Loss, Motherhood and the Queer ‘Happy Ending’

ABSTRACT Throughout the twentieth century, and particularly prior to Stonewall, literature frequently represented same-sex desire in direct opposition to the forward-looking heterosexual romance narratives that ended with marriage and implied or literal procreation. When Patricia Highsmith published The Price of Salt, in 1952, its popularity with readers, and in particular queer readers, was attributed by the author herself to the probable happy ending of its same-sex romance narrative. This happy ending, however, is uncoupled from the idea of a ‘happily ever after’, because instead of romance gesturing towards the promise of children, it is the precursor for a (queer) mother's loss of her child. This paper will argue that the introduction of children into a narrative almost always means that same-sex desire will not be allowed to flourish, even in a text that interrogates heteronormative assumptions, like Virginia Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway. The Price of Salt is significant, then, not because it provides a happily ever after for a same-sex couple, but because it calls into question the very notion that a happy ending is a gesture to a happy future.