Queer Consumerism, Straight Happiness: Highsmith’s “Right Economy”

The Price of Salt (1952) is often touted as the first lesbian novel with a happy ending. In the afterword to its 1990 reissue, Patricia Highsmith explains that she first published it under a pseudonym to avoid being "labelled a lesbian-book writer"; she also draws attention to the fact that the novel first appeared in hardcover and received "some serious and respectable reviews" before being marketed as lesbian pulp and selling a million copies. 1 Defensive vanity gives way to more dignified pride when Highsmith describes the stream of fan letters, from men as well as women, thanking her for telling a story in which homosexuals did not have "to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality ... or by collapsing—alone and miserable and shunned—into a depression equal to hell" (PS 261). Readers liked the fact that her main characters Therese and Carol "were going to try to have a future together" (PS 261). Highsmith also tells of replying to some of these fans, encouraging the lonely ones to seek similarly inclined people in "a larger town" (PS 262). There is agreeable irony in this image of Highsmith—whom biographers portray as orneriness incarnate, sexual predator, misanthrope, and habitual racist—embracing the novel's therapeutic and educative effects. Like any good liberal, she not only affirms the interpretation of the novel's happy ending but also accepts as legitimate the values this ending reflects.

One may infer from her account that these fans were also good liberals—at least in their manner of reading. The paradigmatic liberal reader, Steven Knapp explains, "discovers, by reading literature, the conflicts, inconsistencies, and overdeterminations among her own dispositions," and is thus able to "read herself as an instance of descriptive representation." When literature is subject to a reader's dialectic of identification and disinterest, of involvement and self-awareness, it doesn't so much dictate values to readers as it "helps us find out what our evaluative dispositions are." 2 Such readers evidently took away from The Price of Salt valuable self-confirmation, perhaps even inspiration or courage to pursue same-sex desire, without confusing their lives with those of Highsmith's characters. A distilled formulation of this ambidexterity appears in one of the letters Highsmith quotes from, where the reader thanks her for the "story. It is a little like my own story" (PS 262). The unassuming analogical phrase here, "a little like," allows for capacious differences between the author's and the reader's worlds, even as the reader revels in their likeness.

In the postwar era this queer-liberal reading style played a crucial role in the birth of a vibrant lesbian subculture. Jennifer Worley has shown how lesbian pulp fiction, despite its general aim to gratify heterosexual male prurience and despite the era's oppressive policing of homosexuality, functioned to render queer female identity fathomable: "the pulps offered [these] readers a vocabulary of dress, language, gesture, sexual practice, and public behavior from which they could both forge their own performance of sexual identity and 'read' the performances of others." Anecdotal evidence confirms the pulps' facilitation—"as physical objects of exchange [among friends], as conduits to a shared pleasure"—of women's emergent but still uncertain sense of same-sex desire. 3 Here readerly agency and consumerist agency dovetail to the benefit of self-inquiring, socially forming subjects. This history supports Michael Warner's contention that "variant desires," like any "deep pleasure," may involve "discovering" something previously undetected; which is to say that these desires need not be considered "legitimate only if they can be shown to be immutable, natural, and innate." 4 (This does not deny the possibility but only the necessity of innate desire.) This is part of his broader critique of the way majoritarian culture, in privileging the normal, stigmatizes and drives deviant sex practices from public view. Worley's account reminds us, however, that majoritarian culture's economic structure—particularly its consumerist focus and its knack for market segmentation—has for decades contributed importantly to the production of queer knowledge.

Furthermore, in keying queer desire enhanced by liberal agency to personal discovery, as well as addressing the question of legitimacy, these accounts gesture toward one of liberalism's intractable values: the development or flourishing of persons according to their varying conceptions of the good. Promoted since the eighteenth century in the U.S. as "the pursuit of happiness," this core tenet is enshrined in the postwar era by the United Nations' 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights as "the full development of the human personality." 5 The premium the post-Holocaust era placed on self-realization testified to—indeed it was the practical extension of—the premium it placed, to cite again the UDHR, on the equal "dignity and worth of the human person." 6 At once chastening and enabling, these abstract ideals formed the basis of midcentury liberalism's self-legitimating project. They constituted a secular and cognitive ethical framework within which a polity's specific social, cultural, and economic practices could evolve. 7

Historical propinquity alone invites consideration of Highsmith's strategies of legitimation in light of this heightened human rights consciousness. But there are closer ties. In what follows I argue that UDHR liberalism, besides circulating in the penumbra of The Price of Salt's reception, enjoys a lively presence within the novel. As the novel's celebrated ending suggests, the sign under which the values of human worth and self-fulfillment operate is happiness. We shall see, however, that the trope of happiness in The Price of Salt does much more than help to legitimate Therese's project of self-development, important as this project is. I suggest, rather, that it functions to draw into intimate proximity two sources of postwar American consternation: the question of same-sex desire's legitimacy and the question of postwar consumer society's legitimacy. On the one hand, Highsmith enlists the ideology of consumerism to legitimate same-sex desire. As a conduit to personal discovery and a mode of defending homosexual pleasure, this feature of postwar society accomplishes much; but like the ideology it mirrors—namely, democratic pluralism—it also bears liabilities. Thus only by reversing course, by enlisting same-sex desire to legitimate consumerism, does Highsmith manage to figure her characters as liberals in pursuit of their own flourishing. 8

Eleanor Roosevelt, who chaired the Human Rights Commission responsible for drafting the UDHR, evidently liked Strangers on a Train (1948). 9 In this novel Highsmith effectively honors UDHR values in the breach: Bruno recognizes the "priceless[ness]" of Miriam's life after taking it; her husband Guy, too, concedes that she may not have been "worth a great deal as a person ... by [his second wife] Anne's standards or by anyone's. But she had been a human being," implying her worthiness of at least some life. 10 By 1955 Highsmith seems to enjoy parodying these values. One of Tom Ripley's favorite impersonation "skits" is of "Mrs. Roosevelt writing 'My Day' after a visit to a clinic for unmarried mothers." 11 He clearly does not take very seriously this champion of liberal universalism, who frequently wrote about her work on the HRC in her syndicated column. And yet Tom's parodic attitude is at least partly undone by the travesty of his career as killer-gentleman of leisure. Despite Tom's capacity, as Michael Trask has trenchantly argued, to align his "method" of impersonation with liberalism's prized ontology of autonomy, this achievement has little going for it, Highsmith implies, without a supplemental respect for human pricelessness—not only others' but his own. 12 He and his wife are what Grey Gowrie calls "living-dead people," for whom material comfort and convenience fill the moral vacuum. 13 This condition arguably finds its fullest figuration in the scene where Tom is buried alive in Ripley Under Ground (1970). The episode is brief enough to spare him the fate of the Guanajuato mummy Theodore contemplates in A Game for the Living (1958).

