Patricia Highsmith

Noir fiction is one of the most popular forms of literary modernism. This online course examines five American hard-boiled novelists who published during the rise of the noir novel from 1930-1952: Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Patricia Highsmith, and Jim Thompson. Why has this been such a consistently popular genre? How did the crime novel respond to issues of class, capitalism, race, gender, and sexuality? How do these novels instance complex interrelationships between narrative and film?

American culture has frequently been said to enjoy a special relationship with impostors and con men, who have shadowed the nation’s rise to a modern democracy and an economic force since the 19th century. Nowhere is this mechanism more evident than in the genre of the ‘con man film’ which has fully emerged in the past decade – one character to profit from this revival of the motif is Patricia Highsmith’s well-known impostor Tom Ripley (the protagonist of five novels between 1955 and 1991), who has starred in three adaptations since 1999 alone. , A highly adaptable transatlantic character, Ripley is an American living in Europe, feeding on stereotypical European assumptions about America, performing a variety of European and American masculinity scripts when the situation requires it: the dandy, the cowboy, the self-reliant ‘protean man’.
My talk will show how Tom Ripley’s cinematic success story cannot be explained without the transatlantic dimension, for the success of the impostor is always linked to a desire for ‘elsewhere’: another time, another place, with the prevalence of outdated scripts and stereotypes allowing the impostor to get away with it. The same mechanism is also at work in the highly nostalgic mise-en-scene of the Ripley films, which offer European takes on American genre traditions like the Western or the gangster film. I will demonstrate how this feeds into the texture of the various Ripley film adaptations (which are always transatlantic ventures, helmed by directors like Wim Wenders or Anthony Minghella), focussing on Liliana Cavani’s adaptation of Ripley’s Game (2002) in particular.

This article considers constructions of insanity in 'Strangers on a Train' and 'The Talented Mr. Ripley' in the context of historical understandings of psychopathy and sociopathic personality disturbance. It examines Patricia Highsmith’s psychological influences and assesses how her novels have been read in relation to changing notions of criminal insanity in psychiatry, law, and culture.

In the growing interest of Alfred Hitchcock adaptations, this article discusses not necessarily why the director chose to adapt Patricia Highsmith’s debut novel, Strangers on a Train (1950, 1951), but how he adapted her. While this dualistically reveals much about the creative process of both the director and the novelist, it further begins to pay some due to the ways in which Hitchcock’s film is indebted to Highsmith’s structure, miasma and characters. Notwithstanding the acclaim to which Highsmith’s novel is now held within the fields of crime writing and the writer’s oeuvre, notable scholars writing on the film have been too quick to dismiss the novel as a rough plot for what Hitchcock developed to become the finished film. This article will go some way towards challenging this assertion.

This essay charts the development of two entwined intellectual threads during the 1950s: the translation of European existentialism into an American idiom and what Nathan Hale describes as the “golden age of popularization” for psychoanalysis in the United States. I argue that, in concert, these two movements contributed to the erosion of the New Deal regulatory state by elevating psychological—rather than structural or socioeconomic—explanatory templates for social phenomena. In contrast to the literature of the long Progressive Era, in many works published during the 1950s the ego and its vicissitudes become the dominant template for understanding society and the self. Patricia Highsmith’s novels provide a nodal point for this political and intellectual history as she recasts representations of violence, murder, alienation, class envy, and social mobility in ways that both represent and helped define the legitimation crisis of the regulatory state. Highsmith repudiates a narrative world governed by structural or environmental conditions and—in contrast to literary naturalists like Theodore Dreiser and John Steinbeck—presents the darker corners of human experience as phenomena of the largely autonomous, internal arena of an existential psyche. These shifts in literary tastes, the essay argues, augmented the weakening intellectual purchase of an interventionist New Deal reform agenda during the 1950s.

