfall of Southern aristocratic families, impoverishment of rural white commons, and persistent racism and sexism. Among them, Modernist Southern Gothic writers, most notably represented by William Faulkner, debunked the “modernized” South, which was still haunted by the ancient regime and the Lost Cause and at the same time challenged by the new social system and ideology, often through “grotesque” characters and events suspended between the shame (and often contradictorily with the remnants of nostalgia) for the past and the doubt for the future.

Although Southern Gothic studies have discovered in this American literary genre many themes also common to the fin de siècle European subculture, most of them have stressed only the limited aspects of decadence and failed to establish a direct nexus with its cultural genealogy by focusing on, say, its dark and ominous features and attributing them mainly to the Gothic tradition (though these two literary genres have always been interlaced). One of the significant dimensions that critics have missed is the use of decadent aesthetics—often expressed as aestheticism, dandyism, and dilettantism—as a dissident/survivalist strategy for the non-normative. For fin de siècle writers and artists and their followers—even non-creative individuals—uncomfortable with the rampant bourgeois normativity, decadence was not only a thematic term or tropes that reflected the sociocultural turmoil but also an aesthetic style and artifice to express their irreducible individualities, question or parody the authorities (though often ambivalently), and establish and maintain communities and intimate relationships without straightforwardly political confrontation. Many early-twentieth-century Southern writers, such as William Alexander Percy, Margaret Mitchell, Lillian Hellman, Robert Penn Warren, and Tennessee Williams, who often dramatized the downfall of the Southern aristocracy after the Civil War/Reconstruction, exploited decadent aesthetics often in dandiacal—and sometimes Wildean queer—characters to create, if temporarily and ambivalently, a virtual distance from traditional Southern values and interrogate them. Here, Faulkner marks an epoch with Absalom, Absalom!, which, as Ellen Crowell (2007) suggests, features the mirroring confrontation between Thomas Sutpen, a pseudo-Southern-aristocratic dandy who first strives to avenge himself on but eventually reproduce the Southern authoritarianism, and Charles Bon, a Wildean dandy who subverts the beauty of the Southern aristocracy by excessively/parodically embodying it, dramatizing the decadent strategy in the Southern Gothic narrative3.

Despite the lack of studies that illustrate its author’s debt to fin de siècle culture, I argue that OVOR defines itself as the completion—and at the same time, parodic development—of the Southern Gothic inheritance of decadent literature. Learning from both his favorite author Oscar Wilde and earlier Southern writers, Capote adapted the peculiar aesthetics/strategy of decadence in the significant details of his first novel—above all in the characterization of the queer dandy, Randolph4, and his pedagogical relationship with Joel as a young apprentice of dilettantism. He did so to create critical distance from both Southern heteronormativity, which the author himself had experienced and used as the novel’s setting, and against early-Cold War culture, with its accelerating antagonism toward non-normative citizens. Post-WWII American society, stressing its nationalist heteronormativity, excluded people with non-normative gender and sexuality: while female workers socially promoted during the war were pushed from high-salary jobs into the home to restore the “normal” patriarchy, male citizens, many with traumatic physical and mental wounds from the war, had to display a new form of masculinity as a good father and husband—instead of a brave soldier—to financially support their family5; under these threats to the traditional patriarchy and also the political pressure from the East and internal communists, President Truman’s government began campaigns to drive queers away from society, which would lead to what David K. Johnson calls the “Lavender Scare” in the 1950s, which is “the hysteria over homosexuals in government” (Johnson 2023, p. 230). Capote—a “delicate” boy with what his Southerner aunt called “sissyish traits,” which his mother repeatedly tried to “cure” (Clarke 2010, pp. 24, 43)—had suffered sociocultural intolerance since his childhood in Alabama and observed the rising of the surveillant nationalism in the early-Cold War period. The genre conventions of Modernist Southern Gothic, which interrogated the cruel aspects of the Southern patriarchy helped Capote mobilize his past experience and adumbrate his contemporary sociocultural situation. For example, Mr Sansom’s eyes, which in Joel’s imagination take possession of a water moccasin and the sun to keep monitoring and challenge his son’s masculinity6 despite his paralyzed—virtually castrated—body, clearly symbolize the reactionary surveillant culture of the post-WWII American society full of wounded and panic masculinists. Given his background and his contemporary situation, Capote exploited decadent aesthetics to address the national intolerance that attacked, to borrow Paul Bouget’s phrase to explain the Baudelaire decadent, the social cells less “suited to the labors of communal life” (p. 98).

While inheriting the themes and aesthetics from decadent culture, Capote does not imitate his European and Southern predecessors but critically develops their decadent aesthetics, approximating to “camp” as a parodic style that subverts the sociocultural hierarchy, which traditional decadence, whether secretly or blatantly, often conserved. Some critics have already pointed out the novel’s campy approach to the Southern Gothic narrative convention7. While illustrating that the exploitation of decadence enables the author to playfully deconstruct the tragic narrative of the local literary genre, which often ends up excluding/monsterizing queer-dandy characters, I also argue that Capote assumes the same mischievous but self-critical attitude towards the decadent aesthetics themselves. This article, though extending the genealogy of decadence to this postwar American novel, will simultaneously demonstrate how OVOR reconstructs decadent aesthetics as a non-normative survival strategy through the child protagonist’s unsophisticated but therefore transgressive sensitivity, the vacillating/cross-genre characterization of the decadent dandy, and the parodic adaptation of white dilettantism by the non-white characters; those campy features (self-)critically relativize the toxic claustrophobia/philia and potential authoritarianism of the decadent conventions and philosophy. In fact, as Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp’” defines it as “Dandyism in the age of mass culture” (Sontag [1964] 1999, p. 63)—with a catalogue of campy items that connects the fin de siècle European culture to the postwar consumerist culture—camp can be considered as the legitimate heir to decadence, though camp “dethrone[s] the serious,” never paying dutiful respect even to the precursor (Sontag [1964] 1999, p. 62). In this sense, Capote’s parodic adaptation of decadence embodies the (temporary) completion of decadence and simultaneously its necessary evolution into camp in the Cold War/Pre-Stonewall society.

2. Decadent Aestheticization of/Self-Distancing from the Southern Gothic World

Joel’s adventure in the ruined plantation, Skully’s Landing, is replete with Southern Gothic tropes from the beginning. Soon after he wakes up on the first morning after he arrives at the Landing, Joel is attracted by the landing’s garden, which gives an impression of “a jumbled wreckage”: the chaotic luxuriance of subtropical plants characteristic of the South encroaches on the vestiges of the colonial-style columns; the flamboyant but disorganized “Grass and bush and vine and flower,” which embody the uncontrollable power of Nature and Time, are obscuring even the small remains of the Greek Revival architecture, which once symbolized the excellency of human arts and the glory of the aristocratic Southern culture (p. 38)8. Further descriptions of the garden include more explicitly decadent images: “like a set of fingers, a row of five white fluted columns lent the garden the primitive, haunted look of a lost ruin: Judas vine snaked up their toppling slenderness, and a yellow tabby cat was sharpening its claws against the middle column” (p. 38). The ruined white columns, which are one of the most popular motives of decadent literature and art, is compared to “a set of fingers,” apparently those of the dead, making the thematic combination of decadence and Gothic. By adapting those traditionally Gothic attributes, Capote deliberately tints the Southern Gothic space decadent, foregrounding the theme of decay and the protagonist’s sense of vulnerability.

