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  • Patricia Highsmith's Method
  • Michael Trask (bio)

Authenteo: to have full power over; also, to commit a murder.

Lionel Trilling, Sincerity and Authenticity

In Patricia Highsmith's "The Middle-Class Housewife," one of the stories that comprise her Little Tales of Misogyny (1975), Pamela Thorpe attends a "Women's Lib rally," "mainly to amuse herself," only to learn that she dislikes "what the younger generation had to say" (45). In reply to a call for "the abolition of alimony," Pamela protests that such a move will "destroy a woman's meal ticket," and though she immediately realizes that this is an "unfortunate phrase" (46), its effect is irreparable. Soon the room turns "nasty and hostile" (46), with "armies" "ranging themselves in groups" and making a "din that resembled the loud cackling of hens" (47). Because "of course many of the women had their shopping bags," the combatants begin to hurl their purchased foodstuffs, in addition to "hymnals" (the rally takes place in a church), "umbrellas," and "a sturdy faldstool" (47) that serves as Pamela's projectile of choice. Despite ducking "in time to avoid being hit by a cabbage," Pamela finally succumbs to a "two-pound tin of baked beans" that, hitting her "smack in the right temple," kills her "within a few seconds." Thus the story ends, with her "assailant" "never identified" (47).

It would not be untoward to identify this slender vignette's mobilization of sexist conceits about female unreason, and its generally dim view of female collectivity, with Highsmith's own violent antagonism toward "Women's Lib" and the other "silly protest movements" (45) that shaped the era during which she wrote much of her fiction. Even were this story "only" satiric, it remains the case that Highsmith conducts her satire through a layering of stereotypes with little to suggest that these various parcels of conventional wisdom about how women behave (like a gaggle of "hens," like perpetual shoppers, like a "mob" [46]) are meant to refute one another. The pleasure Highsmith takes in the stereotype is a feature of her work that readers have found hard to ironize. [End Page 584] To take the most prominent example, The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) revels in stereotypes of gay male villainy that a homophobic world has long presupposed. Given its author's penchant for equating homoerotic and homicidal tendencies, one might reasonably ask whether this book can be rehabilitated for gay studies, and—more to the point—what such rehabilitation would confer. If we look to Highsmith's notorious personal views, the reply to such concerns does not appear promising. Her one-time lover Marijane Meaker details Highsmith's racism and anti-Semitism at length, for example, while her biographer Andrew Wilson lets us know that Highsmith was no enthusiast of the new social movements even as she may have benefited from the sexual freedom ushered in by gay and women's liberation.1 Despite her 1952 lesbian-pulp novel, The Price of Salt (a rarity of the genre in having furnished its readers with a nearly happy ending), Highsmith has not lent herself easily to the project of gay and lesbian canon-formation. This hopelessly benighted writer may prove impossible to claim without serious distortion for the counter-tradition emerging from feminist, queer, and other progressively minded research programs.2

Seldom deterred by the recalcitrance of its object, canonization might be said to proceed necessarily through distortion.3 Recent arguments about The Talented Mr. Ripley tend to position its author as either symptomatic of the fifties repression of sexual nonconformity or as queer avant la lettre, having preemptively dispatched the normalizing pieties of contemporary identity politics.4 The first approach submits the novel to the Whiggish narrative that chronicles our progress from a repressive to an open society for gays and lesbians. The second does not place the book in history at all. But the anachronistic "queering" of Highsmith has one advantage over the Whiggish view. Its acknowledgment of her preference for the bad guy over a yet-to-be-conceived "good gay" at least takes note of the novel's lavish delight in Tom's exploits and its insistence that readers likewise root for his getting...

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