Analysis of ‘Breakfast at Tiffany’s’

Breakfast at Tiffany’s is a 1958 novella by Truman Capote. It was adapted into a film by Blake Edwards in 1961, starring Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, with Patricia Neal, Martin Balsam, Buddy Ebsen, and Mickey Rooney. The film differs from the novella in many significant ways, as will be discussed below.

The novella is so short, not even a hundred pages, to go by the edition I have, that ‘novella’ seems to describe a story too long for BAT, and ‘short story’ is too short for it. Since, as is the case with my copy, the story is often published with three short stories–“House of Flowers,” “A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory“–I’ll make a number of references to these stories whenever they share comparable or contrasting themes with BAT.

The novella is as short as it is, but the film is almost two hours long, suggesting a much longer story. Neal’s character, Mrs. Emily Eustache “2E” Failenson, is nowhere to be found in Capote’s story.

The unnamed narrator of the novella is named Paul Varjak (Peppard) in the film. He and Holly Golightly (Hepburn) develop a love relationship that is absent in Capote’s story (in fact, true to the writer’s own sexuality, the unnamed narrator–it is implied–is gay, therefore making his story at least somewhat autobiographical, since the narrator is as much a writer as Capote was).

The regrettably racist caricature of a Japanese, in the klutzy Mr. Yunioshi–played by Rooney in yellowface–isn’t in Capote’s story, either, though Yunioshi is referred to with a racial slur–a “Jap”–by Joe Bell, a bartender near the beginning of the story.

The film ends with a typical Hollywood rom-com cliché, with Varjak getting the girl and kissing her in the rain; while in Capote’s story, there is a far more ambiguous and uncertain ending, with Holly leaving the narrator and going off, out of New York City and into the world.

As for the casting of Holly for the film adaptation, Capote was hoping for Marilyn Monroe to play the part, and he was angry that the part ended up going to Hepburn (though he came to like her performance, all the same). Given that Holly is a romantic dreamer of a girl, chasing wealthy men, I find Capote’s preference of Monroe to play her strange and ironic, when Monroe, having married Arthur Miller at one point, demonstrated left-wing sympathies that may have contributed to her having been murdered, as opposed to the official suicide story of her death. The only thing Monroe had in common with Holly was the blonde hair (well, bleach-blonde, in Monroe’s case), and so brunette Hepburn had blonde streaks added to her hair.

The opening scene in the novella is nowhere to be found in the film, which during the credits shows Holly window-shopping outside a Tiffany’s store. We come to understand that Holly loves being in Tiffany’s because the luxury jewelry store is the only place where she can feel a sense of safety, peace, and calm in her turbulent world. She imagines that nothing bad can ever happen there.

She denies that she likes Tiffany’s for the jewelry (Capote, page 35). While it may not literally be the jewelry that she likes so much about the store, surely it’s the sense of a luxurious life that Tiffany’s represents that gives her that safe, serene feeling.

Holly is a socialite who, as a kind of “American geisha,” dates wealthy men and accepts cash gifts from them; she also aspires to marry such a man. If it isn’t about the wealth that makes Tiffany’s so appealing to her, then why is it that store, of all stores, that gives her that feeling of peace and security?

Material abundance, of the sort that a luxury jewelry store can easily represent, can give one a great and obvious sense of security, of safety and therefore of calm, peace, and serenity, that nothing bad can happen. Thus, Tiffany’s is a capitalist paradise. After all, money isn’t everything, but having one’s basic material needs taken care of certainly gives a sense of peace of mind, so material abundance ensures that peace of mind all the more.

Why does Holly want to “wake up one fine morning and have breakfast at Tiffany’s” (page 35)? Why breakfast at Tiffany’s, which at the time sold only jewelry, and not food (the Blue Box Café first opened in 2017)? Consider the origin of the word ‘breakfast’–a breaking of a fast. So it’s the ending of a period of going without food.

The implication here, symbolically understood, is that one is going from rags to riches, from fasting or starving to abundance, all in one fell swoop. Such has always been Holly’s ambition: to go from her humble beginnings as Lulamae Barnes, married in her teens to a veterinarian named Doc Golightly (Ebsen) in Texas, to her now glamorous life in New York City, renamed Holly Golightly and chasing rich men to subsidize her now high-maintenance lifestyle, and thence, she hopes, to marriage and solid security with such a rich man, who would be Tiffany’s personified.