Gardens and hothouses have been popular motives in decadent and/or Southern Gothic literature. They symbolize not only the desperate struggle of Art against overwhelming Nature and its destined defeat but also the overmaturity/corruption of human culture. In Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (Wilde [1891] 2020), the eponymous protagonist’s fateful and fatal encounter with an amoral dandy, Lord Henry Wotton, takes place in a garden of Basil Hallward, an aestheticist portrait-painter and queer admirer of Dorian; as “[t]he heavy scent of the roses [that] seemed to brood over everything” implies the imminent temptations surrounding the innocent protagonist, a “furry bee” that “creep[s] into the stained trumpet of a Tyrian convolvulus” and makes it “quiver, and then sway[] gently to and fro,” as many scholars have suggested, figures Lord Henry’s homoerotic and miscreant influence on Dorian, who gradually commits various vices including a murder and finally a weird suicide (Wilde [1891] 2020, pp. 23–24). Joris Karl Huysmans’s Against Nature (Huysmans [1884] 1998), another decadent canon, spends a whole chapter on detailing the dilettante protagonist’s collection of rare plants, which culminates in carnivorous plants. Des Esseintes, while alleviating his ennui with the novelties and even believing “the only artists, the real artists, are the horticulturalist,” eventually suffers from a nightmare in which he is raped by a female, deformed-plant-like monster (p. 79). In both cases, horticultural imagery epitomizes the charm and monstrosity of kaleidoscopic human desires, which can ultimately court (self-)destruction.

The Southern Gothic genre has inherited and developed the botanical poetics from fin de siècle decadence by practically representing and, at the same time, symbolically exploiting the subtropical flora of the American South. Faulkner, for instance, metaphorically uses subtropical plants—their sweet but stifling odors, especially—to adumbrate the sociocultural decay of the South9. More recently, Capote’s contemporary queer playwright, Tennessee Williams begins his Southern Gothic play, Suddenly Last Summer (Williams [1958] 1986), set in the 1930s as is OVOR, with the stage directions about the “Victorian Gothic style” mansion of a late queer aristocrat: “The interior is blended with a fantastic garden which is more like a tropical jungle, or forest, in the prehistoric age of giant fern-forests when living creatures had flippers turning to limbs and scales to skin” (Williams [1958] 1986, p. 5). The garden’s chaotic exuberance is particularly represented by the “Venus flytrap” (Williams [1958] 1986, p. 6); the carnivorous plant, which reminds us of the decadent garden of des Esseintes, symbolically foreshadows the sexual depredation and cannibalistic fate of the master/garden designer. The horticultural rhetoric of decadence, which was easily fitted to the American-Southern flora, has helped Southern Gothic writers dramatize the queer-tinted, suffocative ruination of the Southern ancient regime.

Returning to the garden of Skully’s Landing, we can find the similar claustrophobic enclosure, which includes “some plants taller than his head” and “others razor-sharp with thorns,”; “the sultry smell of summer” and “the itchy whirr of bumblebees [that] stung the silence”; “[t]he wall of the house… like a great yellow cliff” and “patches of Virginia creeper” (p. 50). Just as the mansion lord in William’s play, the horticulturist of the garden, Randolph, is a queer machinator who eventually turns out to have contrived to entice and confine the young protagonist in the ruined plantation, as if making him a homoerotic companion in the decadent denouement of the noble family. Capote, with the conventional depiction of the ferocious garden, demonstrates his legitimate succession to the literary legacy of decadence and Southern Gothic, almost blatantly. This explicit mannerism, while suggesting degeneracy both in the society and individuals as the central theme of the book, makes a parodic—campy—distance from it for the reader.

Despite those suffocating attributes of the decadent/Southern Gothic garden, Joel does not just fear or mourn the decay of the Southern history and society symbolized in the garden but vaguely notices the garden designer’s intention to aestheticize the defeat of the human art/civilization by Nature: “It was not a result of simple neglect, this tangled oblong area, but rather the outcome, it appeared, of someone having, in a riotous moment, scattered about it a wild assortment of seed”: in short, the imagined designer deliberately created the chaos (p. 38). The artificial disorder of the garden even reminds him of the “ancient history class at school [where he] had to draw pictures of some pillars like those” (p. 38), which, for instance, recalls the American painter Thomas Cole’s famous series of works that thematize the ruins of Greece and Rome. While the garden and the ruins are the honorable and touching symbol of the rise and fall of the family—and of the Southern aristocracy itself—for Amy, the Southern mistress still obsessed with the glorious past, for the young protagonist, they are instead equal to artworks to appreciate. Here, Joel’s artistic association with the garden does not necessarily mean he has a serious and passionate appreciation of the Southern decadence. Absentmindedly hearing Amy tell the family’s history, Joel “tri[es] to picture the music room … but the willows were willows and the goldenrod goldenrod and the dancers dead and lost. The yellow tabby slunk through the lilac into tall, concealing grass, and the garden was glazed and secret and still” (p. 39). Even with his artistic sense that grasps the designer’s decadent intention, Joel fails to extract any significant narrative from the ruins, just materialistically recognizing the decay before his eyes. Instead, he seems to identify himself with the nonchalant tabby cat. Through Joel’s aesthetic metacognition and simple indifference, Capote stresses the protagonist’s emotional distance from the historically loaded time and space of the Southern plantation.

The metacognitive aestheticization of and indifference to the surrounding, especially uncomfortable environment, have always been a significant component of the decadent culture, or, more specifically, the core feature of Baudelairean dandyism, which has, as many scholars have agreed, greatly contributed to the philosophical theorization of decadence. In The Painter of Modern Life, Baudelaire defines two similar but subtly different character types that appear “above all in periods of transition”: the flâneur—or the man of the world—and the dandy. According to Baudelaire, both character types observe the “turmoil of human freedom” in modern society with a psychological distance (Baudelaire [1863] 1995, p. 10). The flâneur is a “passionate spectator” or “independent, passionate, impartial natures” who love “[t]o be away from and yet to feel oneself everywhere at home; to see the world, to at the centre of the world, and yet to remain hidden from the world” (p. 9). The dandy is, on the other hand, someone who, despite his “quintessence of character and subtle understanding of the entire moral of mechanism of this world,” is “blasé” and “aspires to insensitivity” (p. 9). David Weir (2018) summarizes the affinity of those two characters types and the decadent:

Both of the character types … are, like the decadent, creatures of modern urban society. Like the flâneur, the decadent observes but does not participate in modern life, possibly taking some pleasure in what he sees, but not much. Decadents are more like dandies, especially in their cultivation of aristocratic tastes and in their revulsion over the rise of democracy and the emergence of mass society.

(p. 6)

When retrospectively analyzed, the Baudelairean flâneur magnifies the decadent’s artistic curiosity without moral restriction while dandyism their aristocratic antagonism towards modernization. Whether positively or negatively reacting to sociocultural turmoil, both character types have psychological self-distancing in their nature, which also constitutes the decadent attitude toward the world.

Unlike the Baudelairean flâneur and dandy, Joel does not experience modern urban society, but the rural Southern plantation isolated from the outer community. The generic conventions and traditions of the Southern Gothic being considered, nevertheless, the young hero here faces the remnant of the American version of the sociocultural turmoil that exposes the dark sides not only of the modernized present but of the nostalgic past, from which he keeps emotional distance with dandiacal objectification. In fact, Joel shows his potential as a decadent dandy/flâneur from the novel’s beginning, where he meets a conservative truck driver named Radclif. After being reproved by the manly driver for using the maternal family name instead of the paternal one and tormented in the dream by the troubles and loneliness he has experienced at the opening of his father-seeking journey, Joel’s attention wanders to miscellaneous things in Radclif’s truck:

“You certainly have a lot of junk,” he said, probing around the shelf, which was littered with a collection of yellowed newspapers, a slashed inner tube, greasy tools, an air pump, a flashlight and… A pistol. Alongside the pistol was an open carton of ammunition; bullets the bright copper of fresh pennies. He was tempted to take a whole handful, but ended by artfully dropping just one into his breast pocket.

