The Price of Salt Is the City: Patricia Highsmith and the Queer Frontiers of Neoliberalism

Price of Salt begins in the tradition of the naturalist lesbian pulp novel before veering sharply into the genre of the Western mid-way through. But it is a Western with a difference. While Highsmith’s characters follow the Western’s arc, in which the neurasthenic urban subject goes West, encounters a danger that cures and strengthens her, and ultimately returns home prepared to do the work of urban (and metonymically national) renewal, Highsmith changes the protagonist from a professional man into a working class, homosexual woman, and she expands the Western’s scope from the urban core to the metropolitan region as a whole. This chapter argues that through the novel’s radical revision of the Western to include two queer characters, The Price of Salt cleaves apart the Lavender Scare from the Red Scare and constructs a Red Scare defense of lesbianism in which lesbianism becomes a tool for subjective, urban, and national renewal—and, in turn, the attainment of sexual rights and freedoms becomes linked with the construction of a thoroughly-capitalist subjectivity organized around individual freedom, private property, and entrepreneurialism.