Mirrors, Doubles, and Green-Colored Glasses: The Role of the Tomboy in Acceptable and Unacceptable Deviance

[ABSTRACT ONLY; NO FULL TEXT] In Truman Capote's seminal work Other Voices, Other Rooms Joel's character arc is highly lauded by scholars as a quintessential element of the queer bildungsroman. While many critics exalt his journey of self discovery, the parallel journey of his female counterpart, Idabel, is ignored or negated by many of those very same critics. Through the outcomes of their journeys and Joel and Idabel's similarities, Capote creates a clear divide between an acceptable variation for men and an unacceptable variation for females. Such a schism implies the inescapable futility of disobedience for women in the American South. Idabel's journey belongs outside of the shadows of Joel's growth, because it not only underscores the negative side of Capote's acceptable variance, but also the prevailing norms of what it means to be a woman in Southern culture. Butler's performative gender, Kahane's gothic mirror, and Punter and Byron's approach to final resolutions in gothic stories all apply themselves to a more thorough reading of Capote's female characters. Through the image of mirrors and the act of mirroring behaviors, Capote's female characters find themselves in a gothic world that celebrates queerness in men and reinforces heteronormative expectations for women despite their continual attempts to subvert and reverse it.