“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Truman Capote (post 4): Holly is also Lulamae, a frightened, child-aged, alternate personality, which explains “the mean reds”

In Capote’s novella, here is how Holly first defines “the mean reds”: She says the blues mean “You’re sad, that’s all. But the mean reds are horrible. You’re afraid and you sweat like hell, but you don’t know what you’re afraid of. Except something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is” (1, p. 38).

Here is the movie version: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4jsUIgchHXU

Note: “You’re afraid…but you don’t know what you’re afraid of…something bad is going to happen, only you don’t know what it is.”

As Holly, she has episodes of fear, but she does not know what the fear is related to.

Later in the story, it is revealed that until age fourteen, her name was Lulamae, not Holly. She says, “I’m not fourteen any more, and I’m not Lulamae. But the terrible part is…I am. I’m still stealing turkey eggs and running through a brier patch. Only now I call it the mean reds” (1, pp. 69-70).

Holly and Lulamae are alternate personalities. Lulamae had been in control back when she and her brother, Fred, had been orphaned and were living in Texas as vagabonds, surviving by stealing turkey eggs, etc. She was taken in as a child bride by Doc Golightly, a veterinarian, who is portrayed as kindly and protective. But then she left and has lived as Holly.

I can only speculate that, as Lulamae, she had had an alternate personality, Holly (short for Holiday), who had fantasized getting away from her horrible vagabond life (going away on holiday). So when she was a little older and safer, the Holiday personality took over and traveled away (she is a traveler, as her card says), reversing positions with Lulamae, who was no longer in control, but remained inside as a frightened (living in the horrible past) child-aged alternate personality. Holly, usually not aware of Lulamae, would sometimes feel Lulamae’s never-ending fear (Lulamae was frozen in time, the time being when life was actually horrible), which Holly called her “mean reds.”

So if you think of Lulamae as the original personality and Holly as an alternate personality, then Holly’s travels would be Lulamae’s dissociative fugues. But if you think of Holly as the main personality, then traveling is not a dissociative fugue, but just an intrinsic part of her personality: she is a traveler, she goes on holidays, trying to find a truly safe place (like Tiffany’s).

But I can’t think of either of them, Lulamae or Holly, as the “real” person. Lulamae is evidently a frozen-in-the-past child-age alternate personality. But Holly, like most alternate personalities, is not a well-rounded whole person, but is more or less specialized: she is the traveler, who hasn’t furnished her apartment, because she expects to move on. Moreover, Holly is inconsistent—age, gender, etc., as previously discussed, and sometimes she remembers Lulamae, but other times she doesn’t—so “Holly” is probably the cover name for several personalities.

In multiple personality, none of the personalities is the real person. The real person is all the personalities taken as a whole. To function well, the person, instead of “being beside themselves,” has to “get their act together” (common sayings probably deriving from people with multiple personality). In multiple personality trait, as seen in successful novelists, this is accomplished by cooperation among the personalities.

1. Truman Capote. Breakfast at Tiffany’s: A Short Novel and Three Stories [1958]. New York, The Modern Library, 1992.