(pp. 11–12)

Joel’s childlike curiosity toward mysterious odds and ends, if temporarily, liberates him from the repressive atmosphere that the patronizing driver has created, making the homosocial/homophobic closet into a treasure box. “Joel loved any kind of souvenir, and it was his nature to keep and catalogue trifles” (pp. 34–35). Sadly leaving behind his “grand collections” composed of childish odds and ends like “magazine photos and foreign coins, books and no-two-alike rocks, and a wonderful conglomeration he’d labeled simply Miscellany” (p. 35) in New Orleans, Joel now resumes his collecting, putting the bullet and one of “the nice bluejay feathers,” with which his queer cousin makes a stuffed-specimen-like artwork (p. 68), in a “lacquered box” (p. 35). Joel’s random, childlike desire for miscellany dilutes his interest in the phallic symbol. His unorganized curiosity reminds us of the Baudelairean flâneur or artist of the modern life with “this deep and joyful curiosity [only by which] we may explain the fixed and animally ecstatic gaze of a child confronted with something new, whatever it be” (Baudelaire [1863] 1995, p. 8). Because of this unbounded curiosity, according to Baudelaire, the artist—the flâneur or the decadent dandy—“lives very little, if at all, in the world of morals and politics” (p. 7). Although Joel is still in his actual childhood with its proper vulnerability instead of “childhood recovered” of the dandy (Baudelaire [1863] 1995, p. 8), his aesthetic, if immature, curiosity helps to detach him from the intolerant gender norms of the Southern society.

At the same time, Joel’s boyish but still unfixed gender sensibility unintentionally juxtaposes blatant masculinity embodied by the bullet metonymically attributed to the hyper-patriarchal truck driver and male effeminacy hinted by the feather associated with the queer cousin. The author satirically exaggerates the gender stereotypes through the explicit attributes and subverts the distinction between them through the young protagonist’s half-disciplined gender perspective, while, as it were, vulgarizing this gender-deconstructive operation itself with the appearance of childish pleasure and fantasy. Here, Capote’s rhetoric is barely but significantly stepping out of that of the traditional decadent dandyism, which, despite its idealization of childlike curiosity, highly values or even presupposes erudite pedantry and analytical discernment for its cultural defiance; rather, the episodes of Joel’s collections foreshadow the evolution of Capote’s literary style from decadence into camp. Mallan and McGillis (2005), for instance, as pointing out similarities between camp sensibility and that of children such as artificial exaggeration, role-playing performativity, in-between border status, and unsophistication, insist on children’s potential as a camp performer and audience (p. 9). In fact, Joel, while demonstrating his nature as a camp audience through his collections, also campily performs machismo later in the garden by pretending to be a soldier who, with “his machine gun,” “charged toward the five broken porch columns” (p. 52). Joel’s campy performance here elicits the reader’s mischievous suspicion against the natural authenticity of such clichéd masculinity and Joel’s potential growth into it. Though in the claustrophobic mood of the Southern Gothic suggesting the sociocultural terrors Joel confronts, Capote not only borrows the Baudelairean origin of the decadent dandy/flâneur but also develops it into camp aesthetics to give him a means to detach himself from—or even to mock—the heteronormative mores that the mainstream cultures of the modernized Europe, the patriarchal American South, and the conservative Cold War America share.

Back in the first garden scene, the cool tabby cat, which later turns out to be Jesus Fever’s pet, foregrounds the theme of self-distancing besides Joel’s artistic objectification of the garden’s decadent intensity; if Randolph’s nostalgic aesthetic mentioned by Amy hints at Joel’s dilettante potential, the aloofness of the yellow tabby cat, which is “sharpening its claws against the middle column” regardless of the architecture’s symbolical significance, vicariously embodies his dandiacal insensitivity (p. 38). In the literary tradition of decadent dandyism, as Lynette C. Black (1988–1989)points out, cats often symbolize dandyism, especially stressing aloofness as the core feature of the Baudelairean dandy (p. 186). As if sympathizing with Joel’s apathy that feels in the garden “the willows were willows and the goldenrod and the dancers dead and lost,” the cat “slunk through the lilac into tall, concealing grass” (p. 39), ignoring the permeated symbolism in the decayed atmosphere. In contrast to the Gothic garden’s suffocating immobility, the tabby cat’s airy steps embody nonchalant mobility. Even after this scene, the tabby cat often appears in somber scenes, always relativizing their seriousness. When Joel faces his loneliness in the landing while writing a letter to his friend Sammy, he looks at the garden as if it symbolizes the mysterious threat of his current environment. All Joel finds in the garden looks “stagnant, painted,” giving no positive hints for his letter and even pulling his though out of “sensible order” (p. 75); even in this entrapped situation, the tabby yellow cat, which leisurely parades in the garden, is an “exception.” Here, as in Joel’s first discovery of it, the cat makes a pinhole in the grave scenery. Though not lifting the boy’s melancholic heart, it at least prevents the reader’s full immersion in the intense mood of typical Southern Gothic.

While revitalizing the decadent dandyism of the fin de siècle Europe in the Southern Gothic venue, nevertheless, the cat lightens its dandiacal snobbishness in some ways. For instance, unlike Edgar Allan Poe’s iconic black cat, which has continually enhanced the Gothic conceptualization of the cat, Capote’s cat is “yellow” and “tabby”; while the former feature reminds us of the fin de siècle decadent culture, the latter suggests the cat’s pedigree commonness and even “miscegenation,” approaching to the unsophisticatedness and in-betweenness of camp. Such a symbolic impression is enhanced by the fact that the cat is the Black servant’s pet and can freely cross the border between the white residents’ mansion and the Black servants’ cabin through the chaotic garden. In contrast to the Baudelairean dandy, who was bounded by their privileged positions and tastes, this unrestricted pet, even with its proud aloofness, subverts the class and racial segregation, which often composes the basic terrors of traditional and Southern Gothic settings and situations. As if guided by the cat, Joel himself, while developing his aesthetic pseudo-apprenticeship to the aristocratic decadent master Randolph, casually and frequently visits the Fever family’s cabin and establishes a close relationship with Zoo. In this sense, the tabby cat’s mobility campily connotes a metaphorical vent that can puncture the class and racial exclusivity of the traditional decadence. Capote here again intimates his campy intention to liberate the decadent philosophy and method from the self-repressive conventions by adding the feline noise in the aestheticized microcosmos of the Southern Gothic world.

3. Sentimental Decadence of the Dilettante Master-Apprentice Relationship

As we saw in Capote’s observation that “his nature [is] to keep and catalogue trifles,” Joel shows his potential for dandiacal/flâneur aestheticism or dilettantism, which profoundly affects his inner world. Besides his collections of junk in the lacquered box as his miniature paradis artificial, Joel, not having any physical room to decorate, has his imaginary space called “the far-away room,” where his imaginary friends always welcome him whenever he feels intense stress or loneliness in the real world. When Randolph and Amy intentionally ignore his question about where and when he can see his father, Joel, who “went all hollow inside,” “tried with all his might to find the far-away room” with imaginary friends, which he had difficulty finding in “the last year” when he was safely living with Aunt Ellen and playing with Sammy (p. 66). Here, Joel’s revisiting of his “other room” indicates his current loneliness and serious longing for love and protection above all; at the same time, his mental strategy of indulging himself in his imaginary world to distance himself from the stressful reality gives us an early sign of his decadent dilettantism.