Between Bruno and Guy's honoring breach and Tom and Heloise's deadening crypt, up crops Carol and Therese's happy end. Tapping the literary tradition most congenial to imagining self-realization as a good thing, the Bildungsroman, the conclusion of The Price of Salt signals Therese's happy reversal of the "hopelessness" she suffers at the start of the narrative "of ever being the person she wanted to be" (PS 14). 14 Along the way, by my casual count, she and other characters experience or assess their happiness more than three dozen times. As a discursive trope, happiness conventionally involves not only feelings but also cognitive and evaluative faculties. Indeed, happiness could not maintain its cultural prominence without its capacity to signify other (or more) than sentient feeling. As the cultural critic Sara Ahmed observes, it "mediates between individual and social, private and public, affective and evaluative, mind and body, as well as norms, rules and ideals and ways of being in the world." 15 In The Price of Salt happiness is often invoked to indicate Therese's bumpy progress toward a sexual orientation that satisfies, but it also becomes Highsmith's means for testing the limits of liberal normativity, as when Therese entertains the idea that "love" may be less a matter of "warm and happy" feelings she sometimes has for her boyfriend Richard than the "blissful insanity" that Carol provokes (PS 43, 23). 16

Within Highsmith's intellectual orbit the Partisan Review's 1948 publication of Lionel Trilling's essay on the Kinsey Report (to which I return below) and Leslie Fiedler's landmark essay on Huck and Jim reflects midcentury liberalism's growing concern to engage seriously with the question of homosexuality. 17 Ironically, however, in Highsmith's novel the homosexual theme commands so much attention that critics generally overlook its trenchant engagement with the era's more pervasive concern to grasp the implications of consumer society. Briefly, as the U.S. shifted from a wartime economy of scarcity to a consumer economy of abundance, it was beset with a crisis of legitimacy. Some critics decried Americans' ostensibly insatiable appetite for material goods as the ruin of genuine goodness—what Christian existentialist Joseph Haroutunian called "living according to truth and right." 18 For him and his ilk, happiness itself was no longer legitimate because it reflected the triumph of "a new infinite," provided by comfort-producing machines, over "the old eternal" of transcendent good, which an economy of scarcity and its attendant sense of "man's finitude" had managed to preserve. 19 As the historian Howard Mumford Jones memorably intoned in 1953, the fully privatized right to pursue happiness now "guarantee[d] the American citizen the ghastly privilege of pursuing a phantom and embracing a delusion." 20

Others worried instead that the onset of prosperity after World War II had, as David Riesman put it, "depleted" Americans' "stockpile of new and exhilarating wants"; they were now facing a troubling "wantlessness." This is why, according to journalist and editor Eric Larrabee, abundance "has not necessarily made people happier": "we seem to have constructed a machine which can satisfy wants faster than it can create them, yet is dependent on wants in order to keep going. We are running low on our supply of utopian dreams[.] ... We are so doubtful about the national aims that the President has appointed a commission to find out what they are." 21 For all its devotion to self-examination, Larrabee muses, the nation can't seem to parlay its material and intellectual resources into anything it can strongly believe in or be committed to. Here the absence of new value and meaning amounted to a failure of applied political-economic imagination. Americans risked delegitimation, in other words, by their failure to flourish. Either way, postwar prosperity threatened to render American liberalism a casualty of its own success.

The Price of Salt, I argue, splits the difference of this debate. As the novel's beginning indicates—both its title and its opening scene of Therese's employment in a Manhattan department store during Christmas rush—the world Therese and Carol inhabit is pervaded by commerce and consumerism, by institutions of private enterprise and private life. 22 Besides the department store, its emblematic locations are the suburban home Carol lives in and the comfortable sedan she and Therese tour the country in. Therese may loathe the working conditions of the Frankenberg "prison" (PS 4), but she's not averse to buying its merchandise, such as the book of Degas reproductions that "Richard wanted and hadn't been able to find anywhere" (PS 93). One of her and Carol's early dates leads them to Chinatown where they "ducked from one shop to another, looking at things and buying things" (PS 94). On their road trip, they buy things at every turn—from homemade sausages in Pennsylvania for Therese's former co-worker Mrs Robichek to suede shirts in Estes Park for Carol's daughter and for Therese herself (PS 157, 187). Indeed, this cross-country tour is an extension of, rather than an escape from (as some critics suggest), the comfortable life in the suburbs that Carol's estranged husband funds. Consumer agency, as we'll see, becomes the central means by which Therese and Carol signal their mutual interests, probe their desires, and think through a philosophy of happiness. To be sure, their consumerist ethos has some troubling strings attached; it proves both to enable and to obstruct their ambition of self-fulfillment. Still, they take advantage of what historian Joyce Appleby identifies as consumerism's key social and personal value. "It's not that our humanity requires commerce for its fulfilment," she explains, "but rather that in a commercial society, a whole battery of new cultural means has been created to articulate a broader range of human intentions." 23 On balance, Carol and Therese participate in the broadening and validating of this range.

