First things first: Carol returned to Netflix this week.
In preparation for this event, I decided to finally read the novel it’s based on, Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt.
When it was published in 1952, the book was an unprecedented piece of literature: a lesbian story with a relatively happy ending. Of course, in the context of the 50s, a “happy ending” really just means that neither character dies or is forced into a heterosexual lifestyle, but… baby steps.
As a result, it’s included on basically every single list of “must-read queer books” and “top LGBTQ+ novels.” Given the historical significance, it would be tough to argue that it doesn’t deserve a place.
But I’m someone who loves context. And though I’d never once seen it mentioned in the many lists naming The Price of Salt as an essential piece of queer lit, it didn’t take too much digging to uncover the fact that Highsmith was racist, antisemitic, and misogynistic.
I’ve always struggled with the idea of “separating the art from the artist.” If a person is or was objectively terrible (R. Kelly, John Lennon, Chris Brown, etc.), I’m inclined to throw their art away, in my mind, right along with them.
But what are we supposed to do when someone who’s responsible for such a significant piece of work turns out to have been awful?
The Price of Salt’s place in the queer cannon feels concrete, and I don’t think it would be helpful to attempt to erase it. Still, it feels like a disservice to ignore who Highsmith was. Can we not acknowledge that she sucked, while simultaneously being in love with Cate Blanchett as Carol?
Personally, I think I can. Especially with the knowledge that she died in 1995 and didn’t make a single cent off the movie.
— Becca
The Price of Salt by Patricia Highsmith
Fiction, 1952
If you, my audience, are who I think you are (gays), you’ve already seen Carol, and therefore already know the basic plot of this novel. If not, here’s a summary:
Therese Belivet is working a seasonal job she hates in a department store when the wealthy (and stunning) suburban housewife Carol Aird comes in to buy her daughter a doll for Christmas. Therese is immediately enamored and uses the delivery address she leaves to contact her. After several sexually-charged lunches, they set off on a road trip across the United States.
A scene from a sexually-charged lunch
Of course, their romance is not one without serious obstacles. Carol is in the middle of a contentious divorce and her soon-to-be-ex husband Harges is aiming for sole custody of their daughter because of what he considers to be her moral failings. Meanwhile, Therese’s soon-to-be-ex boyfriend Richard is in denial about the fact that Therese doesn’t love him and is kind of an asshole about it.
Setting these conflicts aside, I was surprised by how dark the book feels. The third time Therese meets Carol, for example, they drive through the Lincoln Tunnel. In this moment, “A wild, inexplicable excitement mounted in Therese as she stared through the windshield. She wished the tunnel might cave in and kill them both, that their bodies might be dragged out together.”
They’ve met three times and this is where Therese is at, mentally?
It shouldn’t come as a surprise, then, that their relationship doesn’t come across as entirely healthy at points. But I’m glad I made it to the end.
In the last 20 pages or so, we see Therese spend some time away from Carol and gain some agency in the process. So when the book ends with the possibility of a continued relationship, it feels like a conscious decision rather than an unhealthy obsession.
And as Highsmith wrote in a 1989 afterword for the book:
The appeal of The Price of Salt was that it had a happy ending for its two main characters, or at least they were going to try to have a future together. Prior to this book, homosexuals male and female in American novels had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing—alone and miserable and shunned—into a depression equal to hell.
By contemporary standards, I’m not sure I’d call the ending of the novel a happy one. But compared to the more common alternatives of the time—suicide or conversion—it was kind of revolutionary.
Queer points:
+3 for Carol writing “Your plants are still thriving on the back porch. I water them every day…” in a letter to Therese. (I can’t fully explain why, but this is def queer.)
+6 for the fact that Carol co-owns a furniture store with another presumed lesbian
Buy it from WORD Bookstore (or borrow it from your local public library like I did)