What we have here is a traditional woman’s version of the American Dream: social mobility through marrying up. The story takes place before the Sexual Revolution, and so women were still chained to the fetters of traditional sex roles, meaning they had to get their access to wealth through successful men…if they were young, pretty, and desirable enough…which Holly assuredly is, at the age of about eighteen or nineteen.

Beyond this dream of chasing wealth, though, is the pursuit of what Lacan would have called an ultimately unfulfillable desire. Tiffany’s symbolizes a nirvana one can never attain, though Holly will never stop trying, romantic dreamer that she is. She can never settle for an ordinary life, and that’s why she leaves New York City and the unnamed narrator for the unknown at the end of Capote’s novella. She may not have married José Ybarra-Jaeger (José da Silva Pereira in the film, played by José Luis de Vilallonga), the rich Brazilian diplomat, but she does go to Brazil in search of a similar dream.

This endless seeking out of more and more to satisfy a desire that can never be satisfied, is not only the essence of what drives Holly to do what she does (symbolically, what Lacan would have called jouissance), but also her unfulfillable desire can be paralleled to capitalism’s endless pursuit of profit (i.e., the Marxist notion of surplus value and Lacan’s plus-de-jouir, or “surplus enjoyment”). Hence, Tiffany’s can be seen as a capitalist paradise.

It is common for people to dream about striking it rich rather than doing the hard work of fighting for workers’ rights and reducing income inequality. Hence, even in today’s world of the obscenely wealthy few vs the impoverished many, we still have all this simping for billionaires going on. Holly can be seen to represent such people, on at least some level.

We can contrast her lifestyle among the affluent in New York City with the uniformly poor in “House of Flowers,” set in Third World Haiti, “A Diamond Guitar,” set in the austerity of an American prison, and “A Christmas Memory,” about a family so poor that the narrator, when a boy and close to his older female cousin, had to save up every penny they could get over the year to pay for the ingredients they needed to make Christmas fruitcakes (page 144). While Holly dreams of the security that comes from wealth, so many others just struggle to survive.

Capote’s novella begins with bar owner Joe Bell telling the narrator about photos of a black man holding a wooden sculpture of a woman’s head, and the woman looks exactly like Holly. Yunioshi is the one who found the wooden head while traveling in Africa, and he informed Bell of it.

It seems that Holly’s been to Africa some time since the end of the narrator’s story about her. Bell imagines she’s “got to be rich to go mucking around in Africa.” (page 8) In this incident, we see again the contrast between being a girl from the First World Who aspires to wealth, and people in poverty with much more humble dreams, as those in Capote’s aforementioned three stories.

The story about her in Africa causes the narrator to recall his story about her from years before, back in the 1940s. Though she had dreams of wealth, she lived in a modest brownstone apartment building in Manhattan’s Upper East Side. Yunioshi, in an apartment on the top floor, complains about Holly ringing his bell and waking him up to open the door for her.

This scene corresponds with the beginning of the film after the opening credits, though as I said above, the novella doesn’t portray Yunioshi as a spastic racist Asian stereotype, bumping into things, and having buck teeth sticking out of his face. Blake Edwards films are full of slapstick, but it’s sad that he stooped to this low for cheap laughs. In all fairness to Rooney, though, when he realized how offensive his performance was, he expressed the deepest remorse and publicly apologized to Asian communities. Edwards was similarly contrite.

Anyway, the narrator has seen her for the first time during this altercation with Yunioshi (page 11). He describes her as having “an almost breakfast-cereal air of health” (page 12). In this context, we note that a man who’s just “pick[ed] up the check” for her, one of those male pursuers of hers who pay for things for her in the hopes of getting…something…back from her. This picking up the check is the so-to-speak breakfast–the end of her poverty–that she hopes will one day lead to Tiffany’s.

From then on, she isn’t ringing Yunioshi’s bell, but the narrator’s, and they haven’t met yet (page 13). He learns more about her nonetheless, such as her cat (which is never named) and her playing the guitar, something she sometimes does sitting out on the fire escape as her hair dries (page 15). We’re reminded of the scene in the film when Hepburn is there, strumming and singing “Moon River,” with music by Henry Mancini.