Joel’s immature aestheticism and unstable (gender-)identity indicate his need for a mentor, especially when his father, an Oedipal role model, is first missing and then turns out to be bedridden. Fortunately for him, as the novel’s title, Other Voices, Other Rooms, suggests with its plural form, the young protagonist is not the only one who has an aesthetic propensity to build one’s own paradis artificial: Randolph, as a dilettante and queer, from his first appearance on the stage takes a role of a self-confident, masterful decadent philosopher who guides Joel, if in a paradoxical or even amoral way. While emotionally caring for his younger relative through gentle words of guardianship, Randolph often casts what William Todd Schultz calls “paradoxical Wildean epigrams,” as if trying to adapt the young apprentice to his ironical manner (Schultz 2011, p. 44): “All children are morbid: it’s their one saving grace”; “Have you never heard what the wise men say? All of the future exists in the past” (pp. 62, 71). Though perplexing Joel with his esoteric philosophy, he seductively praises him for his youthful beauty and almost self-conceited wit to cite a poem. Here, Randolph is already constructing a pedagogic, aesthetic, and homoerotic relationship with Joel, playing both an amoral teacher of decadent philosophy like Lord Henry and an aesthetic admirer like Basil Hallward in Wilde’s Dorian Gray (Wilde [1891] 2020).

Their aesthetic-pedagogic relationship takes a clear shape in chapter eight, when Joel, to serve as a model for his painting, first enters the boudoir of Randolph, who shows off his decadence through his collections and reminiscences. Similarly to the garden’s elaborated chaos, his sanctum conveys its owner’s aesthetic penchant for disordered beauty: the room is full of gorgeous furniture and artworks such as “carved tables, velvet chairs, candelabras, a German music box, books and paintings,” which make “the barren space in it amounted to no more than one foot”; the series of Japanese postcards, along with his often-worn kimono, remind us of the fin-de-siècle trend of Japonisme among European dandies; while such description of the aesthetic surface of the room, along with Randolph’s snobbish behaviors, indicates his nostalgic taste for European aestheticism, the narrator simultaneously implies the chaotic, dark, and grotesque tastes in his collections: despite, or because of, the excessive abundance of well-designed furniture and artistic miscellanies, the room gives a disordered impression “as if the objects in a flood had floated through the windows and sunk here” (p. 111). This artificial chaos winks to the famous dilettante room of Robert de Montesquiou, who “produces spatial confusion, encouraging misreading of the boundaries and dimensions of his rooms. Through the carefully considered placement of mirrors, he creates mises en abîme” (Delille 2021, p. 81). The “liver-shaped” desk subliminally prepares the reader for “internal” grotesques, which is more explicitly thematized by antique dolls displayed on the desk; the dolls, contrasted to their external flamboyance of the fancy clothes, exposes their victimization through amputated limbs and heads or intestines protruding open the wounds (p. 111). Randolph’s room’s gorgeous mixture of elegance and chaos embodies what Len Gutkin calls “dandiacal interpenetration” of aestheticism and decadence (Gutkin 2020, p. 3), which enables the dandy to appreciate and simultaneously keep distance from the beautiful surface and the decaying depth.

For fin de siècle decadent dandies, making a decorative private space with a collection of miscellaneous objets d’art and books was an essential activity to express their individuality and resist normalizing modernity. By analyzing essays and real chambers of Victorian dandies, Jessica Gossling argues that “the principles of decadent interior decoration are anti-bourgeois and à rebours, celebrating curated junk that modifies market values and changes the significance of certain objects. Decadent spaces are, in essence, narcissistic dream-homes that express the perverse and contradictory idiosyncrasies of their occupants (Gossling 2020, p. 456). Matthew Potolsky also argues that decadent collections, that are, “idiosyncratic assemblages … [of] artists, works, and objects that have little more in common than their opposition to some norm,” debunk the arbitrariness of national canons (Potolsky 2012, pp. 70–71). By flamboyantly but grotesquely decorating his room with the mixture of European aristocratic taste and Asian exoticism, Randolph imitates the fin de siècle decadents to make what Regenia Gagnier (2000) calls “a tiny, safe space” for the dissident individualist (p. 148).

Such dissident dilettantism is also significant for those with gender-bending tastes or queer sexuality. Rita Felski (1995) insists that the fin-de-siècle literary avant-garde’s dilettantism was a part of their “key stratagem” to “[refuse] traditional models of masculinity” (p. 91). Besides its expression of queer, individualist sensitivity and aestheticism, decadent dilettantism sometimes becomes the venue for dandies to construct queer relationships or even communities through the shared activities of aesthetic appreciation or education. By exploring the fin de siècle French aesthetes’ circle whose members mutually appreciated each other’s collections or domestic interiors, Damien Delille suggests the homoerotic potential of this aesthetic community (p. 79). For instance, Montesquiou, superimposing his gender ambiguity on “the female domain of japonisme” and stressing the “space of intimacy associated with femininity,” seductively expressed “his queerest and most intimate feeling, far from the established gender norms of his time” by sharing with his fellow dilettantes his passion towards interior design and collections of objets d’art and sometimes by educating his young apprentices (Delille 2021, pp. 80, 82, 91).

Following this aesthetic tradition of queer dilettantism, the intimacy between Joel and Randolph develops through the former’s novice-like curiosity about the master dilettante’s artistic activities and collections and the latter’s pedagogical approaches to the young apprentice. His first encounter with Randolph is, for instance, preceded by his curious observation of Randolph’s cabinet of collections:

Joel had inspected the contents of this cabinet before supper [where he first meets Randolph], and had yearned to have as his own such treasures as a jolly Buddha with a fat jade belly, a two-headed china crocodile, the program of a Richmond ball dated 1862 and autographed by Robert E. Lee, a tiny wax Indian in full war regalia, and several plush-framed daintily painted miniatures of virile dandies with villainous mustaches.

(pp. 69–70)

As if validating his aptitude for artistic education, Joel even recites a poem of Keats, which pleases the master, who says, “A charming boy, little Joel, Dear Joel… Try to be happy here, try a little to like me, will you?”; Joel, touching Randolph’s hand, replies, “I like you already” (p. 69). Joel’s immature aesthetic curiosity and pride expedite his entrance into Randolph’s seductive space of queer intimacy. On the other hand, Randolph exploits the young apprentice’s passion for art by communicating with him almost always through artistic activities. Recalling his artistic apprenticeship in Europe, Randolph talks about his episode with a boy model, Kurt, whose portrait he drew to look “more aged than Jesus Fever [the old servant of the landing]”: “whereas in reality his eyes were childhood blue, the eyes I saw were bleary and lost. And what I saw was indeed the truth, for little Kurt, that was his name, turned out to be a perfect horror, and tried twice to murder me… Exhibiting both times, I must say, admirable ingenuity”; Randolph uses this episode as an example of his peculiar style as an artist who “never paint so much what I see as what I think” (p. 110). His symbolist or impressionist method and episode, while alluding to the fin de siècle artist schools and also parodying the central plot of Dorian Gray that features the protagonist’s portrait reflecting his internal decay, imitate the Paterian rhetoric that reveals the concealed queer truth—often related to non-normative gender and sexuality—of/through artworks: with this catalytic anecdote, the amateur painter metonymically brings the relationship between Joel and himself close to that of Dorian and Basil while, as a decadent philosopher eliciting the apprentice’s hidden dark side, resembling Lord Henry. By sharing the homoerotically seductive atmosphere through aesthetic pedagogy, Capote’s dilettante dandy joins the genealogy of canonical decadents such as one finds in Walter Pater’s The Renaissance, Huysmans’s Against Nature, and Wilde’s Dorian Gray, all of which address the homoerotic sensitivities and relationships in the aesthetic closet of art criticism and education.

