Abstract
Patricia Highsmith generally preferred animals to people and was particularly fascinated by snails. In her novel Deep Water and two short stories from Eleven, Highsmith uses snails, and her characters’ attitudes towards them, to register a range of responses to American capitalist culture in the mid-twentieth century.
In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard’s “motto of the mollusc” regards the snail as a symbol of reciprocity between individual and environment. Highsmith’s characters are frequently driven by a repressed fury with a culture which severs this link between self and social habitat. This chapter argues that a significant site for this conflict is Highsmith’s juxtaposition of the human and the non-human animal worlds, with the beast repeatedly located in the former. In doing so, it seeks to read this aspect of Highsmith’s work as part of a continuum in detective fiction’s treatment of animals and to demonstrate how far her fiction can be situated within that genre.
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Notes
- 1.
Wilson, Beautiful Shadow, 267.
- 2.
Schenkar, “Patricia Highsmith”, 203.
- 3.
Peters, “Introduction: Re-evaluating Patricia Highsmith”, 5.
- 4.
Bradford, Crime Fiction, 41.
- 5.
Highsmith, Plotting, 141.
- 6.
Todorov, “The Typology of Detective Fiction”, 50.
- 7.
Pepper, “The American roman noir”, 59.
- 8.
Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, 126.
- 9.
Miller, Stuff, 84.
- 10.
McCance, Critical Animal Studies, 2.
- 11.
Highsmith, “Snail Watcher”, 1.
- 12.
Highsmith, “Claveringi”, 63.
- 13.
Greene, Foreword to Eleven, xi.
- 14.
Hesford, “Patriotic Perversions”, 217.
- 15.
Peters, Anxiety and Evil, 48.
- 16.
Highsmith, Deep Water, 19.
- 17.
Peters, Anxiety and Evil, 55.
- 18.
Armstrong, “Animating the text”, 45.
- 19.
Janssen and Baur, “Seasonal effects”, 2917.
- 20.
Highsmith, quoted in Wilson, Beautiful Shadow, 196.
- 21.
Auden, “The Guilty Vicarage”, 4.
- 22.
Peters, Anxiety and Evil, 151.
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West, S. (2022). “The Motto of the Mollusc”: Patricia Highsmith and the Semiotics of Snails. In: Hawthorn, R., Miller, J. (eds) Animals in Detective Fiction. Palgrave Studies in Animals and Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09241-1_10
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