256 Capote, Truman
received severe beatings for wetting the bed. As an
adult, he still wets the bed, sucks his thumb, and
fantasizes about buried treasure, but he has acquired
an “ever-present, poorly controlled rage.” His friend
Willie-Jay calls attention early in the novel to
Perry’s propensity for “explosive emotional reaction
out of all proportion to the occasion.”
Like Dick and Perry, Bonnie Clutter exhibits
symptoms of mental illness; however, her symptoms
are reflected inward. She becomes hopeful shortly
before her death that her anxiety, sadness, and social
withdrawal are the results of misaligned vertebrae
rather than postnatal depression. Her preference
for a physical rather than mental or emotional ail-
ment reveals the social and personal shame that she
associates with mental illness. The townspeople in
Holcomb use words like nervous or spell to describe
Bonnie’s illness; they refer to her retirement at
the mental hospital as “time away,” as though she
were vacationing. The pain of seclusion becomes as
debilitating as the depression itself. Although she
worries that she is “missing out on everything. The
best years, the children—everything,” she remains
quarantined in her bedroom, unable to escape the
crippling cycle of her depression.
While the Kansas courthouse is uninterested in
any gradations of sanity, preferring instead a black-
and-white definition, Capote shows that mental ill-
ness is hard to define. Its causes span physical brain
injury to a history of abuse and abandonment to the
stress and anxiety associated with childbirth and
child care. In Cold Blood resists a narrow definition
of mental illness; instead, it expands and humanizes
it, compelling the reader to question the differences
between sanity and insanity or health and illness.
Ethan Myers
Justice in In Cold Blood
Citizens of Holcomb, Kansas, the main setting in
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, disregard class hier-
archies when they claim that the town exists as an
egalitarian utopia: “All equal, regardless of wealth,
color, or creed. Everything the way it ought to be in
a democracy; that’s us.” When the happy democracy
of this small American town is disrupted by the
murder of the Clutter family, the town must bring
the murderers to justice in order to reestablish Hol-
comb’s harmony. In Cold Blood challenges popular
conceptions of justice such as rehabilitation, retribu-
tion, or punishment; instead, it presents justice as a
restoration of Holcomb’s ideals.
The Clutters embody the way everything “ought
to be in a democracy.” Herb Clutter, the father, is
an educated, professionally successful church leader
who rejects displays of class hierarchies by snubbing
the local country club in favor of chairing the Finney
County 4-H club, a national organization that serves
children’s moral development. His daughter, Nancy,
is a member of the club. In addition to practically
running the Clutter house, she is an A student and
president of her class; she plays piano and clarinet
and wins awards every year at the county fair for her
preserves, pastries, needlework, and flower arrange-
ments. Despite Herb and Nancy’s embodiment of
American values, the Clutter family’s perfection is
clouded by mother Bonnie’s depression; likewise,
Holcomb’s perfection is clouded by the Clutter
murder. As the murderers Dick Hickock and Perry
Smith descend on the apple-pie democracy of Hol-
comb, their criminal histories, possible mental ill-
nesses, and poor educations stand in stark contrast
to Nancy and Herb’s American values. They disrupt
Holcomb’s utopia.
Dick and Perry’s execution is part of a national
identity in which hangings are as American as Nan-
cy’s award-winning pie. Execution is the most severe
punishment for violating society’s rules; it is the
ultimate removal from society. Dick and Perry effec-
tively remove themselves from Holcomb’s society by
a road-trip flight to Mexico, but the execution serves
as a public and permanent removal. The Kansas jus-
tice system delivers the decision, but the identities
of the beneficiaries remain ambiguous. The con-
victs are executed, so justice serves no rehabilitative
benefit for them. The victims have been murdered;
justice is not for them. As the only survivors, the
townspeople and a few family members are the only
potential beneficiaries of justice. Instead of serv-
ing the criminals or the victims, justice serves the
greater society: By permanently removing imperfect,
criminal actors from society, Holcomb can return to
a purer, more innocent time. Dick and Perry hang in
order to restore Holcomb’s democratic harmony. In