Is Holly Golightly a winning example of woman at play and idleness?
Is Holly Golightly a winning example of woman at play and idleness?
A missive in which I spend a considerable length of time musing over the week of lull, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the potential of love.
It's the mistake you always made, Doc, trying to love a wild thing…You mustn't give your heart to a wild thing. The more you do, the stronger they get, until they're strong enough to run into the woods or fly into a tree. And then to a higher tree and then to the sky. —Holly Golightly, Breakfast at Tiffany’s.
Dear Loves,
The holiday lull. Anne Helen Petersen, at Culture Study, feels the week between Christmas and New Year’s is a thing that needs solving, and indeed, she makes solid points about how this week can feel: uncomfortable and dull at best, miserable at worst.
But just before Christmas, there was a lot of snow, ice, and sub-zero temps that made for somewhat hazardous roads between our house in the north woods of Minnesota and Dilworth where family is. The typical two-hour drive was slow and cautious.
My brother-in-law got COVID so he, my sister, and the nephews were quarantined at home. We dropped presents at their door, like a mix between Toys-for-Tots and the Red Cross, and then watched my sister lug them into the house one by one from the safety of our car.
Even the celebrations felt just a bit off. My uncle arrived straight from a long shift at work before we were scheduled to eat and dug in. My dad followed and so there was no official start time to eating or sitting down together, which created something of a disconnect. A non-together, togetherness. An untogetherness
Sunday morning it started to snow (again) and Lina, mom’s Bordoodle, was acting wonky so we packed up the lunch grandma was making and started for my maternal grandfather’s house just to say hello on the way home. By then Lina had started vomiting and it quickly became clear that she’d eaten chocolate.
So while we were meant to be merrily chatting to my grandfather, we were instead cleaning up dog vomit, trying to figure out how much chocolate she’d eaten (a bowl of m&m’s had been left on the floor), and holding for an on-call vet who was 45 minutes back the way we had just come. (Lina, gratefully, is fine. It was messy and terrifying, but she is fine.)
After all this, while Petersen finds the week post-Christmas a problem, I was filled with gratitude and relief to arrive at the big lull. To do nothing. To chill. To meditate on what the last four seasons provided and how I’d like the next four seasons to feel and what I’d like them to be filled with. And with some luck, we all remained healthy and content for exactly seven days.
Until this year I haven’t actually experienced the lull in living memory. I’m sure as a child I sunk deep into and relished it. I didn’t have to drive myself anywhere, I didn’t have to feed myself, I just rode whatever wave presented itself.
But I got my first service job at 15 and spent most of my adult life either in the service/retail industry in which I was often lucky to get a whole day off at all, or academia in which the handful of years I didn’t also work in the service industry, I was too end-of-semester burnt out to be conscious.
And then there’s the added rushing around to family events and seeing friends. I have spent years vacillating between blindly rushed-off-my feet to numbed-out coma in front of the TV (which is essentially what Petersen describes) to really feel anything at all. But this year I felt time expand and did not push through it. I wrote some things because it felt good. I slept as I liked. I watched movies and ate cookies. So many cookies.
This is how I found myself watching Breakfast at Tiffany’s for the second time, and there are lots of ways in which this movie is problematic, Mickey Rooney as a Japanese neighbor with unfortunate make-up, false teeth, and eyes taped is a glaring issue. But if I could just focus on Holly Golightly, please?
A young woman, living without a chaperone or guardian in New York City, in 1961, who ended up there simply because she’d never been before even though she was married? Sure she’s a call girl, some might say “companion” or “escort” in this vanilla cinematic representation.
But, hey, a girl’s got to earn her rent and in my mind, it hardly deters from her character. She is a “wild thing” and refuses to be caged in marriage. Like Iron & Wine’s Jezebel, she went running when the dogs came calling. Or called when the dogs came running. And she left.
We can only imagine what she was like as an orphan fleeing from foster parents and stealing food from Doc Golightly, but what we’re presented with is the woman she chose to become: glamorous. The internal chaos of her “mean reds” and the clear chaos of her bare apartment isn’t reflected in her dress or the way she speaks or who she presents herself as. She’s a perfect mix of frivolity, endearing disarray, and elegance. One of the earliest representations of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl trope, according to Wiki.
But why, as Kendall Varin suggests in her character analysis, must we love and abhor her? Can’t we just love her?
