Essay Questions

Why would it be appropriate to term Patricia Highsmith the queen of ambiguous short fiction?

In the story, “The Terrors of Basket-Weaving" the main character discovers an old wicker basket which has ashore. She instinctively and intuitively seems to sudden possess the necessary knowledge to repair the damage. Rather than being filled with the joy of discovering a brand-new unknown talent along with that of the basket, however, the woman is overcome with a strange, overpowering anxiety arising precisely from the apprehension that she was mysteriously blessed with this gift. As a result, the wicker basket becomes of the strangest symbols to be found in Highsmith’s work. The unresolved ambiguity of the precise symbolic meaning of the basket appropriately reflects the nature of so many of her endings; a substantial proportion of which are every bit as unresolved. Suffice to say, the basket is a symbol of something profound, primitive and perhaps incapable of being exactly defined. Like so many of her narrative conclusions, the true symbolic value of the wicker basket is so utterly ambiguous, it’s lack of precision almost certainly has to be intentional.

What might fellow trafficker in creative crime fiction Graham Greene have meant when he labeled Highsmith a “poet of apprehension” in the Introduction he wrote for her first collection of short stories?

After establishing Highsmith as a poet of apprehension, Greene immediately proceeds to explain that she deals in apprehension rather than merely fear, further clarifying his contention that fear carries the potential to create an anesthetizing effect culminating in a rejection of denial of the emotional state. Apprehension, by contrast, is much more sinister; it is a stimulant of dread that “nags at the nerves gently and inescapably.” Whatever Greene might actually have been trying to get at, one thing is inescapably true of Highsmith’s short stories for almost every reader: they have the power to disturb. Even those stories most universally viewed as her most horrific (“The Snail-Watcher" and “The Quest for Blank Claveringi”) create a sensation that goes beyond mere fear. Her characters inhabit a world that is instantly recognizable, yet also profoundly disquieting. Whether it is snails quite literally devouring a man or a woman who simply can’t understand or accept how she could repair a wicker basket to perfection despite no previous experience, the reader and the characters are both equally capable of apprehending what is going on, while also often being equally incapable of fully comprehending it.

In what way did Patricia Highsmith’s short fiction foretell the rise of the serial killer as celebrity?

Revealing the kind of prescience that a writer’s mind so precisely attuned to a specific genre often exhibits, a story published in a 1979 collection of short stories focuses on the motivation of fame rather than infamy for the continuation of a killing spree for the first-time murderer who manages to avoid detection. “Woodrow Wilson’s Necktie” foresees the rise of the cult of celebrity of the serial or mass murderer by situating the narrative firmly within the milieu of celebrity killers of the past. The collection containing this story was published at roughly the same time that the nation was gripped by Ted Bundy’s highly publicized (and televised) trial. The groundbreaking decision to allow cameras into the courtroom for one of the first times in American history stimulated many female viewers to view the admittedly handsome and charming Bundy as a sex symbol. At the end of his story, Clive Wilkes' desire to extend his murder spree in the pursuit of celebrity has effectively made him a precursor to the killer-as-celebrity which would be maintained by Ted Bundy in the real world and exemplified by the tranformation of Hannibal Lecter from villain to anti-hero in the reel world. At the same time, Clive becomes a link to the past represented by the wax museum tableau lending immortality in form of infamy to such notorious figures as Bruno Hauptmann, Charlotte Corday and the Manson family.