The Price of Salt by Highsmith Patricia was first published in 1952 and was flaunted as the novel of love society forbids. It is categorised under Classic literature and is a tale of sexual obsession toward a gender that was considered inappropriate in the society. This book is made up of two main characters, Carol Aird and Therese. Other characters get introduced as the plot develops, but the story mainly surrounds these two women.
The inspiration behind this publication, as explained by Highsmith, was a woman she met in brief. Highsmith, then a 27 year old Bloomingdale employee, sold a doll to Kathleen Seen, a beautiful blonde lady. Despite the fact that the encounter was brief, Highsmith could not forget the lady. Soon after Highsmith got sick with chickenpox, and in her bedridden state, the plot details of this novel played out in her mind. Highsmith retained Senn’s credit card details and soon began spying on her. This informed the plot of the novel, The Price of Salt. This novel is viewed as a representation of what would have unfolded, had Highsmith pursued Senn (Highsmith 2).
The novel starts when Carol described as an elegant woman walks into a store where Therese, then 19 years old, was working over Christmas. The writer describes Therese as a lonely young woman who had just moved to Manhattan, New York to pursue being a theatre set designer, the career of her dreams. The plot development in the poem revolves around these two main characters. After meeting in the department store, Therese attains Carols address for shipping reasons and follows her impulse to send her a card. Carol responds and the two start spending time together. Carol gets described as “lonely” in the novel because she got entangled in a divorce process with her husband Harge (Highsmith 51). We get informed about Therese’s love life too. She is going out with Richard despite the fact that she feels neither love nor attraction for him as depicted in the text. “She was never truly interested in any of the myriad of boys and men who showed interest in her” (Highsmith 86).
As Therese spends time with Carol, she realizes that she loves her. Therese’s attraction to Carol keeps growing, and she develops a strong liking for her. This is captured in the novel when the writer explores Therese’s feelings towards Carol. “Was it love or not that she felt for Carol? How absurd was it that she did not even know. She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions” (Highsmith 98).
Richard somewhat senses this but simply brushes it off as a schoolgirl crush (Highsmith 89). Harge, Carol’s husband gets suspicious of the relationship between the two ladies when he meets Therese at Carol’s house briefly. His suspicions arose because of the previous knowledge he had regarding Carol’s homosexual relationship with her friend, Abby. Harge later takes Rindy to live at his place, far away from Carol (Highsmith 103).
This book mainly focuses on one gender, women. This is so because it oscillates around the lives of two women, Carol and Therese. Whereas a few male characters like Harge and Richard get introduced in snippets in the book, the main characters in the book are females. Some even think that the book was meant for a feminine audience due to its theme and setting. This could be thought of as confusing because in the 1950s when the book got published, women were clearly treated like the inferior gender, while men were domineering. Interestingly, the novel breaks this expectation and the gender that takes a front seat in the novel is the female gender (Highsmith 57).
Pursuing their natural attraction to one another Carol and Therese go on a road trip so as to ease the tension at home. It is in this road trip that their relationship blossoms and their feelings for one another become evident. Their suspicious relationship graduates into one full of romance and sex. They proclaim their love for one another and get both emotionally and physically intimate as explained in the book. “Carol kissed her on the lips and pleasure leaped in Therese again. Her arms were tight around Carol, and she was conscious of Carol and nothing else. Her body too seemed to vanish in widening circles that leaped further and further, beyond where thought could follow” (Highsmith 135). They later find out that a detective was hired to spy on them throughout their road trip. Harge states that their rooms got bugged by this detective and incriminating evidence was collected (Highsmith 29).