Amore e guerra Il presente volume intende proporre, attraverso mirati case studies, una riflessione sulle varie stratificazioni intermediali che intervengono nel processo di adattamento di testi letterari per il grande schermo. La prospettiva adottata mira a far rilevare l'ampio spettro delle intersezioni fra media, codici e poetiche dello sguardo: dalle dinamiche performative enfatizzate nel passaggio dal teatro classico al cinema, alle strategie di transcodificazione che pongo-no l'accento su cromatismi e temperature ideologiche più o meno connotate nel passaggio dal graphic novel al film, o alla tematizzazione della fotografia nel percorso di traduzione/tradimento dal romanzo al racconto delle immagini, con un affondo specifico sulle dinamiche di trasposizione intersemiotica che agiscono nel transito della narrazione dalla letteratura al cinema. Nella scelta dei casi di studio emerge con chiarezza come genre e gender siano spesso strettamente interrelati e come il discorso sul genere, la forma e il codice possa essere funzionale, soprattutto a certe latitudini geografiche e sociali, alla messa in racconto di appassionati gender troubles, che vedono le donne protagoniste di un accidentato, ma deciso, itinerario di affermazione della propria agency e della libera rivendicazione di passioni e desideri imprevisti.

The aim of this study is to examine in what ways the movie Carol (2015) as well as Patricia Highsmith’s original novel subverts Laura Mulvey’s concept of the male gaze as she theorises in her work “Visual and Other Pleasures”.  The movie’s representation of the controlling male gaze is explored as well as the emergence of the female gaze. The argument of the essay is that in Carol the women are allowed to look, and their gaze is significantly different in nature from that of the male.  The essay also studies the significance of the road narrative in the movie, following the ideas of Nicole Seymour.  In Carol, the road represents a change of Therese Belivet’s identity. Finally, the role of symbolism is discussed, paying particular attention to the meaning of the photographs taken by Therese Belivet.

The misdemeanors of Patricia Highsmith’s infamous character Tom Ripley (who originally appeared in five novels, published between 1955 and 1991) have enjoyed a fruitful life on screen. The new millennium saw the production of three Ripley adaptations, a fact that is testimony to the audience’s ongoing fascination with a shady character whose motivation remains in the dark. This “Ripley Renaissance” is indicative of the way the impostor figure has risen to global stardom in the last decade, and it also points to the void which is to be found at the core of Ripley’s character. Due to his ambiguous sexual identity, the character is immensely adaptable to a multitude of genres and interpretations. Consequently, Ripley’s on-screen embodiments range from a tragic 1950s closet homosexual (The Talented Mr. Ripley, 1999), a sadistic sociopath who is out to destroy the existence of a reliable breadwinner (Ripley’s Game, 2003), to a dilettante upstart with more than just a touch of the gigolo (Ripley Under Ground, 2005). By focusing on the unique problem-case of the Ripley character, this article not only attempts to challenge the traditional, hierarchical relationship between ‘original’ and ‘adaptation’, but also points to some parallels between the field of adaptation studies and gender discussions.

Imagining a queer protagonist, a case deemed unusual for the genre of detective fiction, Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, also known as “A Novel of Suspense” was written in 1955 when queerness and homosexuality were seen as dangerous subject matters of discussion in public. Within her novel, she imagines a protagonist named Tom Ripley who is intelligent, talented, and to a certain extent, likeable, but at the same time a murderer of two characters (i.e. Dickie and Freddy) guilty of various crimes; thus, she designs a place where the social order and justice are not lived up to. As Rebecca L. Prigot notes “morals are not safe from Highsmith’s magnifying glass”. In this context, I argue that the representation of Tom as a likable criminal lacking the feeling of guilt and the lack of appropriate punishment element at the end of the novel probe raises, in many ways, both ethical and formal issues. How ethical is to represent a murderer of two victims as a sympathetic character? Must the punishment of the crime be always meted out to the murderer by always the detective or policemen within the genre of the detective/crime fiction? Could we regard it as a moral act of the author to give a paranoid psyche to Tom, the murderer, instead of bringing him to criminal justice? To offer a better understanding of these ethical questions about the era, my thesis paper will also focus on how the social and historical atmosphere of the United States in the 1950s. Finally, it will discuss the genre matter: Can The Talented Mr. Ripley be regarded within the genre of detective fiction despite the lack of criminal justice at the end of the novel? How are the roles of detective, victim, and criminal distributed to the characters? What are the functions of Italian police force and the American detective in the novel?

