Others from a Southern Mother: Southerning the Queer in Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train

Before being eclipsed both novelistically and cinematically by The Talented Mr. Ripley, Patricia Highsmith’s Strangers on a Train (1950) represented a cultural and critical touchstone on the Cold War American landscape. Neil Gordon calls the novel “one of the most accomplished books she would write” but admits that its noteworthiness and notoriety was aided in no small part by film director Alfred Hitchcock, whose classic film Strangers on a Train released in 1951 brought Highsmith “immediate fame” (26). Likewise, Leonard Cassuto notes that in terms of sheer memorability, Hitchcock’s movie far eclipsed Highsmith’s novel with its “moody and disturbing excavation of guilty paranoia that bears little resemblance to the film beyond its initial premise” (W9). Other critics—especially film critics—have either excoriated the novel or ignored it in their analyses. Donald Spoto, for example, refers to the novel as a “somewhat breathlessly florid melodrama” (321) while Robert J. Corber lambasts it as “blatantly homophobic” (69). Jonathan Goldberg, in his exploration of Strangers on a Train as a queer film classic, acknowledges the novel’s value in terms of its radical illustration of how “socially alienated the protagonists are from acceptable forms of behavior” (17). However, Goldberg concludes that the film is the far superior version, and he ultimately dismisses the novel as outrageous, insidious, and corrosive.

Given the long-standing popularity of Hitchcock’s film with both critics and viewers, it is probably not surprising that critical attention focused on the novel itself has been almost nonexistent. Moreover, unlike the majority of essays on Hitchcock’s film version of Strangers on a Train, what extant criticism there is on Highsmith’s novel curiously (and, I would argue, consciously) sidesteps the rather obvious queer attraction between the novel’s two central characters, Charles Anthony Bruno and Guy Haines. Josh Lukin and Kenneth Payne both provide incisive studies on the effects the novel’s conformist Cold War milieu has on the characters of Guy and Bruno, but only Payne acknowledges—and does so grudgingly—the “homoerotic element” in their relationship (154). In fact, he quickly pivots from this term and concludes instead that both men are sexually ambiguous, which, in turn, renders their “masculine authority” as “decentered, destabilized, and disqualified” (155).

Unlike Payne’s, my consideration begins with the presumption that Guy and Bruno are in fact very much queer and, in terms of mapping Guy and Bruno’s queer identity, I draw on David Halperin’s useful definition of queer as a site of contestation. Halperin observes in Saint Foucault that “[q]ueer is by definition whatever is at odds with the normal, the legitimate, the dominant. . . . ‘Queer’ then, demarcates not a positivity but a positionality vis-à-vis the normative” (62). Positionality is important here because, in terms of the Cold War landscape of Strangers on a Train, Highsmith consciously positions Guy and Bruno as visibly nonnormative outsiders who threaten to upend the conformist Cold War–era ethos. I contend, however, that Highsmith not only challenges this Cold War conformism by making these characters perfectly queer but also by rendering them identifiably southern.

The South, of course, occupied a precarious place in the larger confines of Cold War–era America because of its regional quirkiness, its laissez-faire attitude toward difference, and its historically defiant separatist ethos. Taken together, these attributes were viewed as threatening for those social and governmental entities seeking to formulate and adjudicate a unified, coherent American identity. This essay, thus, approaches Strangers on a Train from a grounding in queer theory to show not only how Highsmith interrogates the conventional Cold War demonization of sexual others but also how she deploys southern regional identification as a way to effectively cement Guy and Bruno’s queerness. In so doing, my essay demonstrates how Highsmith’s “southernizing” converges with this queerness to create a deviant and divergent regional identity that, according to Bruce Brasell, “denaturalizes the process of normalization” operating within the Cold War–era “American national ideal” (53).

By exploring the South’s importance in the very queer milieu...