The sexual orientation of the main characters in the novel cannot go unnoticed. Harge and Richard’s initial suspicion get confirmed when the two ladies declare love for each other, and get sexually intimate. This brings out the lesbianism context in the novel. Surprisingly enough, before these women fell in love with one another, they got involved in heterosexual relationships. The shift to a homosexual relationship was expected (Highsmith 31). The sexual orientation depicted in the novel leans towards lesbianism, which along with male homosexuality was still viewed by large sects of society through discriminating eyes. There is a constant shift between homosexuality and heterosexuality that leads to theme confusion. Considering the period in which this novel is written this was necessary because society would have utterly rejected the novel, had it been a purely lesbian one with a happy ending. This is because same sex desire was still highly discriminated against; so much that every lesbian novel had to have a tormenting ending. Despite the novels shifty manoeuvring between homosexuality and heterosexuality, it was inevitably categorised as a lesbian novel. This proved to be quite profitable as the novel sold over a million paperback copies.
Although the sexual relations between the two is turning out to be both intense and erotically charged, so much so that it is described in nearly hallucinatory terms, there is no evidence of yearning causing the relationship to dry up as fast as it blossomed. The intensity of love and attraction between Therese and Carol fades away quickly and the problems that Carol is going through with respect to divorce and custody hearings, add salt to the injury. Therese happens to be the victim of a mother who is not only absent, but also rejects her, something that leads her to fall in love with another supposed absent mother. Carol, unlike Therese’s mother, is so affectionate towards her daughter Rindy that she is willing to relinquish anything to secure her happiness. Therefore, for this love affair to be possible Rindy must be expelled from the picture or else Therese is at risk of becoming a measly stepchild in this complex relationship triangle (Highsmith 87).
The conspicuous disconnect in this affair gets triggered by Therese’s concern over being loved less as compared to Rindy, along with contradictory feelings of Carol concerning the possibility of sacrificing her child if she has the intentions of keeping her young lover. Although Highsmith in some measure is successful in concealing the chemistry holding Carol and Theresa in their implausible relationship, she allows unexpected flashes of it to come out. For instance, there is a moment in one of Therese’s visitations to Carols home, whereby she imperiously orders Therese to go to bed by herself as explained in the book. “Go ahead. I am not ready for bed yet” (Highsmith 124). Therese’s emotional response was one of complete submission to the desires of Carol. There is an obvious perception that the center of this connection might be tacitly comprehended by Carol, as well as Therese as being sado-masochistic (Highsmith 88).
Highsmith’s writing is not beautiful; rather, it is fair to express it as being not only dense, but also plodding. One gets drawn off into the seething sea under the impermeable layer of detailed ordinariness. The normal happens to be just a blanket under which all these suppressed impulses, as well as compulsions of an arousing sexual identity become ceaselessly agitated. The outer realism of heterosexual supposition with its convictions is totally unremarkable, monotonous, as well as quotidian (Highsmith 90).
The gradual acceptance of lesbianism as a way of life for women could be viewed as a shift of balance that characterised modernism. Initially ancient societies were homophobic. The novel got published in 1952, and did not face as much criticism as was expected leading to audiences across the reading elite to love the book. The society at that time still viewed lesbianism sceptically to some extent. Carol’s lesbianism presented in court would be incriminating and reduce the chances of her winning custody of their daughter. This shows that the society still looked at lesbianism as a vice, and the manifestation of moral decadence.
Evidence of post modernism in the book gets shown when we read about the detective sent to gather incriminatory evidence against Carol during the child custody hearings. The private investigator is a signature figure in almost all Highsmith books. The investigator taps the house in which Therese and Carol first engage in sexual intercourse. Carol confronts the private investigator, whose cover got blown, and demands an explanation. The investigator agrees to sell some of the tapes containing the incriminating evidence. He goes on and tells Carole that he had already sent some of the tapes to her husband in New York (Highsmith 78). The use of bugging devices and private investigators, characteristic of the first and Second World War could be viewed as an indicator of post modernism.
This post modernism theme is also evident through the widespread acceptance of lesbianism and homosexual tendencies. No one gets caught aback by lesbians anymore. This newly found acceptance of lesbianism among women gets expressed in the book and could be considered as the onset of modernism. People in modern societies, unlike the ancient ones, were free to engage in activities that got previously prohibited. Lesbianism was one such outlawed activity.
