Women and Cats: Belonging in Breakfast at Tiffany’s

Written for a case study assignment for a Women in Literature course

Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s and its film adaptation have many differences, perhaps the most obvious being the movie’s romance between Holly Golightly and the male protagonist, which does not exist in the novella. The narrator of the novella is certainly fascinated by Holly, and at one point says he was in love with her, but there is no explicitly romantic connection or reciprocation, and she leaves and does not return. In both the novella and the movie, Holly, a free spirit who does not feel connected to a name or identity and has no desire to belong to anyone, is shown to relate to her nameless stray cat. The cat is central to both of the very different endings. Thus, the cat symbolizes the attitudes the different versions of the story show toward Holly. Although the novella shows the cat and hopefully Holly finding somewhere to belong, but not with each other or with the narrator, the film uses a reunion with the cat to push the romantic relationship. Ultimately, the use of this symbol of Holly’s sense of identity and belonging to get Holly and the man together romantically shows the way film encourages male ownership of women, and wants female characters to exist only as romantic prizes for male protagonists.

In Holly and the cat’s final scene in the novella, Holly justifies abandoning the cat by repeating her assertion from earlier in the book that they were both independents and didn’t owe each other anything. She then changes her mind, saying they did belong to each other after all, and says “it could go on forever. Not knowing what’s yours until you’ve thrown it away” (Capote 86). This is significant because she previously said that she couldn’t name the cat because couldn’t own anything without finding a place where she could belong. In this final moment, she acknowledges that maybe she had been close to finding that place. Ultimately however Holly and the cat do not end up belonging to each other; Holly leaves the cat and the narrator for good. The narrator sees the cat in someone else’s window, and comments, “I wondered what his name was, for I was certain he had one now, certain he'd arrived somewhere he belonged. African hut or whatever, I hope Holly has, too” (Capote 87). Evidently, the cat’s adoption symbolizes Holly’s own hopes for belonging, but being in the right place does not necessarily mean settling into a traditional American domestic romance, something the narrator seems to understand and accept.

In contrast, the climactic scene with the cat in the movie places Holly’s comparison of herself to the cat within the context of an exchange of new dialogue in which the man tells Holly that he loves her so she belongs to him, and she says that “people don’t belong to people.” In this exchange, Holly’s issues with belonging become not about finding a place to fit in but about people and pushing back against a free spirit being caged. Releasing the cat is turned into Holly rejecting any claim of ownership of the cat not just on principle but in symbolic protest to the idea of the man having ownership over her. Going back to look for the cat moments later is not realizing her own bond with the cat but realizing that she does want to belong to the man, and when they find the cat and kiss, which does not happen in the novella, it represents the idea that Holly has found her identity and sense of belonging – with him.

The change in the climax with the cat represents the film’s overall transformation of Holly and the narrator into protagonists in a love story. While the narrator in the novella loves Holly, he says he was in love with her “just as I’d once been in love with my mother’s elderly colored cook and a postman who let me follow him on his rounds and a whole family named McKendrick. That category of love generates jealousy, too” (Capote 60). In other words, it is really an infatuation or a fascination, more than anything romantic or sexual. He explores multiple types of love. That is not the case in the film, which seems to have decided that romantic sexual love is the only one worth presenting.

And that love must be reciprocated, so that the man, who represents film’s assumed heterosexual male audience, can be satisfied and in power. As Laura Mulvey states in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” the role of male characters is to be surrogates for male audiences and to be active figures driving the story, while the role of female characters is to be passive erotic objects of desire. This mindset is absolutely evident in the film adaptation of Breakfast at Tiffany’s. The narrator shifts into a protagonist, and is more outspoken about what he wants, so his desire becomes core to the plot. Holly is very similar from book to film for most of the movie, but her appearance certainly has the male gaze in mind, and the conclusion takes away her active decision to remain a free spirit and leave. She can be wild for most of the film, but in the last moments she must be tamed and the man must be given a claim of ownership over her.

Holly’s cat shows some of the subtler changes from the novella to the movie, but they are significant changes. For most of the script, the cat’s role does not change at all. It is only at the end that the role changes. The cat representing Holly wanting to find a sense of belonging in a place and within herself in the novella is a striking difference from the cat representing Holly resisting but giving into romance and belonging to another person in the film. This change marks a trend in film to require romance, as if that is all women are meant for. The nameless man without much of a personality somehow becomes the hero, and the fascinating woman must fall into his arms.

Works Cited

Breakfast at Tiffany’s. Directed by Blake Edwards, performances by Audrey Hepburn and George Peppard, Paramount, 1961.

Capote, Truman. Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms. NY: Modern Library, 2013.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Visual and Other Pleasures. 2nd ed., Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.