Session: 2c
Time: 14.00–15.30
Room: JK2–3 1.09
Chair: Emelia Quinn
Panel description: The American novelist and short story writer Patricia Highsmith (1921–1995) is perhaps best known for her psychological thrillers, most notably The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955) and its sequels. In recent years, her significance to the history of queer literature, in the form of The Price of Salt (1952), has also received renewed attention thanks to the success of Todd Haynes’ film adaptation Carol (2015). However, her status as one of the pre-eminent authors of animal revenge fantasies has yet to receive its critical due, despite Highsmith’s oeuvre containing numerous narratives of animals revolting against humans: from her 1957 novel Deep Water, in which the protagonist (or, perhaps more fittingly, antagonist) is consumed by snails, to her 1975 collection of short stories, The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder, composed of a series of tales featuring the violent revenge of a range of animals (from hamsters to elephants) against the tyranny of humans. Infamously misanthropic by nature, the violence enacted by nonhumans against their human captors in the latter text invoked for Highsmith a profound sense of hilarity: “Every time she re-read one of her stories, she had to admit that the experience left her doubled up, with tears of laughter rolling down her face” (Wilson, Beautiful Shadow 331). However, such tales represent not simply a masochistic pleasure in human pain, nor an easy joke at the expense of animals. The animal-loving author instead described the scenes depicted as the acting out of “righteous instinct” (331) on the part of her animal heroes.
This three-person panel focuses in-depth on Highsmith’s narratives of animal revenge: their comedy and camp, their sincerity and indignation, their misanthropy and animal-loving. In an age in which ruminations on nonhuman resistance are at an all time high, as testified by the thematic focus of this conference, this panel seeks to deepen our understanding of the recent history out of which contemporary depictions of animal revolt have emerged through close attention to this key figure from the mid-twentieth century.
Robert McKay (University of Sheffield), “Patricia Highsmith’s Dark Multispecies Mutualism”
Abstract: The contemporary moment is one in which the environmental, public health, social, and psychological benefits of partnerships between humans and animals are widely celebrated. We see this in arenas like green social prescribing, ethical dairy production, animal-assisted therapy, and petkeeping—and it often recurs in “more-than-human” creativity and scholarship across the arts, humanities, and social sciences. But as the recent controversy around Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path suggests, the positive appeal to such multispecies mutualism cannot avoid its more troubling aspects—where the reality and fantasy of more-than-human connection are intermixed, its benefits commodified, and its unequally-borne costs and harms obscured.
To consider the profound ambivalence at work in ideals of interspecies relationality, I turn to Patricia Highsmith’s portrayal of what we might call “dark multispecies mutualism” in The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder. This collection largely comprises stories that imagine animals’ intentional acts of revenge against the people and systems that abuse them. But my paper focuses on the three stories—”The Day of Reckoning”, “Hamsters vs Websters”, and “Harry: A Ferret”—that centre narratives of violent allegiance between humans and animals. I am especially interested in the scope their highly stylized form affords Highsmith to satirise and besmirch ideals about the beneficence of human–animal relations, and the privilege of human–human ones. As she started work on the collection, Highsmith wrote that “the fortitude to live comes from the realization that life is not composed of realities [and] one doesn’t even have to worry about this fact” (Her Diaries and Notebooks, 849). These insouciantly histrionic, emotionally intense, psychically untethered, and morally excessive stories of dark multispecies mutualism reveal Highsmith’s commitment to animals and a particular kind of misanthropic dissidence from humanity.
Bio: Robert McKay is Professor of Contemporary Literature at the University of Sheffield where he co-directs the Sheffield Animal Studies Research Centre. His book Anthropofugal Fictions: Literature, Species Politics & Flight from Humanity is forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press, and he has co-edited several volumes, including Animal Satire (Palgrave, 2023) and The Palgrave Handbook of Animals and Literature (Palgrave, 2021). From 2025-2030 he will be working with Alasdair Cochrane, Rosaleen Duffy and Eva Haifa Giraud on Multispecies Mutualisms, a project funded by the Wellcome Trust.