Ice-Cream Cones and Gooey Fudge Sundaes

Critics tend to view The Price of Salt's titular metaphors as signs of the disciplinary penalties that Cold War homophobia imposed on persons who acted on their same-sex desires. Carol and Therese do not, to recall Highsmith's afterword, "pay for" their romance in suicide or mental collapse, but Carol does lose the custody of her daughter and Therese is subject to her former boyfriend's epistolary verbal abuse. Yet reading price as exclusively sacrificial or punitive and salt as exclusively sexual occludes the homologies Highsmith labors to establish between amorous and consumer economies, wherein price functions to register potential exchangeability or substitutability and to calibrate desire to the availability of goods or persons. Highsmith keeps a healthy distance from the seductive but radically anti-social vision of the market economy that Michael Clune identifies in certain midcentury writers. For William Gaddis, Frank O'Hara, and others "the price system structures subjectivity" in that "interest and desire play across an environment already organized by price." An "object of cultural fascination," this "purely economic world" allows them to imagine economic activity such as price comparison and consumer choice as being entirely independent of social or intersubjective relations. 24 In fact, that is this world's raison d'être: the writers Clune examines promote an aesthetic alternative to realism's representation of actually existing conditions. They want us to accept "that literature's value is not always a social value." Its value might be instead to advance the idea of an aesthetic world elsewhere. 25

By contrast, Highsmith adheres closely to the realist literary tradition, which more readily accommodates authorial ambitions to reflect, revalue, and potentially transform the social world. In her exploration of the relays between amorous and consumer economies, however, Highsmith does not assume that these psychosocial structures entirely organize midcentury experience and value. Crucially, she suggests, not everything valued can be priced—specifically, not UDHR ideas of human dignity and worth—even if the priceless status of the human being often appears overshadowed by a market logic of rarity. The novel poses in effect the following questions: When is the happiness derived from choosing a same-sex love partner a lot like the pleasure derived from choosing an expensive leather handbag (such as the one Therese buys for Carol)? Conversely, when is the happiness derived from a leather handbag a lot like the pleasure derived from a love partner? When are these choices and conceptions of the good not at all similar, and why not? The ethical stakes of The Price of Salt ultimately depend on the viability, the intelligibility, of these questions.

On the one hand, for the purposes of legitimating same-sex desire, the novel imagines amorous and consumerist modes of desire as practically identical. The homology underwrites Carol's righteous (if unsuccessful) defense against the family court's accusations of her "vice and degeneration" (PS 229). Erotic intimacy, she insists, "is a question of pleasure after all, and what's the use debating the pleasure of an ice-cream cone versus a football game—or a Beethoven quartet versus the Mona Lisa" (PS 229). Here she banks on the moral triviality of consumer choice and the subjective principle of aesthetic taste to challenge traditional homophobic prejudice. Her consumerist ethos thus avoids the pitfalls and inconsistencies that Lionel Trilling discovers in Alfred Kinsey's scientistic arguments in Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (1948). Trilling observes that not without disingenuousness does the Report reserve its "harshest language" for criticizing "the idea of the Normal," while "letting the idea of the Natural develop quietly into the idea of the Normal." He allows that for liberal Americans committed to tolerance the beneficent effects of establishing "a democratic pluralism of sexuality" are many. 26 For one thing, the pluralist ideology helps to expose the narrow-mindedness of the pervasive tendency to imagine the homosexual as a neurotic, degenerate psychopath. But the Report's mission of tolerance hinges on unacknowledged and dubious methodological biases. For instance, it defines male potency in terms of frequency of orgasm, rather than, say, "the ability to withhold orgasm long enough to bring the woman to climax." It also problematically reduces human sexuality to animalistic behavior "by encouraging people in their commitment to mechanical attitudes toward life." 27 As mechanization takes command, Trilling fears (not entirely unlike Haroutunian), people may detach sex from important emotional, social, and moral aspects of their lives.

From Trilling's standpoint, then, Carol's consumerist argument for sexual preference can look like a less fraught form of "democratic pluralism." At least it takes the human subject's pleasure into consideration, whereas Kinsey's methodology neglects to ascertain whether a sex practice "is actually enjoyable." 28 But while Carol's defense of same-sex desire doesn't rely on scientific authority, her invocation of an aesthetic principle so subjective that it has no "use" for debate introduces pitfalls of its own. One pitfall is indeed the triviality of consumer choice. Carol's indiscriminate array of goods—her analogical slide from the alimentary to the athletic before rendering these pleasures indistinguishable from aural and visual fine arts—certainly provides tolerant liberals like Kinsey and Trilling a line of defense against conservative moralists. But this blur of consumerist analogies also subjects interpersonal intimacy—more precisely, intimate persons—to the vicissitudes of what social theorists call the overspiritualization and underspiritualization of consumer goods. As Michael Schudson explains, some theorists such as Raymond Williams worry about the undervaluation of goods in themselves as well as the overspiritualization of goods via advertising—which "is magic, and it magically associates extra, non-essential meaning with perfectly ordinary, serviceable goods." Meanwhile others such as Christopher Lasch worry that "people underspiritualize goods," particularly handcrafted ones that might serve as transitional objects and thus help children develop autonomy. Such volatility forces the question Schudson poses: "What is the appropriate level of aesthetic interest a consumer good should evoke?" 29 He identifies numerous social and personal variables that make the question difficult to answer (labor cost, environmental impact, and so forth); whereas Carol's conflation of wide-ranging consumer pleasures renders her entirely unable to field the question. The implied substitutability of one analogy for another too easily elevates ice-cream consumption to the experiential status of interpersonal intimacy just as it too readily demotes an enduring work of art to the status of something as fleeting as sex.

