In Cold Blood

Closely intertwined with the American Dream are the norms surrounding masculinity in 1950s America. Herbert Clutter exemplifies the relationship between the two by representing something close to the masculine ideal in both his personal and public lives. Herbert is hard-working, ambitious, and self-reliant. His most significant professional achievement—River Valley Farm—is a testament to his determination and his desire to be his own master. Not content with working for others, Herbert “from the beginning aim[s] at operating a property of his own” (12). At the same time, Clutter is not so independent-minded as to be solitary. Unlike, for example, Tex John Smith, Clutter is a family man: a devoted and protective husband and father whose family conforms to the social and cultural norms of the era. Dewey is another character very much in the same mold, working a tough job while loving and protecting his wife and children.

By and large, the rest of the novel’s male characters represent deviations from this norm, although some of those deviations are more socially acceptable than others. As his own daughter notes, Tex Smith’s rugged individualism makes him essentially incapable of functioning in a domestic setting and perhaps in society in general: “Alone: in Mrs. Johnson’s opinion, that was how such men should live” (211). Nevertheless, he embodies a recognizable and even celebrated form of masculinity similar to that of his cowboy rodeo persona. Dick, meanwhile, associates his own “normalcy” with aggressive heterosexuality—his desire for women and his sexualization of them. When Perry describes his dream about the yellow bird, Dick responds, “I’m a normal. I only dream about blond chicken” (108). Although a man like Clutter would no doubt disapprove of this kind of crassness and misogyny, they are still within the bounds of socially acceptable male behavior.

However, remarks like this one are at least partly bluster; Dick is deeply insecure in his masculinity and adopts a hypermasculine persona to compensate. The sources of this anxiety are complex and include his struggle to get ahead in life as well as his facial disfigurement and chronic illness—fainting spells, migraines—that resulted from his car accident. The most important factor is likely Dick’s awareness of his sexual predilections, which include a strong attraction to underage girls: “[H]is sexual interest in female children was a failing of which he was ‘sincerely ashamed’—a secret he’d not confessed to anyone and hoped no one suspected [...] because other people might not think it ‘normal.’” (232).

Sexual “deviancy” of various kinds is probably the most significant form of gender nonconformity in the novel. Capote himself was openly gay at a time when American society considered it immoral and unnatural. Perry’s relationships with both Dick and Willie-Jay have strong sexual overtones. Although Perry has had a handful of liaisons with women, his friendships with men are much more emotionally intense, to the point that he is unable to cut ties with Dick even as he becomes increasingly disillusioned with him: “The sound of Dick’s voice was like an injection of some potent narcotic, a drug that, invading his veins, produced a delirium of colliding sensations: tension and relief, fury and affection” (224). Perry’s conflicted feelings about Dick are also a testament to his self-hatred, which centers on his sense of himself as insufficiently masculine. This gives their relationship a volatility that ultimately proves disastrous; Perry’s murder of Herbert is in part the result of his desire to show Dick he is a man. 

For those left behind after the Clutter murders, the brutality of the killings naturally begs the question of what sort of person could commit such a crime. To Dewey, it’s obvious that the perpetrator must be uniquely bad, or at least uniquely “crazy” (96). Consequently, he finds it hard to explain the evidence suggesting that there was more than one killer, wondering, “how two individuals could reach the same degree of rage, the kind of psychopathic rage it took to commit such a crime” (95). On the opposite end of the spectrum, Myrtle Clare—Holcomb’s cynical postmistress—denies that there is anything exceptionally evil at work, because human nature itself is essentially bad. Asked who could have killed the Clutters, she suggests that it could have been anyone: “The man in the airplane. The one Herb sued for crashing into his fruit trees. If it wasn’t him, maybe it was you. Or somebody across the street. All the neighbors are rattlesnakes. [...] It’s the same the whole world over” (79).

Neither Clare nor Dewey is entirely wrong. According to Dr. Jones, both Dick and especially Perry show signs of psychological abnormality. On the other hand, the banality of their motive—robbery—is in keeping with Mrs. Clare’s view of evil as ordinary. Both Clare and Dewey’s views raise more questions than they answer. For instance, if the murders are understood primarily as a robbery gone wrong, the question arises whether everyone is capable of similar acts, given sufficient motivation. This is what motivates Don Sullivan to testify on Perry’s behalf. As a devout Christian, he believes that all people are inherently flawed and recognizes that “what has happened to [Perry] could have happened to [Sullivan]” (301). Sullivan, however, is unusual in his admission; most people in the novel don’t want to acknowledge that they are potential criminals.