Nevertheless, those decadent works, though partly promoting non-normative communications, intimacies, and communities happening in queer relationships, do not recklessly praise the decadent pedagogy but rather ironically criticize its negative aspects. Potolsky, on the premise that “one finds images, concepts, and practices of erotic and aesthetic education everywhere in the works of decadent writers” and that “[m]aking reception a means of production, [decadent texts] celebrate imitation, appreciation, and creative appropriation rather than power, authority, and the sovereignty of knowledge” (Potolsky 2012, pp. 107–8), simultaneously demonstrates those decadents’ ironical criticism of the esoteric pedagogy’s endless reproduction of the monomaniac teacher’s controlling influence on the student and the student’s blind acceptance of it, which, as the metaphor of the late Victorian nationalist project of the public school that “shapes the individual and the striving nation alike,” “produces imitations rather than individuals” (pp. 105, 124).

Echoing the ambivalence of the fin de siècle pedagogy of decadence, Randolph, though accommodating the intimate closet for Joel and himself through the pedagogical relationship, betrays the problematic aspects of the decadent education. While talking about his past in Europe, Randolph, though boasting about his artistic training to “cop[y] so many Masters,” mocks his own unproductivity as an artist, metaphorically associating it to his biological-unproductivity as a gay man: “still, when it came to something of my own, I went quite dead, and it was as though I had no personal perception, no interior life whatever: I was like the wind-flower whose pollen will not mate at all” (p. 115). Randolph’s artistic dilettantism is here connected not only to his non-normative gender through his “spending much of his time in an interior, private space codified as feminine rather than in the public sphere of work and politics” but also to his homosexuality through his aesthetic sterility as a second-rate artist who can produce nothing but imitation (Felski 1995, p. 95). The metaphorical parallelism of artistic unoriginality and biological unproductivity is often foregrounded when Randolph self-deprecatingly talks about his artworks. As for his decorated room, for instance, he, despite its seeming idiosyncrasy, mocks his creation as “only a joke played on myself by myself,” emphasizing the emptiness of the “gaudy grave”—and its creator himself:

“[…] There is no daytime in this room, nor night; the seasons are changeless here, and the years, and when I die, if indeed I haven’t already, then let me be dead drunk and curled, as in my mother’s womb, in the warm blood of darkness. Wouldn’t that be an ironic finale for one who, deep in his goddamned soul, sought the sweetly clean-limbed life? bread and water, a simple roof to share with some beloved, nothing more.” … “Inasmuch as I was born dead, how ironic that I should die at all; yes, born dead, literally […]”

(p. 112)

Here, the self-derisive dilettante admits that his paradis artificial is neither a prolific atelier nor a bedchamber where he creates his figurative or literal offspring but a substitute for the maternal womb that his thanatotic escapism had to make. While expressing his self-distancing from and tacit resistance against mainstream values, Randolph’s aesthetic safe space connotates his sterility, inertia, and destrudo.

In contrast to the fin de siècle decadent teachers who “seek to impose their will on [their students], to fashion them … into imitations of their own ideals” (Potolsky 2012, p. 108), however, its post-Wilde’s trial/Pre-stonewall counterpart voluntarily exposes his infertility and vulnerability to the young protagonist, deviating from the conventional narrative of decadent pedagogy. Talking about the Thanatotic intention of his room’s design, Randolph asks Joel: “the midwife was perverse enough to slap me into life. Or did she? … Answer me: did she?”; responding to Joel’s puzzlement about the master’s death drive, Randolph gives an esoteric prophecy, which seems to forecast the apprentice’s aesthetic/perceptive growth and loss of innocence in the future:

“Never mind,” said Randolph, “all difficult music must be heard more than once. And if what I tell you now sounds senseless, it will in retrospect seem far too clear; and when this happens, when those flowers in your eyes wither, irrecoverable as they are, why, though no tears helped dissolve my own cocoon, I shall weep a little for you.”

(p. 112)

Using the tropes of musical dilettantism in a mentorial tone, Randolph predicts the young apprentice’s prospective maturity/decadence, which helps him to understand the master’s Thanatotic pathos, which, as we later know from his past story of unrequited love and loneliness, roots in his non-normative sexuality. Tyson Pugh (1998) argues that “Randolph’s many didactic discourses about love certainly teach Joel how to deal with the emotions he is experiencing at this time of his maturation” (p. 678). If, as suggested by his lost lovers’ photograph in the center of the room, his frustration in queer love lies in the core of his solitude, Randolph, by forecasting Joel’s future understanding of his “difficult music,” self-projectingly affiliates the young protagonist into the queer fellowship, not only based on the intimate pleasure of sharing decadent aesthetics and activities but also on the prophetic pathos that foresees the young apprentice’s future reproduction of pain and loneliness, which saturate in the somber interior of his room. Here, Randolph’s self-deprecating/self-pitying exposure of vulnerability and his projection of it on Joel’s future seem to adumbrate the negative experience of the queer in the antagonistic environments of the conservative South and figuratively of the Pre-Stonewall America, in which non-normative gender and sexuality can easily result in loneliness, low self-esteem, and persecution.

Starting by mentioning the homoerotic intimacy sensed by the mirroring epistemology and at the same time cautiously stressing women’s inability to fully understand the queer male anxiety—“That [masculine] personality which, despite legend, can only be most sensitively appreciated by its own kind” (p. 118)—Randolph, as if trying to fraternize with Joel again by paradoxically reiterating their shared isolation as the male queer, tells the story of his unrequited love for a Mexican boxer, Pepe Alvarez:

It was different, this love of mine for Pepe, more intense than anything I felt for Dolores, and lonelier. But we are alone, darling child, terribly, isolated each from the other; so fierce is the world’s ridicule we cannot speak or show our tenderness; for us, death is stronger than life, it pulls like a wind through the dark, all our cries burlesqued in joyless laughter; and with the garbage of loneliness stuffed down us until our guts burst bleeding green, we go screaming round the world, dying in our rented rooms, nightmare hotels, eternal homes of the transient heart.

(p. 119)

Because of his story’s evident thematization of homosexual love, Randolph’s statement about “his own kinds’” existential despair now obviously indicates the sociocultural ostracism of queer people and the lack of their community in the pre-Stonewall American society, involving Joel in it with the appellative combination of “darling child” and “we/our/us.” Randolph here re-uses aesthetic imageries related to decadence and dilettantism, demystifying the image of the transcendent aristocratic dandy: the paradis artificial has become shabby temporary hideouts of the queer fugitive—“rented rooms, nightmare hotels”—which sorrowfully echo with the novel’s title; the dilettante’s cosmopolitanism degenerates into the “eternal” exile of “the transient heart”; the gluttonous eating of the hedonist, which is one of the most popular images of the decadence of the Roman Empire, is replaced by the green-blooded flesh-bag bursting with “the garbage of loneliness”; the amoral revelry of decadents turns out to be painful “cries burlesqued in joyless laughter.” Here, Randolph self-pityingly reconstructs his self-image as a decadent dandy into a bleeding gay wanderer persecuted by the homophobic society. Although his story began like a didactic, Bildungsroman-like recollection of his artistic apprenticeship in Europe with the promised maturation into a critical modernist philosopher, or as the other side of the same coin, the corruption into an amoral villain, Randolph in the love-hate story has rapidly turned into a miserable victim of the unrequited queer love, still struggling with the trauma.

Now, the teacher’s decadently ornate room and Joel’s “other room,” which gives imaginary refuge to the effeminate orphan, overlap each other as the symbol of/shelter from their vulnerability and melancholy in the heteronormative society. Phillip G. Hadlock asserts the melancholic character of the Baudelairean dandy, who self-questions but simultaneously strives to recover in vain the masculine-self wounded in phallic culture: “[Baudelaire’s dandy] is … a signifier which seeks, through its melancholia, the return of the masculine self. And the dandy’s revolt may best be construed as an inexpressible opposition to the loss of the masculine self to phallic culture” (p. 59). If, as Hadlock suggests, the Baudelairean dandy in the Pre-Wilde’s trials society, where, according to Michel Foucault and following queer historians, homosexuality was not generally established as a sexual identity yet10, obliquely “calls into question the conditions of phallocentric law” in their extravagance in writing and clothing (Hadlock 2001–2002, p. 66), Capote’s sentimental decadence, inheriting the melancholic dandyism of fin de siècle decadence and at the same time reflecting the Pre-Stonewall queer’s predicament, stigmatization, and loneliness, exposes the queer dandy’s embellished but gaping wounds, which his antique dolls with “open wounds” symbolize and his own past demonstrates.