When the narrator finally does meet her, it’s out by his window. Coming into his room, she explains that she’s trying to get away from another suitor. She notes the narrator’s resemblance to her brother, Fred, and so, feeling a brother transference, she wants to call him Fred. Note how she doesn’t go by her real name (Lulamae), she doesn’t call the narrator by his real name (which we never learn in the novella, and as I mentioned above, is given as Paul Varjak in the film), and the cat is never given a name (except “Cat” in the film).

At the end of the film, Holly contemplates their no-name status when justifying to Varjak why nobody belongs to anybody, and saying that she doesn’t know who she is. Namelessness, thus, represents social alienation, between people and in one’s own species-essence.

Linked with this alienation from within and without is how OJ Berman (Balsam) characterizes Holly: “She is a phony,” and “She isn’t a phony because she’s a real phony.” (page 27) Berman is a Hollywood talent agent who has groomed Holly in the hopes of making her into a movie star. She believes all the nonsense she says about herself, and his grooming of her, which has included French lessons to help her get rid of her original hillbilly accent from Texas, has been part of the process of creating her phony personality as a café society girl. (page 29)

To get back to her meeting of the narrator, he tells her he’s a writer. He also tells her that it is Thursday, which reminds her that she has to go to Sing Sing and meet a mafia man incarcerated there named Salvatore “Sally” Tomato. She’ll get the “weather report” from him: a coded message to transmit information about such criminal activities as the narcotics smuggling that she’ll get entangled in and arrested for towards the end of the story. She’ll give that “weather report” to Sally’s lawyer, Oliver O’Shaughnessy, every week.

As I’ve pointed out in many other posts, I regard mafia men in movies and fiction as representative of capitalists in general, since as a Marxist I regard capitalism’s accumulation of surplus value to be a theft of the value that workers put into the production of commodities; therefore, capitalism in general is criminal activity, whether legalized or not.

Holly’s regular involvement with Sally, therefore, is part of her own simping for the rich, which in turn is part of her dream of finding that peace and security that comes from wealth, as represented by Tiffany’s. The chaotic and troubling world from which she wishes to escape into a capitalist paradise is the capitalist hell of poverty, which she naturally fears. One is reminded of what Belle says to Scrooge in A Christmas Carol as an explanation for his own pursuit of wealth: she says to him, “You fear the world so much” (Dickens, page 50).

To get back to OJ Berman and whatnot, he first appears at one of Holly’s many parties, in which she hobnobs with rich and socially important people like him. In the film, you can spot a couple of Asians in the background, extras with no dialogue: they seem to be there as if to say, ‘Look, the filmmakers are not saying that all Asians are like Yunioshi.’ The inclusion of these two non-caricatured Asians hardly compensates for Rooney’s performance, though.

One presumably wealthy man that Holly shows interest in is Rusty Trawler. He’s thrice divorced, but he’ll end up marrying someone else (page 66). Rusty also seems to be a Nazi sympathizer, for according to a set of clippings from gossip columns about Holly and Rusty, “he attended rallies in Yorkville“, he’d “sent her a cable offering to marry her if Hitler didn’t” (recall that the narrator’s reminiscences about her take place during WWII, when her brother Fred is serving in the army), and Winchell always referred to [Rusty] as a Nazi (page 33).

Yes, Holly, in her pursuit of that capitalist paradise of peace, symbolized by Tiffany’s, is even willing to marry a fascist if he has money. Supporters of capitalism are willing to lean that far right, if need be.

Her wish to marry money runs deeper than mere gold-digging, though. The transactional relationship between men and women as a result of sex roles (he gives her money in exchange for at least the hope of sex) is, of course, profoundly alienating, exacerbated by modern capitalism. She opts for this transactional relationship with men (while also having something of a bisexual attraction to women, using the word “dyke” in a non-derogatory sense, and hinting at this sexuality in the stripper scene in the film) because, as I mentioned above, deep down, she cannot relate to people in a deep, meaningful way.

Her platonic friendship with the narrator, therefore, is an ideal escape from the usual ‘I give you something, so you give me something back’ trap between men and women, because recall, it is strongly implied, if you’re paying attention as you read, that the narrator is gay. Holly observes that if a man likes neither baseball nor horses, “he don’t like girls.” (page 34) The narrator likes neither; he’s even tried riding a horse with her in the park (pages 77-78), and he loses control of his mare and falls off. Also, when saying she’ll never rat out Sally Tomato in exchange for the cops dropping the charges against her in her connection with him, she addresses the narrator as “Maude,” slang at the time for a gay man or a male prostitute (page 91).

