The Glamour Girl in Breakfast at Tiffany's

Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's is a lovely novella, permeated by yearning. It turns out that Holly Golightly has a "ragtag," varicolored blonde boycut, in stark contrast to Audrey Hepburn's brunette coiffure. It also turns out that I was right in my childhood guess as to what "the powder room" referred to, though the guess was made hesitant by Audrey's sparkling-clean image. Here then is the original conception of the iconic Holly. The narrator recalls Stingo from Sophie's Choice, the young male aspiring writer getting acquainted with New York and secretly falling for someone larger-than-life. His framing of Holly Golightly recalls Lady Brett Ashley in The Sun Also Rises: the woman who sleeps with every male character in the book except for her friend the protagonist who truly cares for her.

I find myself irked that it's never the other way around, that I can't imagine a book where the protagonist is a young female aspiring writer and her love object, as seen through her eyes, becomes a legendary figure in American fiction. Men are never the daydreamed-about, the glorified, while women are so often externally depicted that it's no wonder we still have disproportionate violence against women in our society: boys can grow up reading all the classics and never learn from them what goes on inside a girl's head. Guys are the default, gals are exoticized. Male characters are granted imagination, ambition, desire, inner conflict, while female characters are painted only with the qualities that make them desirable: is it any wonder that many people proceed as though this were true in the real world? (Sure, there has been a modern-day effort to correct this by flooding curricula with works by minorities and women, but because so many of those works are of inferior quality to the classic canon, the effort has been seen through. Students know.)

None of this is of course finding any fault with Capote. It is finding fault with the way that his novella has been interpreted. Capote told the tragic tale of a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, an orphan, who sells herself and survives off rich men's admiration and money rather than getting an education and a dignified job (by which I mean, any job). Yet Holly Golightly is remembered as beautiful and glamorous, a lost-bird free spirit. These are labels applied from the outside. Holly becomes whatever suits men's dreams.