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  • The Boy Ripley Followed:Pym as Source for Highsmith’s Killer
  • Paul Thifault (bio)

To readers of Henry James, there is something very familiar about the premise of Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel, The Talented Mr. Ripley: An American bachelor of modest means and ambiguous sexuality is forever changed when he is sent to Europe, all expenses paid, to retrieve the prodigal son of wealthy East Coast industrialists.1 By borrowing this plot from James’s The Ambassadors (1903), Highsmith links her work to the tradition of “serious” American literature. Like her title character, Highsmith aims at this elite status through a sort of forgery, airbrushing the Jamesian classic into a genre tale of murder and suspense (imagine if Strether had decided to kill Chad Newsome, assume his identity, and snuff out little Bilham for good measure). Eager for us to get the joke, Highsmith even has Tom Ripley consider stealing a copy of The Ambassadors from the ship’s library on his trip abroad (Talented 35). Despite this playfulness, such allusions reveal Highsmith’s significant postmodern revision of the American expatriate paradigm, as an amoral and materialistic criminal will commodify and fabricate Strether’s epiphanies of self-discovery and cultural enlightenment.2 In this way, marking Highsmith’s engagement with canonical texts not only highlights the subtleties of her own project but also underscores crime fiction’s roots in the American canon, contributing to what Frederic Jameson calls the “effacement … of the … frontier between high culture and so-called mass or commercial culture” (2).

Like Highsmith, I call attention to the The Ambassadors to hint at the importance of intertextuality to Ripley’s design. While critics routinely note Highsmith’s stylistic and philosophical influences, scholars have done little more than point to James’s novel when looking for key intertexts.3 Surely, The Ambassadors provides a familiar opening scenario for The Talented Mr. Ripley, but Strether’s narrative offers no point of origin for Ripley’s crimes. In the end, such a narrow view of the plot’s sources threatens to reinscribe the highbrow/lowbrow divide by suggesting that only the novel’s initial premise, and not its entrenched crime narrative, invokes the complex intellectual questions that we tend to associate with high art.

My goal is to better situate Ripley’s criminality in relation to American literary history by showing how Highsmith’s novel operates in close connection with Edgar Allan Poe’s The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838). Scholars have yet to examine the parallels between Ripley [End Page 312] and the only novel of Poe, Highsmith’s birthday twin, even though both texts follow the macabre adventures of a young, displaced American from New England who harbors a strong psychological association with another young man. Ripley and Pym begin their journeys with similar schemes, using fraud to insinuate themselves into father-son relationships that center on the son’s entry into the father’s nautical business (Mr. Greenleaf is a prominent shipbuilder, and Mr. Barnard, an eminent ship captain). Like Ripley’s obsessive identification with Dickie Greenleaf, Pym believes that he shares with Augustus “an intimate communion [that] had resulted in a partial interchange of character” (19), and these friends, whom the main characters idolize, both die gruesomely and unexpectedly, on boats, midway through these books, shattering the protagonists’ ties to America, and christening them into adulthoods of wandering and cold calculation.4 Last, both books conclude with protagonists sailing toward an unknown future manned by apocalyptic, static “figures” of judgment (Pym sails toward the ambivalent “shrouded human figure” in the cataract, and Ripley imagines the “figures” of “four motionless policemen” waiting on the pier [Poe 217; Highsmith, Talented 273]).

Such parallels warrant a close reading of the novels in tandem. However, I am as concerned with proving that Highsmith consciously borrows from Pym as I am with showing how The Talented Mr. Ripley is animated by the same sophisticated aesthetic strategies that scholars today attribute to Poe’s much-admired canonical work. My two related claims will be that—first—Poe’s complex use of race should guide our interpretation of homosexuality’s function in Highsmith’s novel; and, second, that antebellum...

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