The Talented Mr. Ripley is a novel that primarily focuses on the psychosis of denial. Tom, the protagonist, swings between two dominant attitudes of post-war feelings: the simultaneous urge for alienation and engagement and use of performance as a tool to maintain that denial in the face of reality. In the novel, his mind is dominated by these two contradictory urges and thus experiences a split in his personality, which is the main cause of his pleasure. From a Freudian perspective, this mode of instability in personality is due to the subject oscillating between two incongruous, yet equally dominant urges that are illustrated by Freud’s theories of the life and the death instinct as explained in Civilization and Its Discontents. My argument proceeds in two stages. First, I claim that in The Talented Mr. Ripley Tom’s actions are results of his compelling desire to free himself from reality, constructing an illusionary world while surrendered by the demands of a decentered post-war society. Second, I conclude that the duality between alienation and engagement results in Tom’s escape from the boundaries of identity. Consequently his alienation from society eventually causes alienation from ‘the self’ and his engagement with another determines his engagement with ‘the other’, and results in his self-satisfaction.

After the Second World War, many observers of American culture claimed that a “malaise” had descended upon the country. Sociologists like David Riesman and journalists like William H. Whyte wrote bestselling books about this malaise. Philosophers waxed extensively, calling it an “existential crisis.” Even Hollywood found angst to be a marketable thematic in films like Rebel without a Cause (1955), Rear Window (1954), and other productions in the mystery, suspense, and sci-fi genres. It’s not surprising that the historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. dubbed the period the “age of anxiety,” which is also the title of W. H. Auden’s Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of poetry in 1947.

This diagnosis of anxiety, malaise, loneliness, and crisis was in sharp contrast with the political rhetoric of the mid-century decades. For example, the publicist Henry Luce called for the United States to exert its economic and political strength globally, thus inaugurating what he termed the “American Century.” President Harry Truman would similarly characterize the U.S. as “the most powerful nation, perhaps, in all history.” Middle-class white America enjoyed unprecedented rates of high wages, home ownership, and for the first time had access to amenities like television sets and affordable sedans. So why was there so much anxiety? What assumptions were implicit in the diagnostic term “malaise”? What was occluded or overlooked in this diagnosis? And how might the postwar decades help us better understand the intellectual vocabulary and political culture of our present moment?

This course approaches these questions in American cultural history by looking to novels by Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Gwendolyn Brooks, Shirley Jackson, John Okada, and Patricia Highsmith, among others. The course lectures will also discuss thinkers who were influential in the postwar period, including Freud, Sartre, King, and Hannah Arendt.

This article originally appeared in
Clues: A Journal of Detection, 33 (2) 2015. pp. 20-31.

This article considers constructions of insanity in Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley in the context of historical understandings of psychopathy and sociopathic personality disturbance. It examines Patricia Highsmith's psychological
influences and assesses how her novels have been read in relation to changing notions of criminal insanity in psychiatry, law, and culture.

Complete version of a 2015 essay published in Clues: A Journal of Detection about Patricia Highsmith's signature 'double chase' motif and its relation to crime fiction, gothic, queer theory, and reflexive modernity. Focuses chiefly on her novels The Two Faces of January and Those Who Walk Away. This is the final author copy.

