Breakfast At Tiffany's Arranged Marriages

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Throughout history, society has never cared much for women’s happiness. Arranged marriages were used to buy and to sell women to the highest bidder and women were expected to comply for the best in interest of their families. While society did not care if a man has an affair, a woman is expected to keep a content facade. Helga Crane from the novel Quicksand, May Newland from the novel The Age of Innocence, and Holly Golightly from the novella Breakfast at Tiffany’s all have suffered through marriages in order to have a place in the world. The patriarchal society that these women live in has conditioned them to believe that in order to not only survive, but also ensure that their love ones survive, they must belong to the “strongest” man that …show more content…

Holly spend her childhood outside of society, running with her brother Fred from their abusive foster parents. Holly and Fred were later taken in by Holly’s future husband, Doc Golightly. Once Holly marries Doc, she lives an easy and comfortable life, but it was not the life that Holly thought would be for her. While married to Doc, Holly has a fairly comfortable life, she has enough food each day, a safe place for her brother to live and no worries about whether she has enough money to live on. Doc was also not the husband she thought she would marry so she flees in search of her ideal life. Holly moves around and finally settles in New York. In the 1960s, women were expected to still be housewives, still under the control of their husbands or their fathers, so a single woman living alone is considered inappropriate with assumptions that she is selling herself. No matter what Holly choices are, society still controls her fate. If Holly is married, life becomes doable but once she defies society, she has to face society’s consequences. In New York, Holly struggles to maintain her lifestyle and supplements her income by visiting a felon. When Holly goes against societal norms, society will push her out. Society will not allow Holly to make it on her own, so she has to resort to illegal activities in order to survive. Holly knows that society will not let her support herself or her brother by herself, so she actively seeks for a potential rich husband, Rusty Trawler, even if he might be gay. Doc later comes to visit and tries to take his “wife” home. Once he sees Holly he says: “geese don’t they feed you up here” which proves that it is evident to Doc that Holly is unable to support herself in her new lifestyle. Once Doc realizes that Holly will not leave with him he then threatens that her brother will have to stay in the army to survive, which

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