nasty brutish and short

Recently I had occasion to sketch a brief comparative character study of Patricia Highsmith’s Tom Ripley and Daphne du Maurier’s second Mrs. de Winter, two of literature’s sulkiest schoolboys. Both are fond of slouching, stuffing their hands in their pockets, treating their ersatz-husbands like King Quarterback Bully-My-Love, avoiding women, barely suppressing a murderous rage against rivals for King Bully’s attention, slotting everyone they come across into a rival-or-burly-protector index, and responding to abstract vaginal imagery with terror and revulsion (no reason!!!). One can easily imagine swapping them into one another’s stories and causing nearly-identical havoc. The unnameable second Mrs. de Winter never loves Maxim better than when she learns he’s “accidentally” killed his wife (“My heart was light like a feather floating in the air”), and is only frustrated she was too love-shy to ask him about it sooner (“Maxim would have told me these things four months ago, five months ago”); as happy as Tom persuades himself he is as Dickie’s replacement, by the end of TTMR he can admit to himself that if only he’d played his cards right he “could have lived with Dickie for the rest of his life, travelled and lived and enjoyed living” instead of living in Dickie’s clothes. Both love their man and their man’s personal effects with the same world-obliterating love, trapped on different ends of the “fuck them or be them” conundrum. Both physically small, where that smallness seems to signal queerness in a way they’re both terribly proud of and deeply resentful about, both itchy and disgusted by the proximity of anyone else’s queerness, except for His, and of course it’s not queer when it comes from Him, just (I’m not, are you? You go first. I’ll be right in. Let’s both say it on the count of three. I’m not. She might be. He is. Look, over there — up in the sky — it’s someone else’s queerness) —