Queer Friendship and the Psychological Thriller

It’s one of the oldest stories in the book: somewhere between “the butler did it” and “our narrator isn’t telling the truth after all.” When it comes to psychological thrillers, the motif of an obsessive friendship—rooted in the unrequited love of a dangerous, queer-coded murderer—is one of the foundational tropes of the genre. There’s the supernatural version: the near-fatal relationship between the virginal Laura and the seductive vampire Carmilla in Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1871 Gothic novel Carmilla. There’s the male version: the friendship between the wealthy, callow Dickie Greenleaf and the sociopathic upstart, Tom Ripley in Patricia Highsmith’s 1955 novel The Talented Mr Ripley, who will come to murder and impersonate his beloved. There’s the refracted version in Daphne Du Maurier’s 1938 Rebecca, in which both the devoted housekeeper Mrs. Danvers and the meek, timid second Mrs. De Winter wrestle with feelings both erotic and idolatrous for Maxim De Winter’s magnetic, deceased first wife. There’s the celluloid version—between Bette Davis’s aging actress Margot Channing, and her conniving assistant, Anne Baxter’s Eve Harrington, in the 1950 All About Eve; or between Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s characters in 1992 shlock-horror Single White Female. Contemporary examples vary as widely as Lucy Meyers and Anne Shipley in Christine Mangan’s recent, Highsmith-inspired debut novel Tangerine and Cheryl Blossom and Josie McCoy in the CW’s teen-Guignol-soap Riverdale.

In each case, one character—openly or not-so-openly queer—develops a passionate desire for their closest friend. And in each case, that desire is sublimated into violence: acts of stalking, violence, murder.

At its worst, the trope can veer into tawdry homophobia: the documentary The Lavender Lens: 100 Years of Celluloid Queens, explores the pervasive nature of the trope as one of many that code LGBTQ people as deceitful, deviant, and violent. (In 1980, the year both William Friedkind’s Cruising and Gordon Willis’s Windows—two spot-on examples of the trope—came out, queer audiences picketed screenings of both). And often, too, the trope devolves into pat recounting of what The Telegraph’s Lucy Scholes calls the “evil lesbian plot,” a trope that, she writes, can easy become “hackneyed” in 2018.

But it’s worth noting that two of the most important Ur-texts of the genre, Highsmith’s Ripley series and Du Maurier’s Rebecca, were written by queer authors. And in the complicated dynamics of idolator and idol, friend and beloved, we find something more than just a story about how queer desire sublimates itself into violence. Rather, the best stories of obsessive friendship are the ones that explore just how closely intertwined are the desire to possess and the desire to be, stories that treat erotic gratification not as an end in and of itself but as part of a wider dynamic in which sexual desire, social aspiration and personal identity all refract off one another. Le Fanu’s Carmilla, Du Maurier’s Second Mrs. De Winter, and Highsmith’s Tom Ripley long not just to have but to become the objects of their desire. Exploring the ambiguity of this emotional space, these novels function as two-way mirrors through which our protagonist both gaze upon the other and upon themselves.

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Let’s start with Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Written and published between 1871 and 1872, Carmilla is often considered the originator of the “lesbian vampire” trope. Young and lonely Laura lives with her father in isolation rural Austria when her life is interrupted by the arrival of the haughty, pale, Carmilla Karnstein in the area. They develop a friendship, but that friendship soon turns possessive, as Carmilla overwhelms her new friend with demands for utter devotion. “You will think me cruel, very selfish,” Carmilla tells Laura at one point, “but love is always selfish; the more ardent the more selfish. How jealous I am you cannot know. You must come with me, loving me, to death; or else hate me, and still come with me, and hating me through death and after. There is no such word as indifference in my apathetic nature.”

But threaded within that narrative of possession is a narrative of commingling. Carmilla tries to lure Laura with a vision of unity that suggests not just sexual unity but a collapse in difference: the two become not just one but the same. “If your dear heart is wounded, my wild heart bleeds with yours. In the rapture of my enormous humiliation I live in your warm life, and you shall die—die, sweetly die—into mine. I cannot help it; as I draw near to you, you, in your turn, will draw near to others, and learn the rapture of that cruelty, which yet is love; so, for a while, seek to know no more of me and mine, but trust me with all your loving spirit.” Elsewhere, she is even more explicit: “You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one for ever.”

And, as Carmilla surreptitiously feeds on Laura by night, the two of them do, indeed, become one: spilled blood transcending the boundaries of two bodies. For Laura, erotic dreams and Carmilla’s nighttime feedings meld together. “Sometimes,” Laura recalls, “it was as if warm lips kissed me, and longer and longer and more lovingly as they reached my throat, but there the caress fixed itself. My heart beat faster, my breathing rose and fell rapidly and full drawn.” She grows sick and pale: “The narcotic of an unsuspected influence was acting upon me, and my perceptions were benumbed. Although she and her family finally grow wise to Carmilla’s supernatural influence—and ultimately kill her—the older, wiser Laura who ends the novel is not the naive Laura of its start. Though dead, Carmilla has become part of Laura. “To this hour,” the novel closes, “the image of Carmilla returns to memory with ambiguous alternations–sometimes the playful, languid, beautiful girl; sometimes the writhing fiend I saw in the ruined church; and often from a reverie I have started, fancying I heard the light step of Carmilla at the drawing room door.”