A related yet greater liability of Carol's consumerist defense is what I'll call the Humbert Humbert syndrome of converting politically sanctioned privacy into solipsistic—and, in his case, criminal—subjectivity. Terry Castle has written provocatively about the resemblance between Nabokov's Lolita (1955) and The Price of Salt—the "transgressive sex," the detective-trailed road trip, the "frenzied bid for freedom." 30 The comparison is instructive, though I want here to suggest less because of the novels' similarly dramatic adventures than because of their differently calibrated relays between sex, consumerism, and happiness. As many critics have noted, American consumer culture is both the object of Humbert's bitingly witty contempt and his explanation for handling Lolita as a delectable object of consumption. The girl he describes as the "ideal consumer"—one who "believed, with a kind of celestial trust, any advertisement or advice that appeared in Movie Love or Screen Land"—is the girl he plies with an endless array of goods—clothes, magazines, tourist souvenirs, and "gooey fudge sundaes." 31 Such gifts are compensation as well as preparation for Humbert's sexual indulgences. The self-described nympholept discerns in Lolita's consumerism a narcissistic self-awareness, hence cultivation, of her sexual attractiveness without, however, a corresponding self-awareness of the intersubjective position she might occupy. In the novel's notoriously titillating scene of Humbert's initial orgasmic encounter with her, he counts on her being "safely solipsized": the "child knew nothing." 32Nabokov reveals, in effect, the conditions necessary for making the happiness (Humbert's) derived from an underage sex partner look a lot like the happiness (Lolita's) derived from a gooey fudge sundae. He also reveals, it should go without saying, the insufficiency of "democratic pluralism" as grounds for legitimating a sexual preference.

But Humbert Humbert need hardly worry about his moral and legal dereliction because the consumerist logic he embraces also supplies the terms for exceeding socially legitimate happiness, for accessing the transcendent realm of religious bliss:

[The reader] must understand that in the possession and thralldom of a nymphet the enchanted traveler stands, as it were, beyond happiness. For there is no other bliss on earth comparable to that of fondling a nymphet. It is hors concours, that bliss, it belongs to another class, another plane of sensitivity. Despite ... the horrible hopelessness of it all, I still dwelled deep in my elected paradise—a paradise whose skies were the color of hell-flames—but still a paradise. 33

Nabokov suggests that the price Humbert pays for his theo-sexual consumerism is high—not merely in the sense that it involves child abuse and even a murder that Humbert all but overlooks or that it results in his incarceration. Humbert has also forfeited his capacity to validate his happiness; he can merely observe and confirm it. "I have but followed nature," he declares, "I am nature's faithful hound." Earlier he attributes his nymphet addiction to the trauma of having been caught in an "unsuccessful first tryst" with his childhood love Annabel, of having never been able to consummate this love. 34 This etiology serves to attach his sexuality to the very core of his being, rendering him, not Lolita, the novel's true emblem of solipsism.

By conflating happiness and naturalized appetite, and by converting both into a ticket to personal salvation in bliss, Humbert pursues a radically subjective conception of the good. This is why he can imagine "horrible hopelessness" as something not to overcome but instead to equate with self-fulfillment. The combination of aesthetic masochism and sexual religiosity (the blessedness of bliss) absolves Humbert not so much of his crime of child abuse—which he recognizes—but of liberalism's reckoning with selfhood. That is, in addition to the absence, in his amorous economy, of an acknowledgment of Lolita's inherent worth, her pricelessness, is the absence of an acknowledgment of his own pricelessness. By understanding himself as nature's faithful hound, Humbert forecloses on the possibility of endorsing—or, for that matter, reproaching—his actions. He is unable to see himself, to borrow from the philosopher Christine Korsgaard, "as having a will, as having the kind of self-conscious causality that is a rational will." 35 This condition of causality drives a wedge between Humbert's self-styled naturalism and liberal self-constitution: "if I am to constitute myself as the cause of an action, then I must be able to distinguish between my causing the action and some desire or impulse that is 'in me' causing my body to act." This kind of self-claiming understands the self as a necessary value, as priceless; it entails the conversion of historical and personal contingencies into necessity by virtue of "valuing the humanity that is their source." 36 Korsgaard's concern here with the "sources of normativity" is not the familiar moralistic one of theorizing the kind of person who must lay claim to her actions and thus be accountable for them. Rather, she theorizes the kind of person who might change her mind; or who might see herself as mistaken. "There is no normativity if you cannot be wrong" in your evaluation of your dispositions and desires. 37 Humbert Humbert is nothing if not confident in being unmistakably right about his.

In The Price of Salt Carol offers no comparable description of herself as hopeless or as nature's hound. But when she asserts the pointlessness of debating subjective taste, she exhibits a kind of contempt for the proposition of mind-changing, which is often the point of debate. Her designation of love partners, alongside works of art, as sources of hedonistic "pleasure" renders them unworthy of interpretative scrutiny or evaluative judgment; she thus severely restricts the significance of choosing one potential partner over another. While it hardly makes sense to debate a preference for one ice cream flavor over another or even for eating ice cream over watching football (since such preferences have more or less psycho-physiological causes and are trivial), when it comes to choosing love partners, UDHR liberalism's commitment to human dignity and fulfillment encourages the engagement of normative, willed mindfulness. Indeed, the novel's overarching portrayal of Carol's slow and rather careful consideration of Therese as a love partner indicates a happy inability to abide by her own pernicious proposition.

Mistaking the Right Economy

In The Price of Salt, Therese bears the narrative burden of disclosing the fuller implications of this proposition. She is only nineteen and at stake in her youth is not so much the frisson of her becoming an underage sex victim (Richard complains that since she is not "a child" he can't "report [Carol] to somebody" that Carol is "committing a crime against" her [PS 136]); rather, it is her relatively unformed personality. Through her Highsmith stages the difficulty of making up one's mind, of building mistake and error into one's constitution—and the perils of deserting this capacity. One might reasonably presume that the novel's most prominent example of making a mistake is Therese's fumbling relationship with Richard; certainly, Therese's transformation from a muddled, awkward heterosexual into an ardent, self-aware lesbian indicates her initially mistaken sexual orientation, which gets cleared up once she and Carol find each other. As Alfred Kinsey stated in his second report, The Sexual Behavior of the Human Female (1953), new knowledge about all modes of sexual behavior "has increased man's capacity to live happily with himself and his fellow men." 38 But while knowledge may be happiness, I suggest that Highsmith mobilizes Therese's error in sexual orientation less to convey the importance of epistemological self-correction than to disclose the possibility of legitimating amorous attachment. This receives narrative treatment in Therese's halting and mistake-prone process of self-development and culminates in her rapid mind-changing when she meets another woman. Thus things don't get cleared up until the very end of the novel.