The issue of insanity is even more complex. Neither Dick nor Perry is able to plead insanity during their trial owing to a standard called the M’Naghten Rule, which concerns legal—as opposed to moral—definitions of right and wrong. In both men’s cases, however, Dr. Jones raises doubts about whether they could have acted differently. Dick, he says, has poor impulse control and “cannot tolerate feelings of frustration as a more normal person can, and he is poorly able to rid himself of those feelings except through antisocial activity” (340). Dr. Jones also suggests that these traits may be the result of brain damage. Perry, meanwhile, appears to have killed Clutter in a dissociative state triggered by feelings of humiliation. More broadly, Jones argues that Perry’s paranoid tendencies and aggressive outbursts likely stem from childhood trauma and abuse. It is hard to reconcile these conclusions with the idea of moral culpability; Perry did not consciously choose to kill Mr. Clutter, and the circumstances that shaped his “paranoid schizophrenic [personality] structure” were likewise beyond his control (343).

All of this calls into question the meaning of the work’s title. If evil is in many instances not a “cold-blooded” choice, but rather a product of circumstances, punishment seems less like an appropriate response; in fact, in cases where societal factors themselves have a negative impact on a person’s character and actions, the state effectively scapegoats individuals for its own failings. As Capote frames it, this is a particular danger of capital punishment, which he suggests only creates a culture of violence and death by coolly disposing of human life. In Cold Blood therefore prompts readers to consider the possibility that the criminal justice system that sentences Perry and Dick to death is in some sense as evil as the acts and people it condemns.

Death looms over the first and last sections of In Cold Blood. “The Last to See Them Alive” follows the Clutters’ movements over the last day of their lives, while “The Corner” details the sentencing of Perry and Dick, their time on Death Row, and their eventual hanging. At first glance, these situations seem entirely dissimilar; the Clutters have no idea how close they are to death as they go about their daily routines, whereas their killers have years to reflect on their impending executions. Nevertheless, a common thread runs through both Parts: how humans respond to their knowledge of their own mortality.

In a certain sense, the deaths depicted in In Cold Blood may not seem particularly inevitable; neither the Clutters nor their murderers die of natural causes but rather as a result of human choices and actions. Granted, the focus on Dick and Perry’s psychology adds an element of determinism even here, hinting that, given the men’s backgrounds and personalities, neither could have acted differently. Beyond that, however, Capote consistently frames the deaths he depicts within the broader context of human mortality. He notes, for instance, that Bonnie had a bookmark bearing the Biblical warning, “Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is” (34), and quotes an excerpt from Thomas Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”—a poem famously about life’s transience.

As a result, the ways in which various characters react in the face of their own deaths illustrate broader truths about the human relationship to mortality—most notably, the fact that however theoretically aware of our mortality we are, most of us don’t believe in it on a gut level. Here, for example, is what Mrs. Ashida says of Herbert’s likely mental state in the moments before his death: “The last thing I said to Herb, I told him how I couldn’t imagine his ever being afraid. That no matter what the situation was, he could talk his way out of it. [...] I’ll bet he wasn’t afraid. I mean, however it happened, I’ll bet right up to the last he didn’t believe it would. Because it couldn’t. Not to him” (135). Similarly, in the wake of his conviction, Dick alternates between accepting the sentence and holding out hope for a reprieve. Andy may be the only character who does not engage in some level of denial regarding his own death, but this is treated as symptomatic of his schizophrenia. As Dick puts it, “The trouble with you, Andy, you’ve got no respect for human life. Including your own” (368).

Given the heavily Christian setting in which the story’s events unfold, it isn’t surprising that many characters’ attitudes towards death are informed by religion and the belief in an afterlife. This is perhaps made most explicit in the letter from Don Sullivan to Perry, in which he remarks that he found religion after the death of his younger brother from leukemia: “He knew he was dying and afterwards I used to wonder what he thought about. And now I think of you, and wonder what you think about. I didn’t know what to say to my brother in the last weeks before he died. But I know what I’d say now. And this is why I’m writing you: because God made you as well as me and He loves you just as He loves me” (301). What the novel as a whole makes clear, however, is that mortality is a difficult thing to come to terms with, even for those who accept a religious or spiritual framework. As the Clutters’ worldly possessions are sold at auction, one of their employees describes the scene as “like a second funeral” (312), underscoring the seeming insignificance of life in the face of a force—death—that can take everything away in a moment.