Breakfast at Tiffany's

Breakfast at Tiffany’s
Truman Capote

A Literature Review


“Breakfast at Tiffany’s”, the 1958 novella by Truman Capote, is many things to many people. Unlike the movie that spawned from it in 1961, it is the written piece that is saturated with more complexity of emotions, less sanitized scenes, and a clearer portrait of Capote’s vision of the unorthodox Holly Golightly. Taking place in Upper East Side Manhattan in the final years of World War II, Capote was said to have gathered much of his raw material from the gossip columns, personal experiences, as well as the lives of his eccentric friends from New York City. The original inspiration for Holly Golightly herself was rumoured to be a meld of several of Capote’s close socialite companions: Babe Paley, Gloria Vanderbilt, Carol Marcus, and Oona O’Neil. Even the impoverished and rural past of Holly Golightly’s character was speculated to have been based on Capote’s mother Lily Mae, with Holly’s true name by birth as “Lulamae”. And notwithstanding, many biographers and critics have likened Capote’s own life to be written into the character of Holly Golightly herself.

So in knowing his sources of stimulus, there are many themes that attracted me to view this novel through the lens of luxury, society, and the individual.

All throughout the story, Holly Golightly maintains a child-like naivete, but at the same time exudes a street-smart sensuality. It is a paradox that she actually fabricates for herself. The projection of self as deliberate artifice reoccurs again and again as the narrator recalls his memories of Holly. Her own transience is epitomized with her mailbox label: “Miss Holiday Golightly, Traveling” (11), as if she is not at home yet, but rather, still looking. She insists upon this ephemerality very clearly: “I’ll never get used to anything. Anybody that does, they might as well be dead” (19). And her outward appearance follows suit. Her persona is entirely crafted, her accent adopted, her vocabulary tweaked, her hair dyed, her clothes and jewellery contrived. When she is about to read the final news from her lover José by post, she asks for a moment, in order to put on a shield of beauty to protect her ego:

“Guided by her compact mirror, she powdered, painted every vestige of twelve-year-old out of her face. She shaped her lips with one tube, colored her cheeks from another. She pencilled the rims of her eyes, blued the lids, sprinkled her neck with 4711; attached pearls to her ears and donned her dark glasses; thus armoured, and after a displeased appraisal of her manicure’s shabby condition, she ripped open the letter” (98, 99).

She fashions herself into an object for commodity – mostly for her line of work, but also for what she believes as symbols of social success. And this ambition is not kept to herself, but others clearly know it too. They call her a real phoney, because “she believes all this crap she believes. You can’t talk her out of it” (30). So the objects of luxury she surrounds herself with and aspire to attain are not a means to an end, but rather, the end. Her social relations are almost always defined and perpetuated by financial gain, except for the one with the narrator.

The role of Tiffany & Co. in the story is small but critical. It is rumoured that the title is from an anecdote that floated around Capote’s social circle about an uncultivated patron who, when asked which is the best restaurant in town to dine at, had said: “Let’s have breakfast at Tiffany’s.” In this tale, it merely needs to stand in as the cornerstone of happiness. Holly Golightly says it is the only place where she can go to in order to cure her of the “mean reds”, her sporadic fits of fearful anxiety. This reflects the shift of the consumer culture in our society mid-last-century. She sighs: “Not that I give a hoot about jewelry…[it’s] the quietness and the proud look of it…that lovely smell of silver and alligator wallets” (39, 40). The luxury goods themselves are not the specific reasons why she loves the place per se, but rather she adores what it represents as a concept. And in the end, with her last postcard to the narrator about her new life, she scribbles, “Brazil was beastly but Buenos Aires the best. Not Tiffany’s, but almost” (110). So, although her idealized destination has fiscal, materialistic, and frivolous dispositions, it is the feeling within its walls that she covets. In this respect, she is fabulously naïve, yet utterly relatable. It is the very pulse advertisements and marketing campaigns tap into, and makes us all into real phoneys.