Road-tripping & nervous dread in The Price of Salt

[breathedout]

peachpulpeuse asked: i was just thinking about the conversation you lot were having re american road trips, and i realized that even tho the road trip in the price of salt is supposed to be a romantic getaway, or whatever, it gives me the same itchy nervous dried-sweat feeling as the extended road trip/pedo kidnapping in lolita. have you felt the same thing? is it an artifact of creepy road trips (e.g. f&l in lv)?? or is it just that p. highsmith cant help but make you feel anxious and culpable? idk anyway cheers

Yes, definitely. I mean to some extent that anxious dread is very much rooted in the plot, since they’re being tailed and spied on by Carol’s husband’s private detective the whole time, so there’s that uneasy tension between getting away and running away.

The prospect of escape, in particular escape from one’s own identity, is I think always incredibly appealing to Highsmith and I think she herself perceived it as a little too appealing: dangerously appealing, for reasons that become obvious with Ripley. Which makes it intriguing that she plays the tension in the road trip section of The Price of Salt the way that she does: what outcome are we, the readers, supposed to be rooting for here? One is very conscious that in reading a romance novel one is supposed to be rooting for the main couple to stay together, and in this case I legitimately do… but does that mean hoping for Carol to choose Therese over her daughter, staying with Therese and just never returning to New York? Starting a new life from scratch in some little town in the American West, just severing all ties with her previous existence and living in permanent exile, à la the end of Du Maurier’s Rebecca? I mean, that’s sure what Highsmith herself would try to do, over and over again, but I think even she gets why it’s a disturbingly claustrophobic and unsatisfying version of a happy ending. The one that she gives us—where Carol chooses New York and her daughter over Therese and then the court takes the daughter away anyway, so that Carol ends up in a tenuous reconciliation with Therese as a sort of consolation prize—feels maybe more politically depressing but also more genuinely… freeing? At least to me. And I end the book feeling a lot more confident that Therese is going to have the opportunity to develop into her own independent person, than I would have if she and Carol had shacked up in Santa Fe or whatever.

And then too, in the road trip section, the fact that the dynamic between the two women, even on its own, is remarkably… prickly… adds to that sense of unease. Schenkar has this great line about Highsmith, which is that “Whenever Pat fell in love, her first thought was to escape with her new lover and her second thought was to escape from her new lover.” I think there’s definitely a bit of that tension going on with Carol, and perceiving it through Therese’s eyes just adds to the sense of shaky footing. Highsmith herself felt both cruelly abandoned and oppressively hounded by her mother, who was the most enduring and also the most mutually hurtful love of her life; and I think it’s interesting that she sets up this fictional dilemma where, no matter what Carol does, she’ll be both abandoning and pursuing a relationship with a daughter-figure (one eroticized, one not, but the glass of milk scene alone sets up mother-daughter vibes between Therese and Carol). That’s enough to create a prickly dread-feeling for anyone, I think!

But yeah, ahahahaha basically I think everything Highsmith wrote is supersaturated with guilt and anxiety. ISN’T IT GRAND.