Emelia Quinn (University of Ottowa), “Patricia Highsmith, John Waters, and Misanthropic Camp”
Abstract: For Ron Broglio, animal revenge is always comic, with animal revolution presented as “a good joke” whereby “The idiocy of the position makes us laugh” (Animal Revolution, 51). In this paper I further probe this seeming inability to take narratives of animal resistance seriously by looking at the role of camp aesthetics in Patricia Highsmith’s tales of animal revenge.
This paper places the camp aesthetics to be found in Highsmith’s 1975 short story collection The Animal-Lover’s Book of Beastly Murder alongside John Waters’ early independent feature film from 1970, Multiple Maniacs. Highsmith and Waters, while not previously studied in conjunction, share striking similarities. Temporally and geographically proximate, both built their reputations on an embrace of the low and base: Waters quickly earned the moniker “the pope of trash,” while Highsmith has been described as the “high priestess of the nasty.” Investing a sense of camp frivolity in this love of the trashy and nasty, both also share a deep fascination with criminality and murder, the deviant and abnormal. They also share a distinctly misanthropic disdain for the human that sits in complex tension with their black humour, designed as it is to draw together a collective of ostensibly misanthropic consumers.
This paper reads together the animal murders of Highsmith’s work and the infamous lobster rape scene from Multiple Maniacs in order to reflect on the queer and camp aesthetics of animal vengeance fantasies. Such campy humour is tied inextricably to the misanthropy of both works, and allows for an exploration of the limits and possibilities of a form of misanthropic camp, or camp misanthropy.
Bio: Emelia Quinn is Assistant Professor of Environmental Literatures and Animal Studies at the University of Ottawa. She is author of Reading Veganism: The Monstrous Vegan, 1818 to Present (Oxford University Press, 2021) and co-editor of The Edinburgh Companion to Vegan Literary Studies (Edinburgh University Press, 2022) and Thinking Veganism in Literature and Culture: Towards a Vegan Theory (Palgrave Macmillan, 2018). She has published widely at the intersections of animal studies and queer theory in journals including PMLA and GLQ.
Chloë Taylor (University of Alberta), “Patricia Highsmith’s Cats and the Pathologization of Feline Misanthropy”
Abstract: Cats appear in many of Patricia Highsmith’s writings, including the kitten victims in “Engine Horse” and “The Day of Reckoning,” both squashed by humans; Portland Bill of “Something the Cat Dragged in,” whose discovery of a severed human hand launches an amateur murder investigation; and PussPuss of “The Empty Birdhouse,” who is used by humans for her killing services but is otherwise unwanted and knows it. This presentation, however, will focus on the misanthropic cat character Ming, who, at the outset of “Ming’s Biggest Prey” is described thinking “People! Ming detested people. In all the world he liked only Elaine” (66). Ultimately Ming will kill the person he “detests” the most, Elaine’s lover Teddie, who has made multiple attempts on Ming’s life while Elaine wasn’t looking. While most small animals in Highsmith’s tales of “beastly murder” succeed in killing humans through strength in numbers, Ming works alone, jumping onto Teddie’s shoulder as he descends a flight of stairs, hanging on so that the man falls and fatally strikes his head. Ming is then left alone with Elaine, who has realized what kind of man Teddie was and expresses her love for Ming.
While Highsmith’s 1975 story presents Ming’s attack on Teddie as a justifiable and indeed satisfactory act, cat psychiatrist Claude Béata’s 2022 book, La Folie des chats, diagnoses a “pretty calico” named Lisbeth, who has similarly attacked her companion human’s lover, as “mad” (150). Béata observes that more humans are sent to hospital by cats than dogs, and views such feline aggression as psychopathological. In defending the reality of psychopathology in other-than-human animals, Béata moreover diagnoses the captive orca Tilikum with bipolar disorder, and refers to orca’s kills as “accidents” (148). Juxtaposing Highsmith’s accounts of animal murder with medicalizing interpretations such as Béata’s, this presentation will insist on the intentionality and rationality of actions such as Ming’s, Lisbeth’s, and Tilikum’s.
Bio: Chloë Taylor is Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta. She is the author of three monographs on the philosopher Michel Foucault, and has edited or co-edited five books in critical animal studies, most recently The Routledge Companion to Gender and Animals (2024). With jessie beier and Dylan Hall, she has recently completed the co-authored book, Anthropocene ABCs: An Epochalyptic Primer, forthcoming with Fordham University Press in Fall 2026.