Despite the concreteness of Randolph’s confession, which adequately explains his sexuality and Mr Sansom’s bedridden state—he was shot by Randolph, who became mentally unstable after Pepe and Dolores eloped—Joel feels “confused because the story had been like a movie with neither plot nor motive.” To his confusion, Randolph answers, “But, my dear, so few things are fulfilled: what are most lives but a series of incompleted episodes?” (p. 123). Randolph’s agnosticism encourages his apprentice and the reader to embrace those “incompleted episodes” of his past as they are. Right after finishing his narrative, Randolph cannot help making a direct piteous entreaty for compassion, with which Joel responds with a pitiful affirmation: “Then, in a voice as urgent as the bell, [Randolph] added: ‘And please, tell me what I want to hear.’ Joel remembered. ‘Everything,’ he said gently, ‘everything is going to be all right’” (p. 124). Unlike his esoteric rhetoric so far, the decadent master here becomes so surprisingly frank that he asks the young protagonist for directly warm words of consolation, if not for the substitutional homosexual relationship. This makes a stark contrast to what Eve Sedgwick (1990) calls the “modernist abstraction” of homosexual themes, most explicitly exemplified by Wilde’s Dorian Gray (Wilde [1891] 2020). According to Sedgwick, Wilde’s “antinarrative project,” with its “modernist abstraction” of the characters’ queer desire, gives the reader the narrative with the sense of conclusion “explained in terms of either the Theme of the Double—‘The Divided Self’—or else the Problem of Mimesis—‘Life and Art’” without detailing the realistic development of homosexual relationships in the plot (pp. 166, 161). Unlike Basil, whose modernist stoicism, in compensation for the exemption from engaging “a prurient vulgarity associated with figuration [of homosexuality]” (Sedgwick 1990, p. 166), forbids him to beg Dorian for empathetic intimacy, Randolph, by re-confronting and exposing his crude past and loneliness as a forlorn queer person without abstraction, allows himself to ask Joel for compassion and even arouse the reader’s empathy11. Pugh insists on the novel’s sentimentalization of the Southern gothic narrative and its sympathy for queer characters: “Capote merges [the gothic and the sentimental] … both to create a hybrid style of gothic sentimentalism in which gothic terror and sentimental pathos combine to solicit the reader’s sympathy for the characters” (Pugh 1998, p. 664). We could argue that this sentimental manipulation of characters partly exemplifies what Sedgwick calls “Postmodernism …, the strenuous rematch between the reigning champ, modernist abstraction, and the deposed challenger, figuration, [that] would … necessarily have kitsch and sentimentality as its main spaces of contestation” (pp. 166–67, italics original), or more precisely, the ongoing transition from modernism to Pre-Stonewall postmodernism, where the image of the decadent/dandy/dilettante vacillates among the villainous seducer, the tragic narcissist philosopher, and the ostracized queer.

We should note that the sympathetic dramatization of Randolph’s past is achieved by, rather than the realistic and objective depiction of the queer man’s quotidian sufferings in the homophobic society, the parodic adaptation of a typical narrative of melodrama—a paradigmatic story of the tragic heroine who keeps loving an unfaithful lover even after being abandoned—with a gender-bending twist. Even in the story’s climax that Pepe, without noticing, courts and dances with Randolph in disguise as a countess, Randolph as the narrator calls himself/the protagonist of the story “sly Cinderella,” queerly citing another story archetype. In this sense, the story is told with, as it were, doubled camp—the drag within the story and the contorted adaptation of narrative clichés—which consequently relativizes the dehumanizing/Gothic and abstracting/modernist narratives around Randolph.

In this transition from Gothic, via modernism, to postmodernism, the educational relationship of dilettantism in OVOR has to hermeneutically change, too. On the Gothic backdrop of the temptation/kidnap plot prepared in Part I, in which the decadent villain, while critically and aesthetically educating the young protagonist, confines him in the gloomy landing, the early part of Randolph’s preaching in the eighth chapter adapts the modernist/narcissist abstraction of homoeroticism by repeatedly emphasizing the existential isolation/narcissism of his kinds without mentioning homosexuality:

“They can romanticize us so, mirrors, and that is their secret: what a subtle torture it would be to destroy all the mirrors in the world: where then could we look for reassurance of our identities? I tell you, my dear, Narcissus was no egotist… He was merely another of us who, in our unshatterable isolation, recognized, on seeing his reflection, the one beautiful comrade, the only inseparable love… Poor Narcissus, possibly the only human who was ever honest on this point.”

(p. 113)

However, the specific narrative of his unrequited homosexual love that resists the didactic reduction exposes the master’s vulnerability, enabling him to beg the apprentice for caring empathy. Through this modal mutation of the pedagogical relationship, Capote reconstructs the decadent narrative around queerness from the homophobic terrorization/abstraction of temptation-narcissism to the sympathetic sentimentalization of empathy-loneliness.

4. Campy Democratization/Reconstruction of Decadence

Even though the sentimentalized neo-decadence helps Joel and Randolph construct the queer intimate space, as some scholars have argued, the claustrophobic—or claustrophilic—closet of their relationship can result in reproducing some forms of authoritarian control or hierarchy, potentially including pedophilic abuse12. Joseph Valente points out how Randolph’s “stylistic features associated with modern homosexual subcultures (Wildean wit and paradox, flamboyant aestheticism, camp)” eventually fails to “rise … to the queer dignity of the anti-normative” and result in the reproduction of norms, that is, “the fabric of a lifestyle no less routine for being sometimes outrageous—symptoms at bottom of the grand obsession which he would resolutely draw our protagonist” (Valente 2013, pp. 529, 543). The authoritarian re-normalization of the decadent teacher-student relationship resembles the self-contradictory impasse that fin de siècle decadents committed and simultaneously warned about. In fact, fin de siècle decadent novels, even with the aesthetic admiration of dissident forms of philosophy, lifestyle, and relationship against the mainstream, normative culture, often caution the reader about their moral decay or reproduction of authoritarianism, usually through the villainization of decadent-dandy characters and their tragic downfalls: decadent literature has always contained the self-ambivalence that praises and at the same time upbraids amoral aestheticists13. Capote, well understanding the narrative convention of the decadent canon, deliberately avoids the blind admiration of decadent dandyism or dilettantism, though his approach is not necessarily traditional. OVOR’s polyphonic plot structure, though centering on Joel’s relationship with Randolph, concentrically expands to the protagonist’s encounters and communications with other minority characters, demonstrating Capote’s critical view on the exclusive and privileged microcosmos of white decadence. As we examine in this section, Capote deconstructs or rather reconstructs the decadent strategy, mainly through the Black characters’ parodic adaptation of decadent aestheticism.