Though only a visitor to the suburb, Therese embodies certain dimensions of its ethos, ones that resonate with the potential for making mistakes. Earlier I alluded to the similarity in The Price of Salt between the suburban and highway worlds as sites of her and Carol's eager consumerism. But David Riesman's 1952 comments on the suburb suggest that, in addition to alacrity, the era's consumerism is significant as a phenomenon of awkwardness. Ever the counter-intuitionist, he encourages people to think of suburban residents as "explorers" of new "frontiers of consumption," who are thus "opening up new forms of interpersonal understanding, new ways of using" private and public institutions such as the home, school, community center, and chapel. 39 Indeed, they can be seen as early adapters to what Article 24 of the UDHR identifies as the right to "rest and leisure." Having served in the early 1940s on an international committee tasked with "drawing up a Bill of Rights," to which he contributed the idea of "reasonable leisure," Riesman understands suburbanites as subject to their own "awkward" behavior, as "likely to pay a price in loneliness and discomfort" for their choices. He thus implies that what the postwar world of abundance really needs are new ways of appreciating the legitimacy of leisure opportunities; and that, as the site of postwar society's "research and development," the suburb might find legitimacy in the very way its denizens make mistakes as they come to terms with their new rights. 40

Taking advantage of consumer society's suburb and sedan, Therese figures Americans' inarticulate, clumsy, and even perilous effort to legitimate new opportunities derived from postwar prosperity. She dramatizes the challenge of reading and evaluating one's non-trivial consumerist experiences. Like Carol, she addresses the question of subjective taste's applicability to amorous desire, but she articulates a more adequate response to the "should" in Schudson's question, "What is the appropriate level of aesthetic interest a consumer good should evoke?" It all depends on locating the ground of legitimation, Highsmith suggests, in the conditions of liberal agency. Therese doesn't have lesbian pulps at her disposal to help her find out what her sexual disposition might be. Instead she has random items of consumption. Things like a pair of "green woolen gloves" given to her by Sister Alicia when she was a child in an orphanage: only after Carol enters her life and she begins to wonder about her impulses and patterns of desire does she come to understand why she has held onto these gloves without ever wearing them. They seem to function for her as a kind of inert transitional object, providing cold comfort at best and little to no psychic security; by the end of the narrative she is prepared "to throw them away" (PS 249). Her hoarding impulse is thus retrospectively recognized as a sign of attachment—possibly oedipal, possibly more straightforwardly erotic—that had been too powerful to ignore but too confusingly encrypted to grasp. With similarly clouded intuition, she resists a Christmas gift from Richard's mother—a handmade dress—while simultaneously insisting that Carol accept her Christmas gift—an expensive leather handbag. Pawning a necklace Richard gave her and still nearly emptying her bank account in order to purchase the handbag, Therese witnesses herself map out locations of pleasure, attraction, anxiety, obligation, and expenditure, some of which she wants to avoid, others to visit.

Highsmith employs a focalizing technique to underscore Therese's evolving self-awareness. Her inwardness and narrow social horizon seem to make her less susceptible than others of her generation to what Riesman in 1953 calls the era's "Veblenism," which regards consumption choices—whether conspicuous, studiously non-conspicuous, or even anti-consumerist—as "determined mainly by the desire to impress others." 41 Her self-awareness, then, isn't the sort Riesman worries about in his college students who, in absorbing Veblen's critique, have themselves become unable to appreciate "whimsical and idiosyncratic" elements in their own "consumer behavior." 42 They too readily accept Veblen's social theory in which, as Colin Campbell more recently puts it, "consumption is a form of communication in which 'signals' concerning wealth (and thus, it is argued, social status) of the consumer are telegraphed to others." 43 Instead, Therese forms a kind of internal telegraph system, which is organized around her reflections on the symbolic or analogical signals that she creates from items of consumption and her actions involving them. When, for instance, Therese first hears Carol's voice—soon after "[t]heir eyes met at the same instant" (PS 28)—she responds to it analogically: it "was like her coat, rich and supple, and somehow full of secrets" (PS 28). Therese's activity of analogy-making and exegetic elaboration alerts her to her own desire; it gives her "heart" time to "stumble" and "catch up with the moment it had let pass" (PS 28). To come back to Schudson's question, here the aesthetic interest in a consumer good seems appropriately balanced with Therese's romantic interest in a person. This is how the novel imagines readerly agency and consumer agency combining to create occasions for mindful attentiveness, upon which mind-changing is predicated.

Tellingly, when Therese does exhibit Veblenist tendencies, when she tries comparing her status to others, her capacity for crisp analogy—one crucial indication of her mindfulness—falters. The scene of Christmas day at Richard's family's home in which she struggles to make sense of Richard's beautiful kite discloses this tension between reading her self in relation to things and persons and ranking her experience in relation to others'. By this point Carol's coat-person veritably overflows with secrets: Therese has the sense that "Carol was like a secret spreading through her, spreading through this house, too, like a light invisible to everyone but her" (PS 78). Reveling in this figural emanation, she feels "immensely superior to [Richard] suddenly, to all the people below stairs. She was happier than any of them" (PS 79). She further likens the effect of Carol's "invisible" presence to a happy kite: "Happiness was a little like flying, she thought, like being a kite" (PS 79)—even more so when the actual kite she and Richard fly in the nearby park becomes "all but invisible" in the sky (PS 83). This optical perception leads her to imagine the kite as a "delicious and buoyant" force, "as if the kite might really take her up if it got all its strength together" (PS 83). The intensity of her attachment to this figural cluster and the desire to sustain the happiness it yields are so strong that when Richard in a moment of sophomoric exuberance cuts the line to the actual kite, Therese is "speechless with anger" and "fear" (PS 84). Here Therese's analogy fails to sustain the dialectic of identification and disinterest. More precisely, Therese fails her analogy both by losing sight of its figurativeness and by measuring her affective response to it against those who have no access to it (since she has kept it secret). This is why, in response to Therese's "shrill" assertion that Richard's action is "crazy" and "insane," he justifiably pushes back: " 'It's only a kite!' Richard repeated, 'I can make another kite!'" (PS 84).  She has effectively converted Carol's coat-person into a causal principle over which she has no will. In this instance only we readers, privy as we are to Therese's absorption in her all too consuming figures, are left to observe the glitches in her method of self-discovery and to observe how near the brink of solipsism she hovers.

