Social class in the writings of Patricia Highsmith

Abstract

Despite her continued popularity with both filmmakers and academics, the importance of social class within Patricia Highsmith’s fiction continues to elude critical attention. Departing from the psychoanalytical approach which has dominated previous approaches to her fiction, this thesis argues that social class is a consistent, although sometimes contradictory, aspect of Highsmith’s work. Drawing on a variety of primary material from different periods in the author’s career, as well as unpublished writings collected in the Highsmith archives in Bern, the argument demonstrates how the issue of class develops throughout the author’s body of work, and that tracing this development helps us to understand the broader political complexity of Highsmith’s work. The thesis highlights a political illegibility which underlies much of the author’s fiction, with her narratives often suggesting views from across the political spectrum. Primarily, I argue that Highsmith’s class politics are underpinned by two distinctive features: a valorisation of elite, bourgeois culture and values, in particular notions of sophistication, subtlety and restraint, and an anarchic rejection of cultures of conventionality in favour of a wilful non-cooperation. This is rooted in the author’s self-fashioning as exceptional implied throughout her work, a quality embodied by her transgressive protagonists, notably Tom Ripley. The thesis demonstrates the multitude of themes and mechanisms through which the class politics of Highsmith’s work are articulated. It employs an intersectional conception of class, drawing on the approaches of Pierre Bourdieu, Beverley Skeggs, and Imogen Tyler, among others, to highlight how Highsmith’s class politics intersect with her views towards space and place, gender, and race and ethnicity. Moreover, it engages with emerging ideas of class and affect, highlighting the way in which feelings of schadenfreude, disgust and pleasure are intricately entwined with the author’s class politics. The class-based approach employed by this thesis proves instructive to broader discussions relating to Highsmith’s disputed status as a crime writer, with the author’s idiosyncratic class politics closely related to her transgressive subversion of the crime fiction genre and its established conventions.