It is obvious that Highsmith happens to be familiar with this experience considering that, in the late 40′s, she visits a therapist in a failed attempt to alter her sexual orientation so as to marry Marc Brandel, who was her fiancé at that time (Highsmith 187). She even went to the lengths of taking the job at Bloomingdales so as to pay for the therapy. Both Therese and Highsmith initially wrestle with the thought of being lesbians in the full glare of the public. For Therese, the dilemma of not understanding what her sexual orientation is happens to be a gradual process that slowly leads to the conclusive discovery of what she is not.
Unlike other Lesbian pulp novels of the time, Highsmith’s style of writing is graceful, to the point and efficient. The novel consists of passages of immense narrative prowess that displays the relationship between Carol and Therese as complicated and layered. The writer creates confusion by alluding to a constant erotic undercut in the interaction between Therese and Carol. This is because evidences of maternal instincts on the part of Carol and the yearning for motherly love on the part of Therese are evident. The relationship between the two could be looked at as maternal, as well as erotic. Carol treats Therese like her baby, and Therese does not seem to mind it since she lacked the motherly love growing up. Therese later sheds off her childish persona and starts engaging Carol like an adult (Highsmith 152). This is shown when Therese gets into an argument with Carol, and instead of submitting to Carol, like her young daughter would; the two get involved in a fight where Highsmith explains that there was sporadic arm twisting, together with head pulling, and the risk of a foot slipping (Highsmith 157).
The book should have sold sex as a theme as it falls under the category of Lesbian pulp. The book fails to do this as Highsmith only alludes to sexual tension and attraction between Carol and Therese. The two lesbians engage in sexual intercourse on several occasions. The writer quickly rushes through these scenes, and there is no vivid description of sexual activity between Therese and Carol. The theme of lesbianism and queer sexual orientation did not get captured enough. This being a book on lesbianism, readers expected a taste of the explicit sexual encounters between the two women. A good way to capture this would be through the exposure of the evidence collected by the private investigator hired by Harge (Highsmith 112).
After the unlikely pair had toured Ohio, Minneapolis, Pennsylvania, Salt Lake City, Colorado Springs, Chicago, Denver and Sioux Falls, Carols motherly instincts finally kick in, and she abandons Therese out west to go home to fight for Rindy’s custody. She ends the relationship with Therese, leaving her supposedly heartbroken. Carol writes a breakup letter to Therese, trying to explain the reasons why she made that decision. She explains in the letter that their relationship, which society considered as a vice, had brought about degeneration as was predicted by many. “It was said or at least implied yesterday that my present course would bring me to the depths of human vice and degeneration. Yes, I have sunk a fair deal since they took you from me. It is true, if I were to go on like this and be spied upon, attacked, never possessing one person long enough so that knowledge of a person is a superficial thing—that is degeneration” (Highsmith 112).
Therese later heads back to New York and the strength of her character is evident as she rebuilds her life again. She experiences a dramatic revolution from passive girl to self-asserting adult (liberation lesbian etc). She gets her dream job and moves on with her life. The time spent apart from each other enables both Therese and Carol to think about their impending relationship (Highsmith 156).
The court battle in New York ends with Carol losing. Carol writes her a rambling letter admitting that she had no intentions of challenging the claim by Harge for the custody of Rindy. Harge agrees to Carol’s plea to visit Rindy occasionally on condition that she stops seeing Therese. Therese makes a decision of taking dominion over her life after absorbing the blow to her heart due to the break up with Carol. She suddenly achieves a perspective of herself. “She thought of this as the perfect time to rebuild her life” (Highsmith 166), while, at the same time taking a temporary job so as to experience the life she plans to abandon. She then gets a genuine job of a set designer within New York. Therese consents to the request from Carol of seeing and speaking with her thereby bringing out the gleam of fever that was apparent in their first encounter (Highsmith 169).
The novel ends with the possibility of Therese and carol being happy. This creates heightened uncertainty in as far as the conclusion gets concerned. There is a suggestion that Therese and Carole might remain a couple and live happily together. Many critics view this as an anti climax as the eventuality of the homosexual relationship is unclear.
Highsmith, Patricia. The Price of Salt. Chicago: W.W. Norton, 2004.
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