The Price of Salt

The title indicates the key theme, with The Price of Salt meaning The Consequences of Love. Salt is an obsolete term for lust, but Therese doesn’t just sexually desire Carol—she loves her, and Therese feels this love right away. When she first sees Carol at Frankenberg’s, she “[can] not look away” (28), a sharp contrast from the way she thinks and feels about Richard. Carol seizes her attention, and her love starts consuming her immediately. During their first conversation, Therese wishes with “all her power to wish anything that the woman would simply continue her last words” and ask Therese to meet again (29). When she doesn’t, Therese takes matters into her own hands and sends Carol a postcard from Frankenberg’s. Therese thinks love is “supposed to be a kind of blissful insanity” (33), and her gesture supports her belief. Mailing an unknown customer a Christmas card from work isn’t necessarily rational behavior, yet Therese is in love—reason is beside the point. In the book, love doesn’t grow over time—it seizes a person right away. Once Therese sees Carol, Carol captures Therese. Conversely, Therese doesn’t love Richard. They’ve dated for 10 months, and she feels no “blissful insanity” for him. Her relationship with him is practical. She carries no illusions about him and is searingly honest about his ordinariness, from his inability to keep a job and lackluster paintings to his living with his parents. Still, Therese is not yet ready to admit she loves a woman. Richard’s unremarkable nature and Therese’s lukewarm feelings about him embody compulsory heterosexuality; for Therese, this is the most a relationship with a man can offer.

As such, the theme of Atomization and Alienation appears in Therese's long-term relationship with Richard. He loves her, but she doesn’t love him, so he makes her feel separate and isolated. Walking with Richard, Phil, and Dannie, Therese feels “like a dangling appendage” (22), an object that’s not firmly attached to Richard. This metaphor reinforces her feelings of alienation, comparing her to an extra body part or inanimate object rather than a person. The sex between Therese and Richard, which she calls “anything but pleasant” (46), furthers her sense of distance and loneliness. The environment at Frankenberg’s builds on this theme, in part because it’s a temporary job for Therese, who has bigger dreams. While Frankenberg’s offers a more permanent environment for many employees that offers long-term careers and vacation options, Therese does not feel she belongs there. She reflects that “one saw within the store the same faces day after day, the few faces one might have spoken to and never did” (5). Though she and her coworkers share the same physical space every day, there’s no connection. This is reinforced by the detail of a coworker stealing her raw meat, representing the idea that Frankenberg’s cannot be a nourishing or fulfilling environment for her.

Ruby Robicheck complicates this theme because she reaches out to Therese in the cafeteria and invites her to visit her in the sweater department. Ruby gives Therese a chance to feel less alienated, and though Therese doesn’t visit her in the store, the possibility counters her loneliness. As the narrator states, “[Therese] never saw her, but it was pleasant to have someone to look for in the store” (7). Ruby gives Therese a connection—however minimal. At the same time, Ruby’s home life is bleak, and Ruby lives an atomized existence outside of Frankenberg’s. As someone whose dream was crushed, Ruby is a sort of omen for Therese, the possible future offered by Frankenberg’s. Her apartment is described as a “horrible dream,” and Ruby is the “hunchbacked keeper of the dungeon” (13). Depicted as a grotesque nightmare, she creates a moment of clarity for Therese, illuminating what she wants, even if it manifests cruelly: She doesn’t want to be with an "ugly" woman like Ruby.

Likewise, Highsmith juxtaposes Ruby with Carol. Whereas Carol is graceful and beautiful, Ruby is “ugly.” Carol has a car, money, and a family, but Ruby is alone and in a lower socioeconomic class. Carol captures Therese, but Ruby repels her. As characters, Ruby and Carol are foils—opposites. While Therese isn’t the narrator, narration is a third-person limited point of view that follows her perspective, so the separate storyteller shares a world colored by Therese’s mindset. As such, the depictions of both these women are exaggerated, representing Therese’s feelings as much as the characters themselves. Therese’s unreliability is reinforced by her lunch with Carol, where she tells Carol that her parents are dead, even though her mom is still alive. Therese is honest about manipulating the truth, asking, “[W]hat did the facts matter after all? […] Because she was happy now, starting today” (39). What propels Therese is feelings, which are fluid, unlike facts. At the same time, feelings are often put forth as a greater truth in the novel, something worth pursuing and building a life around despite their subjectivity.

Love, Obsession, and Learning to Let Go is another key theme in these opening chapters as the characters contend with their feelings. Therese genuinely wants to be with Carol because she is drawn to her, and her desire borders on obsession, pushing her to transgress boundaries like finding Carol’s address from the C.O.D. slip. By contrast, Therese doesn’t love or want to be with Richard, but she doesn’t want to use him, either; she doesn’t want to go to Europe with him, let alone on dates. Yet Therese can’t seem to let go of Richard, reflecting her youth and inexperience—she is not yet ready to risk being alone or in an intimate relationship with another woman. In the following chapters, the theme becomes a challenge for Therese as she navigates love and letting go of people.