Carol, or The Price of Salt: Patricia Highsmith
A melancholy lesbian classic
Patricia Highsmith’s Carol/The Price of Salt (1952) isn’t quite the happy lesbian novel it’s described as, because there’s a bittersweet joylessness that’s pervasive throughout. It starts off with a young girl, Therese Belivet, in her first little apartment in Manhattan, working as a shop girl, hoping to make it as a set designer, while dating a young man that she’s not in love with nor attracted to. Her life suddenly changes when a beautiful older blonde, Carol Aird, approaches Therese at the shop to buy a gift for her daughter. There’s a spark, a sort of instant attraction, based on a real life attraction that Highsmith felt that inspired this novel.
Therese has Carol’s address from the delivery of the gift Carol purchased, and impulsively sends her a Christmas card. Carol, lonely, going through a divorce, responses to Therese by calling the shop and asking her to a lunch. The two begin to spend more time together, a standard romance except that it’s between two women. Therese’s boyfriend is upset by her “schoolgirl crush”. Carol’s soon-to-be-ex-husband is more than upset. He’s suspicious, and aware that Carol had a short passionate fling with her childhood best friend, Abby. Carol wants to escape the situation by taking an extended road trip - and Therese, temporarily leaving behind her burgeoning set designing career - agrees to join her. They consummate their relationship.
What they don’t realize until near the of the trip is that Carol’s husband has a PI spying on them, gathering evidence of a lesbian affair - which, at the time, would have been shockingly amoral. Here the book changes from a romance into a thriller as you wonder how this will play out. Is the husband jealous and angry that Carol is leaving him? Seemingly so, as he tells her he loves her even though she’s leaving him. Though in the divorce proceedings, he later claims that it’s Carol’s immoral behavior that compels him to seek primary custody of their daughter. How will Carol handle this? What does it mean for Therese’s relationship? I re-read this after reading Constance Debre’s ‘Love Me Tender’. One is set in the early 1950s, the other in the late 2010s. Seventy years have past, but the story of a homosexual woman fighting for access to her child while a controlling soon-to-be-ex-husband uses homophobia and misogyny against her, seemingly to punish her for daring to leave him, is still relevant. Eventually, Carol gives up the very limited access to her daughter to pursue a romance and live with Therese.
Patricia Highsmith wrote psychological thrillers, Carol was her only explicitly lesbian novel, and was originally written under a pseudonym. This romance has a dark undercurrent. There’s the strangeness in Therese’s youth compared to Carol’s experience: Carol is in her thirties, Therese is nineteen, and it reads as though Carol is mothering orphaned Therese at times. There’s an unexplained - except maybe by fate - immediate, emotional intensity throughout the love story. We don’t understand why Carol and Therese love each other - it’s almost instinctive, without much depth or explanation of commonalities to explain the draw. Some of the intensity might be because of the isolation of being a lesbian in Highsmith’s setting. The only safe spaces that Carol and Therese had were inside one of their homes, and living together. The only safe person outside of each other was Carol’s best friend, Abby. The women can’t be out as lesbians without risking their careers and lives. They don’t have the community and insulating wealth of the London lesbians (Virginia Woolf, et al) or Parisian lesbians of the 1920 (Natalie Barney, et al). Carol and Therese are middle class, subjected to the rules of the society around them. The novel is important in this too, in describing the experiences of an ordinary lesbian couple instead of queer women who live above the rules of heteronormative society. To find joy in those circumstances is imperfect and bittersweet. Some of the melancholy of the novel may also come from Highsmith’s ambivalent feelings about being a lesbian. She repeatedly tried to have affairs with men, believing men were superior to women, but in the end admitted to feeling no attraction to men. She returned to being a lesbian, even if the price of lesbianism is high. The Price of Salt draws upon Highsmith’s real-life attractions and romances, and the character of Carol is based upon two of her lady lovers and their experiences with divorce. Like her characters, Highsmith seemingly found the price worth paying.
