Abstract
Near the start of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel The Price of Salt, the protagonist Therese reaches for the book that her boyfriend Richard has been “anxious for her to read,” James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.1 “How anyone could have read Gertrude Stein without reading any Joyce, Richard said, he didn’t know” (PS, 30). By the end of Highsmith’s story, however, Joyce’s novel remains significantly unread, its narrative of a young artist who renounces mainstream society in pursuit of a purer artistic goal rejected along with the boyfriend who recommended it. Richard’s enthusiasm for modernism is, Therese sees, the equivalent of “a little boy playing truant as long as you can, knowing all the time what you ought to be doing and what you’ll finally be doing, working for your father” (148); Therese’s prediction comes true, and Richard ends the novel as general manager of a branch of his father’s bottled-gas company, writing bitter notes to his ex-girlfriend on company stationery (238–9).
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Notes
Janice A. Radway, A Feeling for Books: The Book-of-the-Month Club, Literary Taste, and Middle-Class Desire (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), p. 262
David Riesman with Nathan Glazer and Reuel Denny, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 144–5.
The term “professional-managerial class” is from Barbara Ehrenreich and John Ehrenreich, “The Professional-Managerial Class,” Radical America 11 (Mar.–Apr. 1977): 7–31.
Philip Roth, “Writing American Fiction,” Commentary 31.3 (1961): 225–6. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as “WF.”
William H. Whyte, The Organization Man (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956), pp. 261, 253, 251.
Sloan Wilson, The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1955), p. 5.
Herbert Marcuse, Eros and Civilization: A Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1974), p. 145.
Quoted in Dennis F. Mahoney, “The Apprenticeship of the Reader: The Bildungsroman of the ‘Age of Goethe,’” in James Hardin (ed.), Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), p. 101.
Marc Redfield, Phantom Formations: Aesthetic Ideology and the Bildungsroman (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996), p. 10.
Jeffrey L. Sammons, “The Mystery of the Missing Bildingsroman, or: What Happened to Wilhelm Meister’s Legacy?” Genre 14.2 (1981): 242.
Georg Lukács, The Theory of the Novel: A Historico -philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, trans. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), p. 29.
James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (New York: Penguin, 1976), p. 166.
Herman Wouk, The Caine Mutiny (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1954), p. 466. Hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as CM.
Grace Metalious, Peyton Place (Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press, 1999), pp. 355–7.
James A. Michener, Hawaii (New York: Random House, 1959), pp. 847–8, 874. Also see the introduction to this study.
For another example, see my analysis of Budd Schulberg, The Harder They Fall (New York: Random House, 1947), in chapter 2 of this book.
Laura Z. Hobson, Gentleman’s Agreement (New York: Dell, 1962), p. 181.
William Darby, Necessary American Fictions: Popular Literature of the 1950s (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1987), p. 47.
See, for example, Lillian Faderman, Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love between Women from the Renaissance to the Present (New York: William Morrow, 1981), p. 355 (hereafter cited parenthetically in the text as SLM)
Bonnie Zimmerman, The Safe Sea of Women: Lesbian Fiction 1969–1989 (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1990), p. 9.
See Suzanna Danuta Walters, “As Her Hand Crept Slowly Up Her Thigh: Ann Bannon and the Politics of Pulp,” Social Text 23 (1989): 84–5.
For more on the importance of nontraditional retail outlets in the cultural history of lesbian pulps, see Angela Weir and Elizabeth Wilson, “The Greyhound Bus Station in the Evolution of Lesbian Popular Culture,” in Sally Munt (ed.), New Lesbian Criticism: Literary and Cultural Readings (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), pp. 95–114.
For a detailed history of the rise of the pulps, see Kenneth C. Davis, Two-Bit Culture: The Paperbacking of America (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1984), especially pp. 101–247.
For more on this see, for example, Barbara Grier, “The Lesbian Paperback,” in Grier and Coletta Reid (eds.), The Lesbian’s Home Journal: Stories from The Ladder (Baltimore, MD: Diana Press, 1976) p. 313; and SLM, p. 355.
Letter to Morgan, Sep. 8, 1958, B4-b-2-SCR3[a], Patricia Highsmith Papers; SLM, p. 355. Despite their at-the-time unprecedented affirmation of lesbian sexuality, Bannon’s novels are often seen as espousing outmoded values and attitudes; See, for example, Christopher Nealon, “Invert-History: The Ambivalence of Lesbian Pulp Fiction,” New Literary History 31 (2000): 745–64
Diane Hamer, “I Am a Woman: Ann Bannon and the Writing of Lesbian Identity in the 1950s,” in Mark Lily (ed.), Lesbian and Gay Writing: An Anthology of Critical Essays (New York: Macmillan, 1990), pp. 47–75
Michèle Aina Barale, “When Jack Blinks: Si(gh)ting Gay Desire in Ann Bannon’s Beebo Brinker,” in Henry Abelove, Barale, and David M. Halperin (eds.), The Lesbian and Gay Studies Reader (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 604–15. for more on this debate.
Edmund Wilson, Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1950), p. 259.
Highsmith, Plotting and Writing Suspense Fiction (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1983), pp. 3, 6.
See, for example, Cleanth Brooks, “Irony as a Principle of Structure,” in Morton Dauwen Zabel (ed.), Literary Opinion in America: Essays Illustrating the Status, Methods, and Problems of Criticism in the United States in the Twentieth Century, 2 vols. (New York: Harper & Row, 1962). II: 729: “The poet can legitimately step out into the universal only by first going through the narrow door of the particular.”
Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), p. 5
David Savran, A Queer Sort of Materialism: Recontextualizing American Theater (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003), p. 3.
Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1961), p. 151.
See Andrew Wilson, Beautiful Shadow: A Life of Patricia Highsmith (New York: Bloomsbury, 2003), pp. 194–6.
See, for example, the back cover of Highsmith, The Talented Mr Ripley (New York: Vintage Books, 1992).
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© 2015 Tom Perrin
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Perrin, T. (2015). Rebuilding Bildung: The Novel of Aesthetic Education. In: The Aesthetics of Middlebrow Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137523952_4
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