Indeed, for much of the narrative Therese's personality development is hampered by solipsistic absorption that compromises the legitimacy of her actions and passions. She has a tendency to envelop her experience of Carol in what Carol calls her "private conception of everything" (PS 156). Their romance's oft-noted oedipal coloration (in which Carol substitutes for the loving mother Therese never had and Therese for the devoted daughter Carol is about to lose) gains structural reinforcement in Therese's seeming desire to eliminate mistake from the conditions of its possibility. This is where consumer culture's methods of spiritualizing goods prove most hazardous to the same-sex romance's legitimacy. In the kite scene we saw that Therese's fantasy of Carol as her special invisible secret arises from an overspiritualization of Carol's coat and Richard's kite. Now we see that a fantasy of Carol's absolute specialness arises from her transfer of this logic of overspiritualization to Carol's personhood. Denying in effect Carol's mortal finitude, this scenario violates UDHR principles of secular dignity.

Innocuously enough, Therese imagines the perfume Carol wears as only an advertising department could hope: the scent "was hers alone, like the smell of a special flower" (PS 39). Yet the toxicity of consumerist aura becomes apparent when Therese imagines Carol's specialness as so exquisite as to isolate her from human relations. She finds it "strange to think of" Carol as having parents or siblings, "'[b]ecause I just think of you as you. Sui generis'" (PS 155). She combines the thought of Carol's autogenesis with similarly isolating visions of the couple's location in time, imagining their excursions into the Rockies as "without past or future," as "suspended somewhere in the heart or in the memory, intact and absolute" (PS 190). This envelopment in singularity and twosomeness brings Therese to the pinnacle of happiness—indeed, to "a complete happiness that must be ... so rare that very few people ever knew it" (PS 191). Flirting once again with Veblenism, here Therese derives her sense of Carol's and her own worth not from the principle of human pricelessness but from the market logic of supply and demand whose psychosocial principle is the rarer the better. Not unlike Humbert Humbert, then, Therese's happiness in such instances becomes a conduit to something "beyond": "if it was merely happiness, then it had gone beyond the ordinary bounds and become something else"—something that is "more often painful than pleasant" (PS 191). Also like Humbert, Therese seeks at times to draw her romance into the orbit of religiosity and fate. More than once she invokes her "lucky" fortune in having "found" Carol (PS 136, 179); and she considers what they "possess" to be a kind of "miracle" (PS 186). These appeals to otherworldliness are symptomatic of her fetish-like fixation on Carol; they serve both to reinforce and to explain why "[s]he could not imagine ever leaving Carol" (PS 171).

This consumerist mediation of Therese's desire threatens, in effect, to convert Therese's homosexual desire for Carol into something like idiosexual desire, that is, into an absolutely Carol-specific desire. This is problematic, the novel suggests, because it denies the persons involved the possibility of their being mistaken about their love for one another, of their mindful choosing one another. This threat culminates in a moment of consumerist epiphany, which strikingly resembles her love at first sight in the department store. It occurs near the end of the novel, when Therese finds herself alone in Sioux Falls after Carol has flown back to New Jersey to deal with the divorce and custody battle. Wandering about the town, contemplating Carol, she comes across a shop display: "And there was the beautiful thing, transfixing the heart and the eyes at once, in the dark window of an antique shop in a street where she had never been. Therese stared at it, feeling it quench some forgotten and nameless thirst inside her." Highsmith has Therese optically revel in all the precious and erotic uniqueness of this object, "a tiny candlestick holder": "Most of its porcelain surface was painted with small bright lozenges of coloured enamel, royal blue and deep red and green, outlined with coin gold as shiny as silk embroidery, even under its film of dust. There was a gold ring at the rim for the finger" (PS 222). When she later gives this totem to Carol, Carol's response meets and raises the stakes of their amorous gamble. "'I think it's charming,' Carol said. 'It looks just like you.'" Therese's response: "'Thank you. I thought it looked like you'" (PS 247). This specular mirroring of selves and "charming" thing takes Highsmith's couple to the brink of Humbert Humbert's solipsistic abyss. While their adult status exempts them from tolerant liberalism's full condemnation, their romance appears beholden to a market logic of idiosexual specialness and miraculous discovery—expensive, indeed, but not priceless. 44

Indeed, Highsmith stages here the seductiveness of a licit—that is, socially tolerable—but not exactly legitimate amorous economy. Earlier in the novel, however, she discloses its more insidious aspects. This takes place in Manhattan where Therese has a pensive conversation about the meaning of happiness with her friend Dannie, a graduate student in physics, to whom she feels closer than her boyfriend Richard. Dannie is a personable character; he's attracted to Therese yet, unlike Richard, not angry or repulsed by her possible homosexuality. At age 25 he's smart, mature, and wise; he smokes a pipe. In this conversation he advances a kind of existential physics in which happiness amounts to accepting a "right economy of living and of using and using up." He proceeds by way of anecdote:

"It's like a feeling I had once riding up a hill on a horse. ... I didn't know how to ride very well then, and I remember the horse turning his head and seeing the hill, and deciding by himself to run up it, his hind legs sank before we took off, and suddenly we were going like blazes and I wasn't afraid at all. I felt completely in harmony with the horse and the land, as if we were a whole tree simply being stirred by the wind in its branches. I remember being sure that nothing would happen to me then, but some other time, yes, eventually. And it made me very happy. I thought of all the people who are afraid and hoard things, and themselves, and I thought, when everybody in the world comes to realize what I felt going up the hill, then there'll be a kind of right economy of living and of using and using up. Do you know what I mean?" Dannie had clenched his fist, but his eyes were bright as if he still laughed at himself. "Did you ever wear out a sweater you particularly liked, and throw it away finally?" [...] "Well, that's all I mean. And the lambs who didn't realize how much wool they were losing when somebody sheared them to make the sweater, because they could grow more wool. It's very simple." (PS 105-06)