He has no sexual interest in her, a girl whom, recall, Capote wanted Marilyn Monroe to play, therefore Holly’s something of a sex goddess. He is, nonetheless, fascinated with her in the way a gay man might be with a beautiful woman or a talented female singer like Judy Garland, that is, adoring her for aesthetic reasons rather than sexual ones.

To get back to Rusty, when the narrator has learned that he’s married for the fifth time, according to a newspaper (page 66), he assumes that Holly is the bride, and he’s most unhappy to have learned of this. Later, he realizes that it isn’t Holly whom Rusty has married, but Mag Wildwood, a fellow socialite, friend and sometimes roommate of Holly’s, and a model with a stutter (page 67). He goes “limp with relief” to have learned of this.

On a Monday in October 1943, he is with Holly in Joe Bell’s bar drinking Manhattans (pages 47-48). Then, after lunch in a cafeteria in the park, they avoid the zoo, since Holly can’t stand to see anything in a cage; oddly, for Christmas she’ll buy him a beautiful bird cage and make him promise never to put a living thing in it. (page 53) She sees herself as a free bird.

On that Monday in October, they pass a Woolworth’s, and she wants him to go in with her and steal something (page 49). He goes in reluctantly, and she eyes some Halloween masks. The two of them put on masks and walk out of the store wearing them. After they’ve run off for a few blocks (they’ll wear the masks all the way home), she tells him how she used to steal things when she had to or wanted to, and she still does it every now and then. The scene is replicated in the movie.

That a young woman who attracts wealthy men in the hopes of one day marrying one, and who feels peace of mind only in a luxury jewelry store, would engage in shoplifting from time to time makes perfect sense to me. She embodies the self-centered materialism of capitalism; capitalists accumulate their wealth by stealing the fruits of workers’ labour.

In the film, the shoplifting scene comes right after a scene with the two in Tiffany’s, then in the public library. Note the contrast between the private property of the jewelry store and the 5 and 10 store where they steal the masks. Sandwiched in between in a place for the public, one she significantly doesn’t know about. As a lover of all things connected with capitalism, Holly is fully aware of those places that are private property, but she’s a bit of a fish out of water in public places.

Eventually, that dull, unromantic life she’s tried to run away from tries to find her and get her back. Such a life is personified in Doc Golightly (Ebsen), who’s been snooping around near the brownstone building and getting the narrator’s attention (pages 57-58). This is after the narrator has had a falling-out with her, over a slur he’s made about her way of getting money from men (page 56).

Doc is a personification of the cage she never wants to be trapped in. His appearance and the falling-out between her and the narrator sandwich her bird cage gift that he puts in front of her door: then she rejects it as much as he has, having put it “on a sidewalk ashcan waiting for the garbage collector.” (page 56), then it’s taken back by him into his room. She’ll reject Doc the cage again when he tries to take her back with him to Texas.

Oddly, her revulsion against animals in cages is disregarded by the moviemakers when we see a shot most deliberately taken of a bird in a cage in Holly’s apartment, early on in the film, during that party scene. We see Balsam as Berman looking at the bird. Is Holly supposed to be enigmatically contradicting herself here? Or is it a wish-fulfillment on the filmmakers’ part to put Holly in a cage, as we see when she decides to stay with Varjak at the end of the movie?

When the narrator first meets Doc, he imagines that the man, being so much older than Holly, is her father rather than her husband (page 59). Doc married her when she was just going on fourteen, making her the stepmother of kids he’s had from a previous marriage, kids older than she was! (page 60) Doc claims she had no reason to be unhappily married to him, as his daughters did all the housework and she didn’t have to lift a finger (pages 60-61).

As a horse doctor, he presumably has been able to provide a decent life for her. But the point is that, beyond how cringe we today would find such a marriage to a girl so young, Holly is a romantic who wants to rise up above the mediocre and the ordinary, to the heights that capitalism promises (but rarely delivers) and to those pleasures that jouissance wants (and never fully delivers). Hence, she left him, and despite his pleas for her to come back, she never will.

