Fetish

In the beginning of Truman Capote's novella Breakfast at Tiffany's, Paul--the writer-protagonist-- reflects on an African statuette that uncannily resembles the story's hero Holly Golightly. In the dim lights of a New York bar, the figure of Holly Golightly returns to him not as a revenant, but as an object which is overtly a "fetish," presumably the center of some fertility ritual, undoubtedly phallic. Both the film and the novella thematize Holly's willingness to become a fetish for other men. In so doing, she somehow becomes other than herself. Her "true" nature is constantly in question. As a "wild thing," Lula Mae, a drifter, or "no-name slob," she presents to Paul a series of possible real Golightlys. Since the narrator of the novel is a gay man, there is a sense that this initial admission of the fetish nature of Golightly, in addition to his unwillingness to engage in the circuits in which this fetish operates, provides him with the privileged view into her soul. The film's Paul, heterosexual and without the powers of first-person omnipotence, is still a writer, but more implicitly fraught with anxiety, since he does not narrate the film. When Paul in the film writes, the activity is insignificant in comparison to his attempt (in the words of the song "I Could Write a Book") to make two lovers of friends. Paul's drama is that he must disavow the fetish nature of Holly in order to establish a sexual relation with her, an operation that will in some ways diminish her power. As it is, when Golightly sings Moon River simply and elegantly in the film, it interrupts and challenges Fred's more pained attempts at art. In the film the song acts as does the African statuette--a fetish circulating wildly, yet of humble origin. While it points to her country origins, a floating, fantasmatic otherness obscures this reality. This otherness will facilitate their future relationship. 

What Hepburn's roles make clear--in Tiffany's, My Fair Lady, and Funny Face--is a that this otherness is something to be constantly negotiated. At times she gives over to its power--the films' respective protagonists let themselves be possessed by alien notions of the feminine. But viewers see the struggles and multiple negotiations of otherness, struggles that at times verge on torture. While her characters' fates are to be forced into a system in which woman is perceived as lack or as fetish, Hepburn's innate androgyny places her inside and outside some kind of ideal feminine principle. The site of this struggle, particularly in My Fair Lady, is the voice. The voice can be either the best evidence of the body and existence of a person, or, when separated from the lived body, or tortured into sophistication, can be an alien presence with which a person must struggle for self-possession.