Dieses Buch widmet sich Patricia Highsmiths bekanntester Figur, dem talentierten Mr. Ripley, der sich in fünf Romanen immer wieder seinen Verfolgern entzieht und lustvoll mit den Erwartungen seiner Leser spielt. Ripley ist ein spannender Fall für die Gender Studies, da Hochstapler von unhinterfragten Männlichkeitsbildern und unseren unausgesprochenen Normalitätsvorstellungen profitieren. Durch eine genaue Analyse seiner Abenteuer und der zahlreichen Filmadaptionen wird untersucht, wie sich Geschlecht in die Tiefenstruktur literarischer Texte einschreibt und geprüft, wie der Hochstapler den Leser auf seine Seite zieht und wie flexibel und subversiv Hochstapler in ihrer Gender-Performance sind.

American liberalism after the Second World War turned against the legacies of the New Deal era. Rather than extending the reforms of the 1930s, many expressions of postwar liberal thought recast organizational politics as enfeebling, alienating, or tyrannical. Land of Tomorrow examines the ideas and cultural sensibilities that caused this radical shift in the tenor of American liberalism.

To account for these changes in American liberal sentiment, Benjamin Mangrum looks to some of the most influential writers, critics, and intellectuals of the postwar decades--including Ralph Ellison, Vladimir Nabokov, Lionel Trilling, Hannah Arendt, Flannery O'Connor, and Saul Bellow, as well as the American reception of Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, and many other European thinkers. By revising established accounts of this body of cultural work, Mangrum charts the legitimization of new political sensibilities within the nation's intellectual life. These sensibilities opposed a social democratic order and unleashed a new kind of liberalism, one which centered on ideas about authenticity, alienation, self-management, psychological templates for societal problems, and private judgments of value. This confluence of literary, intellectual, and political history gives us a window onto the basic assumptions and key conceptual terrain of liberal thought after 1945. Land of Tomorrow thus offers a provocative cultural prehistory of political thinking's forms that remain with us today.

The aim of this paper is to examine the elements of suspense and psychological thrillers in Patricia Highsmith’s most famous novels. This American writer whose tales of gentlemen murderers and psychological intrigue were often explorations of her own obsessions was widely known both in the United States and in Europe. Her two most notable works, Strangers on a Train and The Talented Mr. Ripley which feature sociopaths and murder were made into successful movies, first by Alfred Hichcock in 1951 and the second by René Clemént in 1960 under the title Plein Solei (Purple Noon) as well as in 1999 directed by Anthony Minghella. The author of the paper would like to explore and compare the two novels which reflect two different yet simultaneously similar and overlapping crime literary genres, the emphasis being placed on the exploration of the internal human drama, the problem of fading identity and double personality. The author is going to show why the American novelist became a popular crime writer worldwide and why her books made successful film adaptations in the 20th century as well as she is going to analyse Highsmith’s two novels in the light of the 21st literary criticism. According to Graham Greene; “Miss Highsmith is a crime novelist whose books one can reread many times. There are very few of whom one can say that. She is a writer who has created a world of her own – a world claustrophobic and irrational which we enter each time with a sense of personal danger…” (Graham Greene, ‘Introduction’ to The Snail-Watcher, 1970).

Key words: P. Highsmith, suspense, psychological thriller, guilt,  identity

The thesis argues that modern lesbian narratives appeared from the beginning of the twentieth century as a reverse discourse in response to late nineteenth-century sexology that defined the lesbian as unnatural and immoral. The MA thesis analysis explores the texts of three pioneering lesbian narratives, Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness, Vin Packer’s Spring Fire, and Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt. I shall contend that these texts reinterpreted the terminology used by Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing and Havelock Ellis, and created a subversive sequence of intertextuality as they spoke for lesbian visibility. The analysis is focused on the linguistic expressions used in these narratives to identify recurring themes. These themes register lesbian desire both in the sense of being attracted to another woman and that of a need to be distanced from heterosexuality’s noramlizing expectations. In the analysis, following the ideas of Tamsin Wilton, Adrienne Rich, and Julie Abraham, lesbian-ness is understood as a particular social position that critically questions the authority of the heteronormative canon represented by Krafft-Ebing and Ellis. The thesis also looks at the publishing conditions of the lesbian narratives to prove that cenzorship was also a heteronormative device used by the relevant institutions of the literary canon, preventing these works from reaching the public. While previous debates in academia tend to highlight that  the chosen  narratives address lesbian unhappiness, the thesis concludes that all three lesbian novels brought a positive change by their mere emergence at the literary market. Lesbian narratives could serve as an important survival strategy for lesbian readers to  find identities like themselves in the first half of the twentieth century. I hope to contribute to lesbian (literary) historiography by reclaiming a lost and invisible lesbian past in the field of literature.