Still, when Madame Sapphia Spanella, another tenant in the brownstone, sees Holly and Doc embracing, she assumes he is another of Holly’s johns and is morally appalled. Holly thought she’d see her brother Fred before being surprised by Doc (page 64). Later, after Rusty’s married Mag, Holly learns of Fred’s having been killed in action, and she smashes everything in her apartment in a rage of grief. Spanella is as horrified now to know of this tantrum as she was scandalized before with her and Doc. As it turns out, not everyone in the past of otherwise self-centred Holly is contemptuously tossed aside. Elsewhere, now that Rusty is unavailable, she now has a new rich man: the Brazilian diplomat, José.

After Fred’s death and the arrival of José into her life, Holly is changed in many ways. She’s nowhere near as sociable as she once was, José has replaced Mag as her roommate, she generally never mentions Fred anymore, and she no longer calls the narrator “Fred” (page 71). The only times she ever leaves her apartment are on Thursdays to see Sally in Sing Sing.

Because she imagines she’ll soon marry José, she’s developed a “keen sudden un-Holly-like enthusiasm for homemaking,” thus making her buy a number of things that it doesn’t seem quite like her to buy. She’s bought two Gothic ‘easy’ chairs from the William Randolph Hearst estate, and given his tendency to have flirted with fascism around this time, though, perhaps this purchase in particular isn’t all that un-Holly-like (page 71). She’s also trying to learn Portuguese so she’ll be comfortable living in Rio when her husband-to-be takes her there (page 72).

Now, since Holly is taken to having rich men pay her way, whether they be husbands or not, it is apposite to point out that in the movie, Varjak also has someone paying his way. This is the wealthy Emily Eustache “2E” Failenson (Neal), his “decorator.” The inclusion of this character has a way of equalizing things between the sexes; it’s as if the filmmakers, in spite of preferring to put Holly in the ‘cage’ of a relationship with Varjak, don’t wish to leave the receiving of cash in exchange for sex to be stereotypically the exclusive domain of ‘gold digging women.’

After the fiasco with the horses, the narrator finds “photographs of Holly…front-paged by the late edition of the Journal-American and by the early editions of both the Daily News and the Daily Mirror.” (page 79) She’s been arrested in a narcotics bust connected with Sally Tomato (page 80).

The narrator imagines it must be Spanella who is to blame, given how she always complains to the authorities about Holly in a way we see Yunioshi do in the film (Yunioshi is also the one in the film who gets the cops on Holly for the drugs).

Joe Bell, who also likes Holly, wants the narrator to call her rich friends to help her out (page 83). The narrator tries Rusty and Mag, who turn on Holly, not wanting their names at all to be associated with her. Calling Doc in Texas is out of the question–Holly would never want that. Then the narrator tries Berman, who says she’ll be out on bail (pages 84-85).

When the narrator goes to find her in her apartment, though, she isn’t there. He does find a man in her home–José’s cousin, who has a message from José for her (pages 85-86). He wants to break off the marriage plans, because, like Rusty and Mag, José doesn’t want his name, family, and reputation to be stained by association with a girl mixed up with drugs. The narrator finds Holly in a hospital room, where she’s been since the arrest. There he reads her José’s letter (pages 87-88).

Now, she’s heartbroken to know that José has dumped her, that he’s just another “rat like Rusty” (page 88), but she’s not going to let that stop her from going to Brazil anyway. The narrator tries in all futility to stop her from jumping bail, for she won’t “waste a perfectly fine ticket” (page 90), and she won’t testify against Sally Tomato, even though she admits that she is “rotten to the core” (page 91).

I’m not interested in the sentimentalized, rom-com Hollywood ending of the film, so I’ll stick with the novella’s ending. Holly really does leave New York and the gay narrator, and she even gets rid of the cat, putting it outside the car taking her to the airport and telling the cat to “f___ off!” when it won’t leave her. (page 95)

Some may think of Holly favourably as a feminist free spirit for leaving the narrator, as opposed to her choosing to stay in her ‘cage’ in a patriarchal relationship with straight Varjak. But when we read the ending of Capote’s version, in which she isn’t freeing herself from a relationship with a gay friend–who has no wish to dominate her as a husband might–and where she doesn’t want to take responsibility for her involvement in a mafia racket or even for her cat, we realize that the narrator is right when he says to her, “You are a bitch.” (page 95)

She tosses the cat aside because of her fear of commitment, her wish never to be chained to anyone or anything, not caring at all about who or what she’s hurting as a result of abandoning them–Doc, the cat, or her friend the narrator. She is just that self-centred, on an endless quest to satisfy her insatiable thirst for jouissance, that surplus-value plus-de-jouir that connects her desires with capitalism, hence her trip to Rio when she’s lost her José.

