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.
Holly was always awestruck by Tiffany and Co and fascinated by how the rich people could enter the place and actually purchase something. She made herself believe that she needed that to be her life, and to do that her beauty would be her only weapon. This is evident in her clothing style, She dresses like an upper-class woman, as did Lily. It is as though they allowed the social class hierarchy to affect them and cause them to objectify themselves to a point where they do not just reduce themselves to their beauty, but also make themselves believe that they needed to look and dress a certain way for their beauty to show through the harshness of society.
Unfortunately, yet unsurprisingly, media has not stopped objectifying women. This objectification roots from how easy it is for society to devalue women. Moreover, the present media objectifies women in various forms. For instance, the song "Animals" by Maroon 5 (2014), has a line that practically describes the concept of rape:
Yet, the song peaked at number three on the US Billboard Hot 100 giving Maroon 5 their tenth top 10 single in the U.S. and was rated number 1 in many countries worldwide. Media feeds off people's likes and needs. If songs as such are gaining so much fame regardless of its harsh, belittling of women, then there will be many Lily's and Holly's to come even with the advancement of the world."You can find other fish in the sea
You can pretend it's meant to be
But you can't stay away from me"