At first blush this "right economy" looks like the salutary antidote to Therese and Carol's mutual fixation. It exudes tolerant acceptance of all things as they thrive and pass. It also resonates with postwar rebuttals of American acquisitiveness. As Larrabee suggested, "Belief in consumption, in addition, requires belief in waste. If it is desirable, in itself, for more people continually to consume more things, then it is also desirable for those things to be worn out and thrown away as rapidly as possible." 45

More important, Dannie illustrates his philosophy's relevance to interpersonal intimacy by kissing Therese, which she experiences as having "mingled" qualities of "tenderness and roughness," as though the kiss were an objective correlative of the philosophy itself (PS 106). According to Dannie's algorithm of affection, kisses shared between him and Therese need not imply kisses lost between her and Richard (or, as the case will later be, Carol). Such is its "tenderness." But Highsmith suggests that there is troubling "roughness" in its idea of persons' endless availability for "using and using up." It makes individual lives seem all too cheap; it denigrates both self-preservation—as though fear could never be rational or appropriate—and monogamy—as though the happiness obtained from interpersonal intimacy hinged on the ready abundance and casual equivalence of substitutes.

In the homology between persons and un-hoarded sweaters, Dannie reproduces Therese and Carol's neglect of the distinction between things and persons when they bond over and with the candlestick holder. In the novel's representation both of indiscriminate promiscuity and hyper-refined selectivity, then, the line between choosing an amorous partner and choosing a handbag or sweater or ice-cream cone, threatens to lose its brightness. In the scene of Therese and Carol's sexual consummation in Waterloo, Therese recalls the terms of her conversation with Dannie to make sense of their ecstatic intimacy. Similar to Dannie with his horse, she likens herself to "a long arrow" in flight, a flying arrow attached to Carol: "she realized that she still clung to Carol ... [a]nd she did not have to ask if this was right, no one had to tell her, because this could not have been more right or perfect" (PS 168). Just as Dannie's psychophysics of harmony brooks no mistake, here too there's no possibility of questioning the rightness or perfection of their togetherness.

We are now in a position to appreciate the ending's crucial function of restoring the novel's liberal vision, thus legitimating Therese and Carol's romance. All along in their growing intimacy Carol has served to check Therese's solipsistic inclinations by interjecting a self-consciously rational and at times pedagogical will. When Therese wants to do away with the temporality of "past history," Carol cautions that a "duller" alternative might be "futures" such as theirs "that won't have any history" (PS 39). When Therese wants to revel in her sense of feeling "happy" ever since they met, Carol expresses concern that Therese's youth and inexperience make her unable to "judge" this feeling adequately (PS 170). Thus despite Carol's flawed account of subjective taste and her complicity in their mutual fixation, the burden is really Therese's to meet the crisis of legitimation. This takes place directly preceding her final reconciliation with Carol, when Therese attends a party in Manhattan in hopes of making career-related connections. There she is introduced to and later hit on by the sexy actress Genevieve Cranell. In turn, Therese is captivated; she experiences "shock" and "heat"—a "rush inside her that was neither quite her blood nor her thoughts alone" (PS 253). Here Highsmith notably supplements pleasure ("blood") with self-conscious mindfulness ("thoughts"). Both start out in a "rush" but the latter takes over and slows to a standstill: "her consciousness had stopped in a tangle"; "her mind was caught at the intersection" of conflicting desires (PS 255, 256). Highsmith's emphatic repetition indicates not that Therese's mind is shutting down but that she struggles to make sense of her desires and to prioritize her options.

What signals Therese's ultimate success in this struggle is her courteous but confident decline of the actress's invitation to hook up later at a more exclusive party—not because, as the actress thinks, something is "wrong" but because Therese has willed a change of mind. Her brief spell of confusion has led her both to discover and to claim that Carol is right for her after all—more precisely, that she is right about her love for Carol. 46 While still contemplating her options she thinks, "this woman [Genevieve] was like Carol" (PS 253). Therese has recovered her command of analogical thinking: here being like proposes similarity without necessitating homologous identity. Approximate substitutability becomes Highsmith's means of neutralizing idiosexual desire and installing homosexual desire. We now see that the happiness derived from the prospect of same-sex monogamy or imperfect substitutability is predicated on the very possibility of substitutability—not Dannie's version of cosmic promiscuity but rather Therese's normative, though queered, version of an intersubjective attachment that recognizes the constitutive pricelessness of the persons involved (herself as well as Carol and Genevieve). From the vantage point of this concluding episode, the tiny candlestick holder with its golden ring thus begins to look less like an erotic fetish object marking the two women as narcissistic extensions of each other, and more like the golden bands that get exchanged during nuptials, marking intersubjective happiness as something humanly willed rather than miraculously caused.

It turns out, then, that the novel's exalted happy ending of reconciliation is, strictly speaking, irrelevant to its narrative trajectory. According to biographer Andrew Wilson, Highsmith initially planned to end the novel on an "unhappy, tragic note, with Therese and Carol going their separate ways"; but her editor persuaded her "to choose the more optimistic version." 47 I'm suggesting that the choice hardly mattered. The optimistic version merely tenders confirmation that Therese is right, or at least thinks she is for now, about her amorous attachment. She self-consciously affirms that she loves Carol, not Genevieve and not Dannie. The tragic version would have indicated her error about Carol; but it would have also suggested the self-conscious rightness of adopting a more "deviant" practice of promiscuity. It is in the very perplexity and subsequent assessment and claiming of her desire that Therese exemplifies liberal agency, not in her specific choice of future monogamy over promiscuity. Both scenarios involve an ongoing commitment to liberalism's values of human worth and self-development. It is thus not going too far to say that the novel exemplifies what Stanley Cavell argues is the contribution made by 1940s romantic comedies of remarriage to our understanding of "the achievement of human happiness": that it "requires not the perennial and fuller satisfaction of our needs as they stand but the examination and transformation of those needs." 48 If only Hitchcock had elected to film The Price of Salt instead of Strangers on a Train.

