Holly Golightly, Heroine?

The glamor girl is more than people reckon.

I've loved the movie Breakfast at Tiffany's since I was a teenager. It's the sole reason that my husband proposed with a Tiffany engagement ring. "It's not that I give a hoot about jewelry, except for diamonds, of course."

I used to worry that I'd like the movie less as I got older, concerned that after a while the perfect dialogue, the incredible outfits, and the bewitching Holly wouldn't do it for me anymore, and I'd realize what a superficial film it is underneath.

That feeling when you see one of the ten richest men under fifty in America.

Quite the contrary. The story is perfectly crafted, “a phony, but a real phony, you know what I mean?”, and its protagonist, Holly Golightly, is an unlikely but true heroine.

If you've only seen the movie once, give it another watch. Holly needs several viewings before she starts to emerge as the heroine she is. 

Take her intelligence. At face value, she's a flake, calling everyone "darling" and acting too dopey to realize that she's colluding with the mob. 

But look closer. She can size up a situation instantly. When she first visits Paul Varjak (or “Fred, darling,” as she calls him for two-thirds of the movie) in his apartment, she doesn't buy his lie that he's still writing. She casually looks at the typewriter and points out that it doesn’t have a ribbon in it – and then she buys him a brand new ribbon the next day. Holly is sharp. That she chooses to appear ditzy is a survival tactic in a harsh world. 

So she’s smart, but is she heroic? 

First, it’s vital to remember in a story like this one that moral hazards are proportional to the difficulties a character is placed in. A penniless girl trying to support her family might be drawn to criminal activity, whereas a genteel lady might only be tempted to a mercenary marriage; yet there would be more courage, sacrifice, and love in the poor girl’s actions than in the “respectable” woman who sold her honor for a lot more money. 

A heroine is not necessarily a role model, but she must possess, or at least acquire, a few key virtues: courage, or she’ll never surmount her difficulties; resourcefulness, or her sacrifices will accomplish nothing; and something like brotherly love, or sisterly love: she must be working toward something worthwhile. It is not particularly heroic to only serve your own self-interest. 

At first, it seems that Paul is the only character who really grows in this way. When we meet him, he is dissatisfied and a bit embarrassed by his unemployed gigolo arrangement, but neither does he do anything to change it. He's just a self-pitying, thwarted creative who will enjoy his trips to Rome and his fully-paid apartment, even if he doesn't like how he gets them. 

But as he gets to know Holly, "the very lovely, very frightened girl who lived alone except for a nameless cat," he starts to care for someone other than himself. He chooses to sacrifice his feelings for her – twice – to help her. He resumes writing, severs his affair, gets a job, and becomes an honorable man again. 

Where is Holly's character development? While he's doing all that, she's still hopping from date to date as she hopes to land one of the richest men in America. Or Brazil. She's flexible. 

Holly needs to grow, too, but not in the way Paul does. Unlike Paul, she is not entirely self-centered when we meet her. She does what she does so that she can provide for her younger brother, Fred, once he's out of the army. She wants to save enough money that they can buy a ranch down in Mexico and raise horses. She has been looking out for him since she was fourteen years old, when she married a much older man so that she and Fred wouldn’t have to scrounge for food anymore. Though Holly doesn't seem to live in the real world, she has been a cynical pragmatist since she was a child. 

She doesn't save very successfully, and there are other big hazards in her life. She has not had Paul's experiences. She's not being swept off to Rome or furnished with all she needs, and she frequently is physically endangered by her escorts. Prostitution, and whatever its cousin is that Holly practices (something between being a society date for the newspapers and an actual call girl), is much more of a martyrdom than a party. And many women, like Holly, don't practice it for themselves, but to take care of someone else. 

When we meet Holly, she has not unpacked her apartment, even after a year of living there. She has a cat, a former “wild thing” like herself whom she met by the river one day, but she doesn’t want to name him because “the way I see it, I have no right to give him one. We don’t belong to one another.” She is scared to settle down or admit that she’s attached to anyone or anything except her brother.

With all of the trauma that she carries, it is no wonder that Holly doesn’t need to learn to think of others, but to finally judge characters correctly: to put no faith in the “rats” and “super rats” and their millions, but instead trust the people worth trusting. 