Notwithstanding early critics’ accusation of the novel’s anti-realism, OVOR critically explores the hardship of Black people in Skully’s Landing, especially through the female Black servant character Zoo (Missouri) Fever. She becomes a friend and mother-like figure for Joel, soothing his loneliness with her often jovial and caring intimacy; given these maternal features, nevertheless, she also confesses her traumatic past—her husband’s violence—that symbolizes the violence saturating her fellows’ community and their vulnerability, desperately wishing for escaping the South. Even when she puts it into force when her grandfather dies, her attempt soon collapses when she is raped by a group of white and Black scoundrels. Knowing her departure, the white mistress, without understanding her traumatic pain and profound longing for freedom and safety, openly curses her for her ingratitude, saying, “Damn Missouri! … Niggers!” (p. 135). Besides such direct violence and antagonism, the black bodies of both sexes are incessantly exposed to the racist and sexual aestheticization/objectification by the white male dilettantes. For instance, Gary Richards thematically associates Randolph’s “ongoing penchant for hypermasculine, often nonwhite men” including Keg to his collection of the images and miniatures of “swarthy masculine men” (Richards 2005, pp. 33–34). Randolph, just like nineteenth-century Victorian aestheticists who fetishized the “exotic” beauty of non-white people, aesthetically objectifies his black servants as though they are a part of his collections. Such racist stereotyping/aesthetic objectification of the Black body is partly shared by the young protagonist. From their first meeting, Zoo’s “[t]all, powerful, barefoot, graceful, soundless” body “like a supple black cat” with a “freak, human giraffe” neck appears before Joel as an exotic figure who stimulates his early aesthetic curiosity (p. 43). From Joel’s perspective, she is endowed with almost self-contradicting physical features of wildness and elegance, which some critics like Thomas Fahy and Liu Yen-Lian have suggested as a racist stereotype (Fahy 2014, p. 51; Liu 2021, p. 277).

However, Zoo, as if ironically practicing the feline nonchalance of “a supple black cat,” ignores the white dilettantes’ objectifying gazes (p. 43). When Randolph, to appreciate the novel combination of exoticism and traditional fanciness, gives her a delicately designed silver compact, which attracts Joel’s budding dilettantism, Zoo puts common snuff powder in it; Joel gets dumbfounded by the mismatch, reasoning, “So elegant a case … was never meant for ordinary snuff, but rare golden powders, precious witch position, love sand” (p. 48). Not noticing Joel’s surprise, Zoo indifferently explains her pragmatism: “‘I usta been usin it for cheek-red,’… ‘But seein as I don’t go over to Noon City no more (ain’t been in two years), I reckoned it’d do to keep my Happy Dip good ’n dry’” (p. 49). While Zoo’s self-alienation from aesthetic/cosmetic products demonstrates her physical and financial dependency on or even entrapment to the plantation, which makes a stark contrast to Randolph’s lavish seclusion, her quotidian self-pleasure and practicality symbolized by “Happy Dip” deviate from the white dilettantes’ aesthetic expectation and tacitly resist their racist objectification of her, even, if slightly, disturbing the master’s esoteric connection to the apprentice. Such unintentional interruption to their pedagogical relationship happens again when Joel asks her about Alcibiades, one of the most popular historical figures in decadent culture. Probably to praise Joel’s beauty and to secretly insinuate the homoerotic potential between their relationship, Randolph compares the young protagonist to this ancient Greek politician and general famous as a young, hedonistic apprentice and lover of Socrates. As he did in the painting sequence, Randolph here again schemes to construct the intimate educational/homoerotic/pederastic connection to Joel by alluding to the famous example of homoerotic relationships in Greek history. Being asked by Joel about the ancient Greek queer, however, Zoo, without any knowledge of ancient Greek culture, misinterprets Alcibiades as a local choir boy, Alicaster Jones, who “[l]ooks like a white angel, so pretty he got the preacher and all kinda mens and ladies lovin him up” (p. 129). As Pugh (2016) observes, Zoo, while nullifying the dilettante context of referencing to the queer Greek icon but “broach[ing] the possibility of homoerotic attraction,” consequently approves Joel’s gender-transcendent charm in analogy with the beautiful local boy (p. 58). In a sense, Zoo unintentionally steals Randolph’s pedagogical strategy of sharing queer intimacy and opens it to the quotidian common space. Overall, these attributes of aestheticized/fetishized gender, such as the exotically sexualized Black body, the delicate compact enhancing feminine elegance, and the name of a historic figure of homoerotic beauty, bear campy, deconstructive performativity between the white characters’ conventional references and Zoo’s decontextualizing citations.

In contrast to Zoo’s unintentional resistance against the white planters’ privileged culture, her grandfather, Jesus Fever, does not conceal his loyalty to his masters, even trying to reinforce racial paternalism. Sensing his imminent death, Jesus shows Joel his most precious heirloom given by the former patriarch: “a beautiful sword with a silver handle: across the blade there was inscribed, Unsheath Me Not Without Reason—Sheath Me Not Without Honor” (p. 127). With the chivalrous episode of the imperial gift and the inscription of Southern Honor, Jesus educates the young heir as a reciter of the Scully family’s history. Simultaneously, however, Jesus’s patrimonial sword is almost mixed up together with his favorite junk:

In the past days he’d one by one called forth all his treasures: a dusty cracked violin, his derby with the feather, a Mickey Mouse watch, his high-button orange shoes, three little monkeys who neither saw, heard nor spoke evil. these and other precious things lay strewn around the cabin, for he would not allow them to be put again out of sight.

(p. 127)

Jesus’s collections are now constructing his own womb-like “other room,” protecting him from the fear and loneliness of death; in this sense, his cabin scattered with memorial items reminds of Randolph’s decorated room, secretly imitating his escapist strategy of dilettantism. Jesus, however, without aesthetic education and financial means to purchase precious objets d’art, admiringly keeps dirt cheap items alongside the sword. His “failed seriousness,” which Sontag ([1964] 1999) argues is “the essential element” of camp, reduces the phallic/patriarchal symbol’s authenticity by burying it in the middle of junk, just as Joel’s miscellaneous “treasure box” weakens the phallic masculinity of the bullet. As a variation of such parodic adaptation of white dilettantism and chivalrous codes of honor by black people, Another Black character, a hermit, Little Sunshine, lives alone in a ruined hotel where he used to serve. While most sections of the hotel are already decayed, Little Sunshine keeps in beautiful and gorgeous condition the former mistress’s private apartment: “[the apartment was] beautifully clean, and this was where Little Sunshine lived: the evident pride he took in these quarters increased the charm of their surprise, and when he closed the door he made nonexistent the ruin surrounding them” (p. 180): the former servant has become a master of the hotel, arranging it into his own artificial paradise. While still influenced by racial paternalism in their nostalgia for the Old South, these two Black characters recreate their own aesthetic space by arbitrarily exploiting the legacy of the white Southern aristocracy. By stealing and decontextualizing the white dilettante strategy to establish their aesthetic refuge, these Black pseudo-dilettantes subvert the racial authoritarianism in it and democratize the pleasure of decadence.

The white authoritarianism and racist paternalism embedded in the black old men’s loyalty to the Old South’s order is, furthermore, mocked when they deeply indulge in their memories. Near the end of the novel, the Skully family’s mule with the name of John Brown—the famous radical abolitionist before the Civil War—commits suicide at the hotel while Joel, Randolph, and Little Sunshine nostalgically imagine the flamboyant ballroom of the antebellum-Southern fashionable society. As if grotesquely playing with the Southern Gothic narrative tradition that has beautified patient mules that—often as the symbol of enslaved Black people—keep working until death without any complaint, Capote’s mule makes “a notoriously decadent scene … [by hanging] himself lunging from a balcony over the ballroom of a dilapidated antebellum mansion” (Mills 2000, p. 23). Fahy and Liu observe Capote’s satire against the Southern white patriarchy in the suicide of the mule with the self-sacrificing abolitionist hero (Fahy 2014, p. 56; Liu 2021, p. 291). The pathetic but zany grotesqueness of this scene—what Pugh calls “a carnivalesque reflection” of the novel’s Southern Gothicism (Pugh 2016, p. 58)—parodically emasculates the nostalgic and tragic beautification of the ruined mansion of the Old South that Randolph cherishes.

