Spaces of Consumption in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Spaces of Consumption in Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Summary/Abstract: Focusing on concepts such as space, place, globalization, and consumerism, this study examines how a 1950s American aspiring socialite, Holly, the protagonist of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1958), constructs heridentity in order to position herself among her desired peers (Lury, 1996). Capote’snovel illustrates the various connotations of ‘place’: as emotional, imagined,remembered, or experienced by the senses (Moslund, 2011), and features New York asa bleak, post-war setting which combines the emotional, imagined and rememberedpast and present places. In this context, both space and place become important.Space – both the city and its landmarks (the spatial setting) – furnishes the necessarytools for Holly to undergo a transformation into the 1950s socialite; place gives herthe meaning behind the importance attributed to these specific spaces. This paperanalyzes the bar on Lexington Avenue, which the narrator and Holly Golightly visitdaily, as not only a space of consumption, but also a functional place, which thusserves a dual purpose: a functional office for the tenants who live nearby, and an areawhere consumption happens. Alongside the bar and the city as a whole, thebrownstone apartment building and the jewelry store stand as places of consumption,or “cathedrals of consumption” (Ritzer, 2003). It is in relation to such consumptionplaces that Holly stages her New York life in order to be perceived, not as she is, butas what she desires to be. In consuming spaces, these become mere commodities, andindividuals ascribe Karl Marx’s magical connotations to them, transforming theminto meaningful places.

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