The Trouble with Suspense Fiction

In ventilating The Price of Salt's queer-liberal investments, I want finally to suggest that Highsmith offers us a helpful model through which to rethink what Michael Warner calls "the trouble with normal." He argues that the policing and internalization of sexual-political norms has stacked the deck against practices of sexual deviance, which in turn generates the doubly corrosive effect of reducing the gay movement to a desexualized politics of identity and exacerbating deviant sex practitioners' experience of shame. 49 While this claim is empirically verifiable in many cases—and Warner provides ample compelling evidence of the state's collusion with majoritarian culture's aversion to deviance—his theoretical basis for it excludes too many equally verifiable alternatives. The underlying theory is not unfamiliar: modern sexual politics is propped up by mass culture's dissemination of a "consciousness" imbued with the statistical majority's imagined commonality, which "make[s] us aspire to be normal." In other words, sexual politics is largely if not entirely a matter of social psychology. He summons the example of Newsweek, whose mass-mediating magnetic "gravity" teaches us how to measure and guard our normality against "deviations and extremes." 50 Majoritarian culture is by definition oppressive and impoverished, then, since its formation is no more than a symptom of anxious conformity.

This mass-cultural theory, however, occludes much. Not least, it occludes certain social histories that reveal the dialogical function of mass-niche commodities: as Worley's account of lesbian pulp would indicate, opportunities continually ripen for queer-liberal readers' participation in mass markets of deviance while eluding "normal" culture's stigmatizing apparatus. More generally, then, it occludes the dialectical propensities of readers that Knapp maps out. Finally, Warner's theory of "normal" occludes Korsgaard's theory of "normativity," which entails acknowledging the capacity not only to observe the anthropological fact that values inform the modern world, but also to "recognize value itself." 51 This recognition, however imperfectly accommodated by persons, becomes the operative condition of liberalism's possibility; it secures liberalism's idea of universal human dignity and worth. With normativity installed as a guiding principle, Korsgaard's approach allows for the distinction between commendable and reproachable practices of a statistical majority as well as those of a deviant; whereas it isn't clear how Warner's theory would commend any majority or reproach any deviant. 52 Like Warner's theory, Korsgaard's involves separating out innate desire from the grounds of legitimation. She arrives at this claim, however, not by routing desire through society's mediating mechanisms but by considering the human being as a self-justifying and self-endorsing—rather than merely self-explaining—agent.

I've argued in this essay that Highsmith's ambition in The Price of Salt to justify a queer amorous pursuit proceeds by dramatizing the distinction between the main characters' commendable and reproachable intersubjective practices—a distinction that she shows is equally applicable to the novel's resolutely straight characters such as Dannie and Richard. While this salute to liberal normativity may well make the novel an exception in Highsmith's oeuvre—populated as this oeuvre is by misanthropic, criminal deviants—it is worth noting the way it chimes with her comments about her own work and career in her handbook Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (1966/1983). In this book she imparts her views on the formal and commercial relays between her signature genre, suspense, and what she calls the "straight novel"—by which she means "just 'a novel'" that is either "good" or "bad." 53 She takes herself seriously as a fiction writer—indeed as a member of the "classless" class of "creative people"—and predictably dislikes being categorized according to genre. She complains that "critics and reviewers in America consider the mystery novel as superficial and inferior to the straight novel, which is automatically assumed to be more serious, important, and worthwhile because it is a straight novel and because the author is assumed to have a serious intent in writing it." 54 What I earlier described as Highsmith's defensive vanity might here be redescribed, borrowing from Warner, as vocational shame derived from the maligned status of her chosen line of creativity.

Yet rather than repudiating this shame by championing suspense fiction's deviation from "straight" fiction—which would be the literary-political equivalent of Warner's championing of "queer" over "normal" sex practices—Highsmith seeks to reframe the trouble with her vocation by displacing categories of identity (straight fiction, suspense fiction) with categories of practice (good writing, bad writing). As though to redress Carol's consummate inability to debate matters of aesthetic taste, Highsmith supplies numerous criteria by which to assess the goodness or badness of a literary work. Hack suspense writing is bad not simply because it's done for money—after all, she writes for money, having "no private income"—but because it uses "gimmicks" and "trick ideas" such as surprise endings, expert knowledge of forensics, and withholding information from the reader. 55 Good writing, on the other hand, has "insight, character, an opening of new horizons for the imagination of the reader," all of which qualities are available to the "suspense writer" who wants to "improve his lot and the reputation of the suspense novel." Indeed, since every "story with a beginning, middle, and end" has "suspense," she is confident that "the intellectual as well as the mystery and suspense fan" will "enjoy" her work as long as it's "good." 56 Less important here than the specific criteria she proposes is the fact that she imagines aesthetic criteria as an alternative to the genre labels that reinforce prejudice. Such is Highsmith's way of reproaching and commending the various options available to writers of fiction, of supplanting dubious distinctions with more justifiable ones.

From Highsmith's perspective, then, the suspense genre is best understood as one among many available venues that allow the talented writer "to advertise his talent." As this brush with Mailerism intimates, she recognizes in writing suspense fiction the possibility of preserving her authorial "personality" and "individuality" in which she locates a "kind of [organized] freedom"—what we might call her own queer writerly specificity—while fully assimilating herself to the economic and aesthetic contingencies of the midcentury literary sphere. Not unsurprisingly Highsmith ends her handbook on a personal note:  she has the "feeling" that she has "left something out, something vital," namely, "the joy of writing, which cannot really be described, cannot be captured in words and handed to someone else to share or to make use of." 57 In other words, writing suspense fiction is for her the closest thing to self-fulfillment. At once deviant and straight, it becomes her source of normativity.

Mary Esteve is associate professor of English at Concordia University in Montreal and a founding member of Post•45. Author of The Aesthetics and Politics of the Crowd in American Literature (2003) and numerous essays, her current book project addresses the idea and representation of happiness in the postwar era. She adds in acknowledgement:

I am very grateful to Tom Perrin and Post•45 Peer Reviewed's anonymous reader for their comments on this essay's penultimate draft, as well as to attendees of Post•45's 2007 annual conference for their comments on an early draft.

References