Audience and Genre

Looking at Giovanni's Room and The Price of Salt as two books that dealt with sexuality in the 50s, it is interesting that Baldwin's book has become a celebrated work of modernism, while Highsmith's text has been largely ignored. I think that several factors have come to effect the respective fates of these books, but I think that genre has the most to do with their reception.

We have already discussed in class that The Price of Salt can be read as a sort of positive response to the lesbian pulp genre that was relatively prevalent in the 1950s. Although Highsmith clearly distances herself from this genre by adding a (modestly) happy ending, it still has elements of pulp fiction and hints at Highsmith's career as a writer of psychological thrillers. Although the book deals with issues of identity, sexuality and coming of age, Highsmith also throws in a private investigator, a cross country road trip, a gun and some car chases. Thus, the novel would have been marketed within the same genre as lesbian pulp rather than as a work of “serious fiction,” intended to be read by a mass audience rather than a scholarly one. The low privilege of the genre almost definitely impacted the novel's readership and legacy, forcing it to remain a lesbian cult classic rather than a widely read or taught novel.

Baldwin's novel, on the other hand, is clearly in the tradition of serious, modernist literature. To begin with, Baldwin wrote the book on a Guggenheim fellowship, a clear indication that he was writing Literature with a capital L. The tone and style of the novel falls into the tradition of Modernism, from the experimental time sequence of the novel to the existential themes explored by David. His association with Richard Wright and the publication of articles in high prestige journals like The Nation and Partisan Review also positioned him as a serious writer for readers and reviewers. Clearly, his name had weight within the literary community by the time Giovanni's Room was published.

Finally, by using a pseudonym on her novel, Highsmith cut her novel off from the rest of her works. Threatened by the content of the novel, she had to protect her reputation as a writer and effectively disowned the novel. Thus, The Price of Salt never got the attention that the rest of her books have received as she became a respected writer. It was doomed to remain outside the canon until it was republished under her name in the 90s.