Do we despise the “spontaneity and carelessness of early adulthood,” or is it that we miss her so deeply? Grieve for never having been allowed to let those parts of ourselves free in the first place? Or feeling piles of shame through and about the years that we did so?
Though I don’t want Holly’s exact life, and I certainly don’t want my particular 20s back, is it imperative that we abandon all aspects of ourselves that were a bit frivolous and spontaneous? Is making the decision to move somewhere just because we haven’t been any more logical or sound or secure than the other reasons we choose where/when to move? Should we feel bad about ourselves for leaving our shoes in the fridge?
Do we, in other words, have to grow up from Holly Golightly?
I cringe to think that in the eyes of my preteen nephews and cousins (maybe, gasp, even the students I worked with at the UI Writing Center) I’m an adult. I don’t feel adult. And I’m appalled that all those so-called adults who seemed to have all their shit together (and insisted/implied there was only one right way to #adult) were actually just as clueless as I feel now.
How different I thought this would be.
And after learning that women have always been a part of the laboring classes and therefore, barring their husband’s status, have rarely been idle, I worried there would be no examples of women embodying idleness. But the universe gave me Holly, an idle woman if there ever was one.
I was struck-still when Paul hears her singing, opens his window, and she’s sitting on the windowsill, feet in the fire escape, playing and singing along to her ukulele. It’s the kind of idleness I strive for and if anyone has an unused uke they’d like to gift me, I’m taking donations. Golightly sings “Moon River,” a song about “two drifters” exploring “such a lot of world” together. Um, yes, please. My fantasy relationship. And barring the relationship, my fantasy solo life.
Am I wrong in thinking that this is a unique scene? Don’t we usually see men and boys playing instruments? Men and boys toiling their days away? Men and boys fantasizing about and actually exploring the world? While women characters tend to represent caregiving, order, domesticity, seriousness, organization? And those women who don’t represent those things are somehow doing it wrong and must be tamed? Or become a conduit, a muse, for the dude character to find his own inner Manic Pixie Dream Girl rather than a fully developed human with her own needs, desires, flaws, etc.?
And so the ending disappoints many. Holly gives herself over to being possessed, taken care of, and domesticated by a man. Or at least that’s the presumption. And admittedly, Paul uses some dated language.
But I am a staunch believer in love. And I choose to believe that he loves Holly precisely as she is. That he has no desire to change her. That when he says he can “help” her, he means “let’s co-create a unique life and partnership together based on curiosity, play, honesty, and connectedness where each of us is utterly supported and able to be ourselves.” And when he says she “belongs” to him, he means “I can feel that our souls belong to one another equally, do you feel that to?” and if she had said no again he would have left it at that.
I choose to believe that this is a consensual union of eccentric equality between lovers, he just didn’t know how to use this language because he is a product of his time and gender.
I choose to believe they spend their lives floating down Moon River rather than her becoming a domestic knitter and cooker of rice (not that these things are inherently devoid of pleasure: I love crocheting) and he an office junkie in the city sleeping with his secretary.
Isn’t that what that domestic scene is about? She’s domesticated herself, presumably because she feels she has to be domesticated in order to marry her Brazilian lover, and Paul says, No, this isn’t you, come on let’s go out to eat, so why would he expect domestication of her in their life together?
Let’s please believe that after letting go of the idea of marrying a rich man (or, you know, abandoning her career as a call girl), Holly uses that intelligence and adaptable brain she formerly used to study up on Brazil, learn new languages, and keep tabs on wealthy bachelors, to paint or write or play more ukulele. And, with or without offspring, they live a bohemian life together, spending as much time as they can traveling, making, being idle, careless, and spontaneous.
Maybe in 1969, they find themselves stripped naked and covered in mud at Woodstock after spending seven years living in Brazil, because it IS a shame to waste a ticket and neither of them had ever been, and so as soon as the credits roll, they pack the cats, the typewriter, and the ukulele and fly south. Because relationship isn’t the prison, love isn’t the prison (as Holly thinks), it’s the gendered and heteronormative expectations that initially bound Holly as a child bride. But in my mind, she finds that love can also be freedom.
But, you know, I’m an optimist and a romantic.
The week of lull was bookended Monday night by more sick dog drama. Mom had taken the dogs out for a walk around the yard and very briefly misplaced Copper. He’d found what, I think, was a dead raccoon based on the color pattern of the fir he lovingly brought back to the house with him and we were up all night; him vomiting, me cleaning.
And so begins a week rooted in (some) reality.
xx,