Still, the narrator will find the abandoned cat and take care of it (page 97). He gets a postcard from her, saying she’s been to Buenos Aires, liking it there far more than Brazil. She’s “joined at the hip with duhvine Señor. Love? Think so.” He’s married and with “7 brats,” though (page 97). In other words, she’ll use him for his money, for as long as the relationship lasts. Then, as we learned from the beginning of the novella, she’ll pursue her elusive jouissance somewhere in Africa. The narrator just hopes that Holly, like the cat that in many ways is a double of her, has found a place where she truly belongs (page 98).

As I said above, the three stories in my edition of the book that fallow BAT—“House of Flowers,” A Diamond Guitar,” and “A Christmas Memory”–all share certain themes with the main story, and I think they’re all worth mentioning before I end this analysis. These themes include: platonic relationships and/or friendships with implied homosexual elements, the breaking-away and ending of said friendships with the aim of attaining personal freedom, and whether or not marriage is a kind of prison.

In the first of these three stories, set in Port-au-Prince, Haiti, Ottilie is a beautiful, strong-willed prostitute, parallel to Holly as an “American geisha.” But where Holly hopes to marry a rich man and experience the capitalist paradise of peace and freedom from the “mean reds,” a paradise symbolized by Tiffany’s, Ottllie’s marriage to the aptly-named Royal Bonaparte, a marriage in the Third World, a harsh contrast to the opulence of New York City, it is a nightmare in which she is tyrannized by her new grandmother-in-law, the also aptly-named Old Bonaparte…a witch. Her new home is the cage Ottilie is trapped in, “like a house of flowers” (page 109).

In such historically impoverished countries as India and China, it was common for women to be treated like abject slaves by their mothers-in-law, since in a patrilineal society, a married woman leaves the family of her flesh and blood to live with her husband’s family, who don’t regard her as their own flesh and blood. So, the contrast between the First World and the Third World is apparent in regard to a woman’s marriage: one as, on the one hand, at least a dream of marrying up into Tiffany’s heaven, vs on the other hand, marrying into patriarchal hell.

In “A Diamond Guitar,” it’s been said that Mr. Schaeffer is parallel to Holly for being, like her, a dreamer; but I must disagree and say that he corresponds to the narrator of BAT, and that it’s Tico Feo who corresponds to Holly, and for several reasons. Tico Feo is a young man with blond hair (like Holly, young and blonde); the boy tells a lot of lies (as Holly is a “phony”), he plays the guitar, as she does, and like her, he eventually frees himself from the Alabama prison he and Schaeffer are stuck in (and just as Holly jumps bail and leaves the narrator in NYC, so does Tico Feo abandon Schaeffer in the prison).

Schaeffer’s and Tico Feo’s relationship isn’t at all physical, but “they were as lovers” (page 130), just as Holly and the narrator of BAT have a platonic relationship, but he is so fascinated with her as almost to be in love with her. The narrator in BAT expresses himself artistically as a writer; Schaeffer does so by carving dolls.

In “A Christmas Memory,” there’s another platonic male-to-female relationship, but this time in the form of a boy and his much elder cousin. Both characters are unnamed, though she calls him “Buddy,” and he, the narrator, calls her simply “my friend.” This kind of naming and non-naming is similar to how the unnamed narrator of BAT is addressed as “Fred” by Holly (recall, not her real name, either), implying a transference of her brother-to-sister relationship with the real Fred that parallels the familial relationship of cousins “Buddy” and his “friend.”

So we can see a number of parallel themes and motifs in all these stories, including also Capote’s autobiographical elements in at least three of the four stories, through the implied homosexuality in the narrator of BAT, the platonic homosexuality of Schaeffer’s and Tico Feo’s relationship, and how “Buddy,” the boy in “A Christmas Memory,” dramatizes much of Capote’s childhood. We see the superiority of platonic relationships over transactional, sexual ones, and we also see the yearning to escape from one’s cages–literal ones, metaphorical ones, and ones made of flowers.

Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, London, Penguin Essentials, 1961