The significant impact of this tragicomic nonsense on the white dandy can be observed in his unusually reticent and defensive reaction to it: “a sharp intake of breath was Randolph’s only comment, and never once did he refer to the accident, nor ask a question: it was as if from the outset they’d planned to return to the Landing on foot”; on the way home, he “seemed not to know in which direction he was going” and “were in a trance of some kind” (p. 183). When they arrive at the landing, Joel’s aunt and cousin, as if an additional attack on Randolph, have come probably to take him out of the plantation, finishing the exclusive reclusion of the decadent master and apprentice. Amy, who was always Randolph’s accomplice, has been persuaded by them to sell patrimonial antiques, having Zoo uproot one of the most symbolic items, a slaving-summoning bell enshrined in the middle of the Southern garden. Randolph, who posed as a freethinking cosmopolitan, is now in such a “ridiculous scene” (p. 184)—instead of a grandiose downfall like the burning-down of the mansion in Absalom, Absalom!—losing the aesthetic basis of his philosophy that actually roots in the conservative order and beauty of Southern aristocracy. Directly witnessing the shabby fading of the family history, as Joel notices, Randolph can do nothing but “describe a circle, the zero of his nothingness” (p. 184). Campily playing with the Southern Gothic narrative tradition, Capote recites the last words to the already-dead soul of the Old South through the anticlimactic failure of the dilettante’s aestheticism.

5. Convalescence as Decadent/Campy Self-Reconstruction

If Capote’s thematic development of decadence strategically enables the queer dandy to expose his vulnerability leading to queer intimacy, the erosion of his Southern-aristocratic pride can, instead of tragically punishing his decadent dandyism or dilettantism, liberate him and his apprentice from the self-defensive stagnation. Having led Joel until he sees the dead mule, Randolph, now lost and vulnerable like a baby, defenselessly exposes himself to Joel: “Twice he fell down, and as there on the ground, solemn and baby-eyed, until Joel helped him up. Another time he walked straight into an old stump: after that, Joel took hold of his coat-tail and steered him” (p. 184). Witnessing his master’s breakdown, Joel, who himself is now experiencing the symbolical rebirth in convalescence from pneumonia after his repeated failures—or unconscious refusals—to prove masculinity14, now “realized then the truth: he saw how helpless Randolph was; more paralyzed than Mr Sansom, more childlike than Miss Wisteria” (p. 184). In contrast to the master’s dismay, the apprentice now feels “a crazy elation” and “knew who he was, he knew that he was strong” (pp. 183–84). The inversion of their pedagogical relationship makes Joel “puzzle[] out the best way he could” to take care of Randolph (p. 184). Overall, they are respectively experiencing the reconstruction of their subjects and that of their relationship in an intoxicated state as a consequence of the dissolution of the former identity.

Fin de siècle decadent writers have often stressed the significance of “convalescence” as a self-reforming state “between health and sickness,” which “is linked to intoxication as well as to rebirth and childhood” (Spackman 1989, p. 91). Baudelaire argues that the dandiacal artist is “always, spiritually, in the condition of that convalescent”: “Now convalescence is like a return towards childhood. The convalescent, like the child, is possessed in the highest degree of the faculty of keenly interesting himself in things” (pp. 7–8); Nietzsche, who in many of his pieces reiterates the importance of convalescence, which means to him “[a] long, all-too-long succession of years” and simultaneously “lapsing, relapsing, periodically a kind of décadence” (Nietzsche 2007, p. 8), expresses “the gratitude of a convalescent” for his philosophical achievements “after long privation and powerlessness”:

from such abysses, from such severe sickness, also from the sickness of severe suspicion, one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, more ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a tenderer tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childlike and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever been before.

(Nietzsche 1974, pp. 32, 37, italics original)

Barbara Spackman, by analyzing some canonical decadent works of Baudelaire, Huysmans, Nietzsche, and Gabriel D’Annunzio, elaborates the decadent convalescence as the everlasting self-renovation: According to Spackman, the decadent “convalescent-philosopher” always occupies the “space in-between,” never adopting “a rigidly fixed perspective” (Spackman 1989, p. 92). Decadence, that is, the “unhealthy” straggling from the mainstream values or norms, cannot be stagnant but must reform itself in recovery from self-deconstructing tumults, incessantly refreshing the dandiacal/dilettante skepticism and curiosity that relativize the existing ideology and appreciate unscripted pleasure. Initially having exploited the traditionally decadent activities, tropes, and relationship model to keep distance from the oppressing heteronormativity of the conservative South, which analogies the normalizing postwar/Cold War American society, Joel and Randolph, confronting the self-parodying situations that reveal the authoritarianism of their decadent strategy—that is, the decadence of decadence—and simultaneously democratize it, are now undergoing the self-renovating convalescence that refreshes their decadent sensitivity.

6. Conclusions

With its campy adaptation of decadent poetics inherited by Southern Gothic, OVOR demonstrates the campy self-distancing from the accelerating national—and simultaneously regional—intolerance of the American society throughout the early twentieth century, reconstructing the decadent subjectivity and relationship into a convalescent/reparable sensitivity to the vulnerability of self and others. The novel ends with Joel’s famous “transformation” into a camera and eventual discovery of Randolph’s identity as “the Lady,” whom Joel has sometimes seen in one of the windows of the mansion (p. 60).

His mind was absolutely clear. He was like a camera waiting for its subject to enter focus… Beyond one [of the windows of the mansion], someone was watching him… And it was Randolph’s window… a face trembled like a white beautiful moth, smiled. She beckoned to him, shining and silver, and he knew he must go: unafraid, not hesitating he paused only at the garden’s edge where, as though he forgotten something, he stopped and looked back at the bloomless, descending blue, at the boy he had left behind.

(pp. 186–87)

Joel’s becoming a camera, while reconfirming the novel’s genealogical connection to the precedent decadent culture by directly alluding to the famous phrases from Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin (Hongo 2020, p. 6)15, which, as Weir argues, “conveys a more profound sense of decadence through the representation of certain key moments in the fading days of Weimar era that capture the imminence of historical decline” (p. 98), associates the decadent convalescent’s liberated sensitivity to the positive affirmation of queerness. Spackman suggests that the convalescence thematized by decadent writers often connotes “a feminization of the male ‘protagonist,’ who thus discovers a ventriloquistic mode of speech in which the body spoken through is necessarily a ‘woman’s’ body”: “This occupation of the woman’s body is both the decadent’s profession and the means by which he appropriates alterity” (Spackman 1989, p. ix).

Joel’s revelation of the transvestite dandy, which, as some scholars have suggested, indicates his positive acknowledgment of his own queerness, echoes again the gender-bending convalescence of the male decadent, who appreciates aesthetic or philosophic pleasure and productivity by acknowledging their femininity. Nevertheless, in contrast to these decadent writers who narratively or theoretically depict the male heroes’ gender-bending transformations in more figurative ways, Capote takes a more direct and somewhat matter-of-fact approach to decadent queerness by setting the effeminate protagonist’s pleasurable (re)encounter with the transvestite at the climax of the plot. This ending, by demonstrating Capote’s parodic and ameliorative adaptation of decadent aesthetic, narrative, and philosophy, marks the postwar development of decadence into camp: that is, the necessary survival strategy for queer artists who, in the Pre-stonewall, Cold War American society that conducts surveillance of, persecutes, and stigmatizes as “decadence” non-normative genders and sexualities, sought in the tradition of decadent culture “Gay Science: that signifies the saturnalia of a spirit who has patiently resisted a terrible, long pressure—patiently, severely, coldly, without submitting, but also without hope—and who is now all at once attacked by hope, the hope for health, and the intoxication of convalescence” (Nietzsche 1974, p. 32, italics original).