Perhaps that is why Holly is drawn to Paul, whom she calls “Fred, darling” because he reminds her of him a little. He can’t offer her anything tangible, not money or protection or connections, just friendship. Disinterest allows her to form a real relationship with him, until Doc’s refusal to support Fred reawakens her to reality: she needs money, and Paul can’t get her any. So far, her motivation has been admirable if misguided: whatever she does, she does for her brother.

That all changes when Fred dies. 

She starts behaving truly selfishly for the first time, ignoring her feelings for Paul while she seeks the fame and comfort of a politician's wife. What was once a means has become an end. Without Fred to take care of, she does not need to play the field or marry for money, and she could, like Paul, choose a more honorable road. Yet she is fond of José, and she hopes that he will finally provide some peace and safety, even though he hasn’t officially asked her to marry him, even though he won’t tell the press or even his family about their relationship. 

Predictably, that tired road never will lead to the safety that she craves, and as Paul memorably tells her, no matter where she runs, she'll always run into herself. 

She finally realizes it might be worth it to trust the only man she has ever loved, the only one who has never dictated terms to her. The rats and super rats had only been after her looks. Even Doc, despite his gentle heart, had married a fourteen-year-old instead of adopting her, and he later made his financial support for Fred contingent on her agreement to return with him to Texas. 

Holly certainly hasn’t lacked courage in other areas, but she has never risked her heart before, risked having it broken - except for her brother. Admitting you love someone won’t protect you from losing them, but it might be, as Paul says, “the only chance at real happiness.” People do fall in love. People do belong to each other. 

Holly reminds me of Lily Bart from Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth. Although they have very different environments and stories, each is a lovely, enchanting, desirable woman whom, somehow, no one bothers to actually know. She wears a façade, but one man is able to see through to the remarkable woman underneath. 

But unlike Selden, Lily Bart's love interest, Paul has enough courage to fully embrace the woman he loves, knowing that embracing means challenging her as well as accepting her. Paul will face down the world for Holly. Selden in The House of Mirth is a moral coward. Paul Varjak is a hero.

In that memorable final cab ride with Paul, Holly protests that she doesn’t know who she is. “I’m like Cat here. We’re a couple of no-name slobs. We belong to nobody, and nobody belongs to us.”

To prove that she means it, she pushes the cat out of the cab into a rainy alley and tells him to scram. 

This moment in the taxi finally proves Paul to be what Holly needs. He has consistently been the nice guy in the “friend zone,” aside from a few minor confrontations, but now he lays out what she needs to hear.

“You know what’s wrong with you, Miss Whoever-You-Are? You’re chicken. You’ve got no guts. You’re afraid to stick out your chin and say, ‘Okay, life’s a fact. People do fall in love. People do belong to each other. Because that’s the only chance that anybody has for real happiness.’ You call yourself a free spirit, a wild thing, and you’re terrified someone’s gonna stick you in a cage. Well, baby, you’re already in that cage. You built it yourself, and it’s not bounded in the west by Tulip, Texas, or in the east by Somaliland, it’s wherever you go. Because no matter where you run, you just end up running into yourself.” 

He takes out the ring that he’s been carrying around for months, but he doesn’t want it anymore. Then, without another word, he leaves her in the cab and goes looking for the cat. 

Holly had acted coldly during his whole monologue, not looking at him as she coolly pulled on her cigarette. But when he leaves, we see how much his words affected her. After hesitating, she puts the ring on her finger and runs after him - and to the cat, searching the drenched NYC alley and calling his name, “Cat!”: because even without naming him, she has still given him a name. 

You’re terrified for a moment that she won’t find the cat - that it’s too late, she scared him off, and somehow we know that if she can’t find the cat, it’ll be too late for her and Paul, too. 

But then she finds the poor, bedraggled thing hiding behind a crate and carries him back to Paul. They’re all together again. And my words have utterly failed this masterpiece. It’s an incredibly moving scene. 

Not every love story makes the romance a necessary part of the protagonist's arc. It's usually the happy bonus, not the proof of character growth. Breakfast at Tiffany's does it perfectly. 

Holly Golightly, former orphan waif, erstwhile aspiring actress and defamed glamor girl, finally belongs to someone. 

(Cute tangent: When I first sang “Moon River” to my little girl, she said, "That's such a nice song. I want to remember it for when I'm sad because it will help me be happy again." She gets it.)