"Lots of us are doing fine": femslash fan fiction, happy endings, and the archontic expansions of the Price of Salt Archive

In the afterword to the 1989 reissue of The Price of Salt, CitationPatricia Highsmith writes of the overwhelmingly positive responses she had received from readers since the novel’s initial publication in 1952: “Many of the letters that came to me carried such messages as ‘Yours is the first book like this with a happy ending! We don’t all commit suicide and lots of us are doing fine’” (311). This reaction was caused by the novel’s uplifting conclusion, which, given the subject matter, was a rarity at the time. As CitationHighsmith explains,

The appeal of The Price of Salt was that it had a happy ending for its two main characters, or at least they were going to try to have a future together. Prior to this book, homosexuals male and female in American novels had had to pay for their deviation by cutting their wrists, drowning themselves in a swimming pool, or by switching to heterosexuality (so it was stated), or by collapsing – alone and miserable and shunned – into a depression equal to hell. (311)

The Price of Salt has long been treasured for offering its female protagonists a happy ending, at a time when lesbian readers were “sick,” according to the American Psychological Society, and “criminal,” according to the law, as CitationKatherine Forrest evocatively puts it in her Lesbian Pulp Fiction anthology (x). That the novel did not recirculate those same tragic consequences so synonymous with queer media representation at the time, meant that the many women attracted to other women who turned to The Price of Salt to see their own desires reflected there were presented, for once, with a positive version of lesbian sexuality that did not end in tears, death or disaster.