It would be Carol, in a thousand cities, a thousand houses, in foreign lands where they would go together, in heaven and in hell...Carol saw her, seemed to stare at her incredulously a moment while Therese watched the slow smile growing, before her arm lifted suddenly, her hand waved a quick, eager greeting that Therese had never seen before. Therese walked toward her.[53]
Because of the happy (or at least, non-tragic) ending which defied the lesbian pulp formula, and because of the unconventional characters who defied stereotypes about female homosexuals,[h] The Price of Salt was popular among lesbians in the 1950s[54] and continued to be with later generations. It was regarded for many years as the only lesbian novel with a happy ending.[55][i]
Highsmith told author Marijane Meaker that she was surprised when the book was praised by lesbian readers because of how it ended. She was pleased that it had become popular for that reason and said, "I never thought about it when I wrote it. I just told the story."[56] When Highsmith allowed her name to be attached to the 1990 republication by Bloomsbury, she wrote in the "Afterword" to the edition:
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.[1]
The novel's representation of its lesbian characters also departed from the period's stereotypical depiction of lesbians—both in popular literature and by the medical/psychological field (where females who did not conform to their sexual gender role were considered "congenital inverts")—that expected one member of a lesbian couple would be "noticeably masculine in her affect, style, and behavior". Highsmith depicts Therese as puzzled when her experience does not match that "butch-femme paradigm":[16]
She had heard about girls falling in love, and she knew what kind of people they were and what they looked like. Neither she nor Carol looked like that. Yet the way she felt about Carol passed all the tests for love and fitted all the descriptions.[57]
Lesbian spaces
Literary scholar Alice M. Kelly wrote that there are conversations about the spaces for homosexuals in the setting of 1950's New York.[58] The heteronormative society illustrated in The Price of Salt forced Carol and Therese to seek refuge and freedom to express their sexuality. Susan Fraiman explains this as "shelter writing", which is the "safety, sanity and self-expression–survival in the most basic sense",[59] which were not permitted to be expressed in the public sphere. As a result, the only constant safe lesbian space that Carol and Therese have is their home. Kelly calls the private sphere a “homonormative tool” that shelters the "same-sex sexual practices within it to appease a mainstream society." Because they are surrounded by both people and societal norms that do not allow them to express their sexuality and relationship, their self-expression is limited to being concealed behind a heteronormative façade.
When Therese is first invited to Carol's home, she is in awe of her home as huge and clearly established, but Victoria Hesford explores how the setting is "an extension of the stultifying mechanisms of exchange and production that structure Frankenberg’s", as her home fits into the perfect consumer’s home. Everything and everyone have their place which all fit into this nuclear family and heteronormative society, so when Therese enters this home, she stands out and it reminds Carol that their relationship and her feelings cannot be truly hidden in her family home. Carol's family home is "a hollow monument to middle-class heteronormativity" and to escape it they both go on a liberating road trip, where the notion of the home as a “homonormative tool” from Kelly’s work links,[58] as both women conceal their relationship behind hotel room doors and in the later parts of the novel in their respected homes. The Price of Salt not only explores lesbian spaces but also the sudden intervention of the heteronormative society, this is represented through Harge sending a detective to record Carol and Therese during their most intimate scenes, to win sole custody of their daughter. This invasion of privacy ends their retreat and breaks apart Carol and Therese’s relationship as Carol is forced to return into the heteronormative realm to win over her daughter, but it is too late, as they do not see her fit to be a mother due to her homosexuality.
