Abstract
A critical examination of the work of Patricia Highsmith from a feminist standpoint unavoidably presents a number of challenges, the first being the difficulty of ascertaining precisely to what genre her novels belong. To see her as a ‘crime writer’ would be inaccurate as well as limitative, since it would mean ignoring certain elements of her stories which are outside the usual crime-detection-arrest pattern. To call her a mystery writer may be more accurate, since she was once awarded the Edgar Allan Poe Scroll by the Mystery Writers of America, yet the nature of mystery in her novels differs greatly from what is usually expected, in so far as it never comes from wondering who the evildoer is; instead it is connected with what kind of person he is, or more accurately it enfolds the reasons which make him progressively deviate from the norm and become a murderer.
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Notes
Patricia Highsmith, Foreword to Deep Water (Harmondsworth: Pen guin, 1957).
Ròisìn Battel, The Feminist Anti-text, Women Studies Occasional Papers no. 2 (Canterbury: University of Kent, 1983) p. 14.
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own (London: Hogarth Press, 1928) p. 73.
Jan Morris, Conundrum (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974] pp. 156–8.
Patricia Highsmith, The Glass Cell (London: Heinemann, 1965) pp. 110–11.
Tr. Marylin R. Schuster in Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivron (eds), New French Feminisms (Brighton: Harvester, 1981) p. 172.
One of the short stories collected in Patricia Highsmith, Eleven (1945; London: Heinemann, 1970).
Helen Taylor (his stepdaughter), ‘The Ladies Petition’, in Westminster Review, Jan. 1867; quoted in J. Mitchell and A. Oakley (eds), What is Feminism? (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986).
Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792; New York: Norton, 1967) p. 220.
Simone de Beauvoir, Introduction to Le Deuxième Sexe (Paris: Gallimard, 1949), tr. H. M. Parshley as The Second Sex (New York: Knopf, 1952).
Cf. Nancy Hartsock, ‘The Feminist Standpoint’, in S. Harding and M. B. Hintikka (eds), Discovering Reality: Feminist Perspectives in Epistemology, Metaphysics, Methodology and Philosophy of Science (Dordrecht: Reidel, 1983).
See J. Finch and D. Groves (eds), A Labour of Love: Women, Work and Caring (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983).
Germaine Greer, Sex and Destiny (New York: Harper and Row, 1984) p. 268.
See Lynne Jones (ed.), Keeping the Peace (London: Women’s Press, 1983).
From Annie Leclerc, Parole de femmes (Paris: Grasset, 1974), tr. G. C. Gill in Marks and Courtivron, New French Feminisms, pp. 80–6.
Patricia Highsmith, Those Who Walk Away (London: Heinemann, 1967).
Deborah Cameron, Feminisms and Linguistic Theory (London: Macmillan, 1985) p. 117.
See for example, Luce Irigaray, Ce sexe que n’en est pas un (Paris: Minuit, 1977).
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© 1990 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Evans, O.L. (1990). A Feminist Approach to Patricia Highsmith’s Fiction. In: Docherty, B. (eds) American Horror Fiction. Insights. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20579-0_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-20579-0_7
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