gilded cage

gilded cage

A life of wealth and luxury but without true freedom, happiness, or contentment. She married her husband because of his fortune, but her lonely life inside their mansion with a man she did not love quickly became a gilded cage.
See also: cage, gild
Farlex Dictionary of Idioms.

gilded cage

The encumbrances or limitations that often accompany material wealth, as in She had furs, jewelry, whatever money could buy, but was trapped in a gilded cage. This metaphoric expression indicating that riches cannot buy happiness was popularized (and possibly coined) in a song, "A Bird in a Gilded Cage" (1990; lyrics by Arthur J. Lamb, music by Harry von Tilzer), about a young girl marrying for wealth instead of love and paying for luxury with a life of regret.
See also: cage, gild
The American Heritage® Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer.
See also:
  • cannot for the life of me/him/her/us/them
  • can't for the life of me
  • live a life of
  • live a life of (something)
  • life
  • give (one's) life
  • (someone's or something's) time has come
  • creature
  • not give a stuff
  • Such is life!
References in periodicals archive
(He also offers the original song "Gilded Cage" for the soundtrack.)
And in his dotage, Busbee enjoyed a gilded cage existence.
The scientists -- her captors -- seek to assuage her with food and luxurious conveniences, but Gargi knows she is a bird in a gilded cage: "I may be uneducated but I am not stupid.
Mahmoud Abbas is "locked into a gilded cage to what remains of Oslo," Black states bluntly, in reference to the 1993 and 1995 Oslo Accords which binded Palestinian leadership to a political vision of a two-state solution that now seems a distant possibility.
FROM Mollie King's gilded cage to Davood Ghadami parachuting in as James Bond, when Strictly goes to Blackpool it does it big.
"I need to pay back my love," Ai insisted at a news conference in Central Park, honoring "a city [where] every young artist wants to be," where "you never feel you are a foreigner." The location of one of his large-scale works -- a "Gilded Cage" installed at the southeast entrance of Central Park -- is in no way, shape or form a coincidence.
Renegade Strat, leader of The Lost, is besotted by Raven, who is trapped in a gilded cage by her vulgar and wealthy parents.
The latter arena is a gilded cage, the former a literal prison.
'Poe's short story is about a family whose members long to come out from their gilded cage. They struggle to find happiness in dreams and achieve them but shown in a very macabre and creepy way.
The refusal to allow Zarrab""gilded cage" detention surprised many because a number of high profile and wealthy men--including foreign nationals--have been allowed such digs.
THE VIRGINIA FAULKNER AWARD FOR EXCELLENCE IN WRITING $1000 for work published in Prairie Schooner in 2015 Lawrence Lenhart for the essay "The Well-Stocked and Gilded Cage: Psittaculture Nervosa" in Summer 2015
The now-retired college professor, a Jew from southern California, was trapped in a gilded cage of bourgeois entitlement.
When the family takes a vacation without first vetting the hotel, only to have their reservation downgraded and the red carpet withdrawn the minute they're seen, it's a bitter reminder that their gilded cage doesn't always allow access to the larger world.
Little wonder that he apparently wishes to be released from his gilded cage and be allowed to fly the coop to Crystal Palace who may well be heading for relegation to the Championship unless he can do what miracle worker Tony Pulis did.
Repping a concerted effort by helmer Shawn Levy to spread his wings beyond the gilded cage of family-friendly tentpoles, this alternately manic and mawkish adaptation of Jonathan Tropper's 2009 novel aims for "Kramer vs.