“The Queer Gaze and the Ineffable in THE PRICE OF SALT,” an essay by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19)
An excerpt from “The Queer Gaze and the Ineffable in The Price of Salt,” an essay in two parts by Candace Walsh (fiction ’19), published in CRAFT.
The Queer Gaze and the Ineffable in The Price of Salt
I almost didn’t read Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt, one of the most influential, relevant, and exquisite novels I’ve ever encountered. Why? I felt like it would be dated. I thought that I should read it. I saw the movie. And I had reason to believe that it would end in predictable tragedy.
Published in 1952, The Price of Salt, about a lesbian love affair, was made into the 2015 film Carol, and (spoiler) the ending is realistic, but decidedly not tragic. In the book, nineteen-year-old stage designer Therese Belivet and Carol Aird, a wealthy woman in her early thirties going through a divorce, fall in love. Given that the novel was published seventeen years prior to Stonewall, I was expecting a lot of coy, plausible-deniability-ridden allusions, and a tragic ending, required at the time to avoid censorship. Instead, I found the book to be rich with frank expressions of desire—descriptions refreshingly different from the expressions of heterosexual desire that I am used to reading in novels with straight characters.