Critics have long suggested that children characters reveal important ambivalences in Hitchcock, largely thwarting nostalgia without surrendering their innocence, both inciting and implicating adult characters and contributing thereby to Hitchcock’s complicated appeal to middle-class audiences.  "Strangers on a Train" famously casts the director’s own daughter as Barbara Morton, a knowing innocent whose sharp wit allows the audience both to engage with and detach from the narrative.  But after dominating her early scenes, Barbara is crucially humbled by the end; most notably, Barbara’s vulnerability to the director’s signature visual strategies grows precisely as her social authority shrinks, her character’s trajectory thus dramatizing the defining ambivalence in Hitchcock’s treatments of his screen children.

This article contributes to the formulation of an aesthetics of the so-called middlebrow novel during the early Cold War years, when the term middlebrow was in its widest circulation. It argues that in their work middlebrow authors frequently attempt to adapt the Enlightenment paradigm of the bildungsroman, or novel of aesthetic education, in order to meet the challenges of modernity; at the same time they critique a then-hegemonic version of modernism that argued that the nature of twentieth-century society required writers to make a radical break with conventional literary aesthetics. Uncoupling the term middlebrow from its familiar location within debates concerning cultural capital, “Rebuilding Bildung” locates the middlebrow at the heart of a widespread mid-century debate concerning the value of aesthetic experience. In particular, this article argues that middlebrow authors generate in their work a nonsubversive irony through free indirect discourse and the tentative deployment of conventional generic tropes. This irony allowed middlebrow authors to critique without undermining the central contention of the bildungsroman: that aesthetic pleasure might allow the individual to come to terms with his or her social world. The essay examines a number of novels, including Herman Wouk's The Caine Mutiny (1951), James Michener's Hawaii (1959), Laura Z. Hobson's Gentleman's Agreement (1947), and Robert Ruark's Poor No More (1959). It focuses primarily on Patricia Highsmith's The Price of Salt (1952), a novel that attempts to move the “lesbian pulp” genre into specifically middlebrow territory and in doing so brings the stakes of a middlebrow aesthetic project into an especially sharp focus.

This article focuses on the experience of looking through a window in Patricia Highsmith’s novel "The Cry of the Owl" (1962) and its three film adaptations by Claude Chabrol (1987), Tom Toelle (1987) and Jamie Thraves (2009). In the novel, this experience points to the impact of subjectivity on visual perception. It shows the characters interpreting their perceptions according to their own subjective intentions and neglecting the essential “otherness” of the world beyond the window. Whereas the novel uses internal focalization for expressing this subjectivity, the films come up with very different cinematic strategies for the depiction of point of view.

“Ask me things.”
—Carol to Therese in Carol

Carol, like its central character and the woman who plays her, is an utterly self-possessed retelling of Patricia Highsmith’s lesbian classic The Price of Salt (1952). The novel, which Terry Castle once called “an exquisite, gobsmacking, pussy-tingling treat,” was published during the heyday of torrid lesbian pulp fiction, and eventually republished under Highsmith’s real name in 1990 with its new title, Carol. For scriptwriter Phyllis Nagy, Highsmith’s friend during the last decade of her life, shepherding the adaptation to the screen was a shitfight of over twenty years. Carol finally went into production under the direction of cult auteur Todd Haynes, who, in Far From Heaven (2002), Mildred Pierce (2011), and now also Carol, brings a queer sensibility to the American 1950s, the ...

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