Too Perfect

           Nancy is too perfect for me. No, that’s not it. She’s too much what was expected of a woman before Women’s Suffrage. She reminds me of those really freaky and annoying females in Stepford Wives. Without the freaky and annoying of course. Don’t get me wrong, I like her. She just needs to tone it down a little.

            Now that I think about it, I feel bad for her. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves, shall we? I shall proceed to dissect her bordering-on faultless self. According to the narrator, “Normally, Nancy would willingly have taught Jolene to prepare an entire turkey dinner; she felt it her duty to be available when younger girls came to her wanting help with their cooking, their sewing, or their music lessons - or, as often happened, to confide.” Okay. It doesn’t say younger kids, it specifically says ‘younger girls.’ Fine, she’s a girl and she happens to be the typical small town Good Samaritan that helps other females because guys have cooties. Okay, my sarcasm got ahead of me. Sorry. But let’s focus on the activities they mention: cooking, sewing, music, and confiding. The first line of a sewing textbook from the 1890s reads, "Girls: You have now become old enough to prepare for woman's duties; one of these is the art of sewing, which we will take up as simply as possible. By following the given instructions carefully, you will become able to dress your dolls, assist your mothers in mending, make garments, fancy articles, etc.” All they have to do know is stay in the kitchen like good women learn to play the piano, and confide in each other as a pact of womanhood and expression. I’m sorry, but that’s just what come’s to me when I think of the things Nancy does with other girls. It almost places her in a different time period, an epoch where women do those things because it is what is expected of them. That is Nancy in a nutshell: play-doh pliable in her parent’s, her town’s expectations.

            This is why I pity her. When she’s thinking about her best friend, the narrator speaks of how Nancy “deeply felt the daytime absence of her friend, the one person with whom she need be neither brave nor reticent.” Her whole persona is a mere façade then. She is a mannequin trying to appeal to people’s critical gazes. It is when she is basking in her friend’s open ears that Nancy says something that sparked my interest even more than her reticent persona: “I'm losing my mind. I get into the car, I walk into a room, and it's as though somebody had just been there, smoking a cigarette. It isn't Mother, it can't be Kenyon. Kenyon wouldn't dare . . ." Capote goes on to say how Susan grasped the implication Nancy was making but thought it ludicrous. Nancy was referring to her dad, the coffee Nazi and substance critic. Her argument is valid. I just can’t figure out why, out of all people, Mr. Clutter would resort to inhaling such horrible smokes that he hates so much. And I ponder just what it is that would be the catalyst of said decision, what is happening in Mr. Clutter’s life that is so crucial, so colossal. It’s mind-f#@cking. It makes me think that maybe Mr. Clutter is not as innocent as he seems, as oblivious as he sets himself out to be.