8. The Price of Salt, Carol, and Queer Narrative Desire(s)

This chapter offers a brief narrative history of Patricia Highsmith’s The Price of Salt and its origins, marketing, and contemporaneous reception in order to provide a backdrop for its reading of the narrative dynamics of queer female desire in the Phyllis Nagy/Todd Haynes film adaptation, Carol (2015). Arguing that the latter’s articulation of cinematic point of view and space glosses a meta-textual queer erotics in the form of desire as both subject and engine of the narrative itself, the chapter is theoretically grounded in the work of literary and cultural critics Peter Brooks and Roland Barthes, among others. It presumes that source materials and their subsequent reworkings are equally significant cultural texts, neither holding primacy over the other and existing as independent (though related) products.