The Doom of Lily
The narrator here mentions this about Lily’s mother, who may well be a representation of how society viewed Lily. She was made to believe that her beauty was her greatest weapon and her strongest tool towards prosperity. Her beauty was associated with the term, "nucleus", making it the center-point of their lives. It was almost as though their world revolved around, and depended on her appearance. However, little did she know that her beauty would be her greatest weakness, too. Due to her own obsession with objectifying herself and reducing her value to just her beauty, she never was able to be with her true soulmate, a.k.a Selden.“Only one thought consoled her, and that was the contemplation of Lily's beauty. She studied it with a kind of passion, as though it were some weapon she had slowly fashioned for her vengeance. It was the last asset in their fortunes, the nucleus around which their life was to be rebuilt. She watched it jealously, as though it were her own property and Lily its mere custodian; and she tried to instill into the latter a sense of the responsibility that such a charge involved.” (p. 34)
Even though, initially, he fell for her because of her looks, he did care about her ultimately in the novel, enough to want to marry her regardless of her social standing. She was so obsessed with becoming rich that she sided with society’s perspective of her and used her looks to try to get rich men to like her. By trying to compete with society’s classes and standards, Lily loses to her life by failing to pay her debts and ultimately dies of a sleeping-pill overdose.
This is similar to the movie, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, where the main character, Holly Golightly, played by Audrey Hepburn, aims to attract a man with her looks and marry him for his money. Instead of picking Paul Varjak, who confesses his love to her and insists on marrying her, she chooses to marry Jose, a man who is "wildly rich" just as she had always desired.