Carmilla and Laura’s relationship isn’t just a story of unrequited queer desire. It’s also a story of how that desire carves out a space for the two women to affect one another. The innocent Laura’s coming-of-age, and implied sexual maturity is sparked by her brush with Carmilla. In being haunted by Carmilla, Laura also becomes Carmilla.

So too with Tom Ripley, the murderous con man on whom Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley novels center.

Tom’s relationship with his friend and patron, the wealthy, shiftless Dickie Greenleaf, could be read as a straightforward example of sublimated queer desire. He becomes enraged when he sees Dickie with his girlfriend, Marge. When Tom loses control with Dickie during an argument (during which, incidentally, Dickie accuses Tom of having romantic designs on him), murdering him with the oar of the boat they are rowing in Italy, Highsmith, like Le Fanu, blends sex and violence. “God only knew how deep the water was… [Nobody] could see anything they did here…he could have hit Dickie, sprung on him, or kissed him, or thrown him overboard.’

But even more prominently than in Carmilla, Tom’s obsession with Dickie, including its erotic component, is framed as an element of Tom’s relationship with himself. Dickie—handsome, loved, rich, at ease with himself—represents everything that the alienated, lonely Tom wants to be. Dickie’s confidence only thrusts into relief Tom’s own discomfort with himself. Highsmith makes this explicit. During one major argument between Dickie and Tom before the murder, Tom realizes the extent to which he has created his own identity around being like Dickie, and the extent, too, to which this identity is a fraud. “You were supposed to see the soul through the eyes, the one place you could look at another human being and see what really went on inside, and in Dickie’s eyes Tom saw nothing more now then he would have seen if he had looked at the hard, bloodless surface of a mirror…it struck Tom like a horrible truth, true for all time…each had stood and would stand before him and he would know time and time again that he would never know them, and the worst was that there would always be the illusion, for a time, that he did know them, and that he and they were completely in harmony and alike.” Dickie is a literal mirror for Tom’s insufficiencies.

After Tom kills Dickie, he spends the rest of the book successfully impersonating him: taking over his trust fund, his clothes, his apartments. Access to Dickie’s possessions allows Tom to define himself in opposition to them, just as he defined himself in opposition to Dickie the human being during Dickie’s life. “Possessions reminded him that he existed, and made him enjoy his existence. It was as simple as that. And wasn’t that worth something?” Tom, lacking a clear identity of his own, develops a relational one. Re-inventing himself as Dickie, Tom achieves not just erotic possession but, as in Carmilla, a kind of commingling. He and Dickie are, as Carmilla and Laura were, “one forever.”

And, finally, there is Rebecca. A rare “double example,” of this trope, Du Maurier’s novel explores the influence of the late first Mrs. De Winter, Rebecca, on those that survive her: her husband, Maxim, his meek second wife (who is never named), Rebecca’s devoted maid Mrs. Danvers. The first and second Mrs. De Winter, and Mrs. Danvers, define their identities in opposition to each other. The second Mrs. De Winter resents and fears her predecessor, whom she feels she will never live up to, even as her obsession casts an erotic shadow over the novel’s lush and melancholy atmosphere. Mrs. Danvers, fanatically devoted to Rebecca, equally despises her substitute, ultimately attempting to manipulate the second Mrs. De Winter into committing suicide out of a conviction she’ll never be able to rival Rebecca for Maxim’s love.

Though there is little explicitly supernatural about Rebecca, the narrator is nevertheless as haunted by Rebecca as Laura was by Carmilla. She spends her days as a bride wandering Max’s atmospherically Gothic ancestral home, Manderley, and half-hallucinating her predecessor:”I was sending out invitations. I wrote them all myself with a thick black pen. But when I looked down to see what I had written it was not my small square handwriting at all, it was long and slanting, with curious pointed strokes. I pushed the cards away from the blotter and hid them. I got up and went to the looking-glass. A face stared back at me that was not my own. It was very pale, very lovely, framed in a cloud of dark hair. The eyes narrowed and smiled. The lips parted. The face in the glass stared back at me and laughed. And I saw then that she was sitting on a chair before the dressing-table in her bedroom, and Maxim was brushing her hair. He held her hair in his hands, and as he brushed it he wound it slowly into a thick rope. It twisted like a snake, and he took hold of it with both hands and smiled at Rebecca and put it round his neck.” As the narrator imagines Rebecca having sex with her now-husband, it’s difficult to separate her jealousy from her desire—for them both.

As in Ripley, this erotic triad manifests itself not in over sexuality, but in a fetishization of the material goods Rebecca left behind. Mrs. Danvers takes the second Mrs. De Winter to Rebecca’s rooms—shuttered since her death—and demands that she stroke and feel Rebecca’s clothes. “She looked beautiful in this velvet,” Mrs. Danvers tells her. “Put it against your face. It’s soft, isn’t it? You can feel it, can’t you? The scent is still fresh, isn’t it? You could almost imagine she had only just taken it off. I would always know when she had been before me in a room. There would be a little whiff of her scent in the room. These are her underclothes, in this drawer…” Together, Danvers and the narrator experience Rebecca’s absence as an erotic presence: they touch her lingerie, smell her perfume, imagine her there in the room having only recently undressed.

Later, when Danvers is attempting to convince the second Mrs. De Winter to jump from the balcony, she does so in caressing terms: hinting at a seduction. “Mrs Danvers came close to me, she put her face near to mine.’It’s no use, is it?’ she said. ‘You’ll never get the better of her. She’s still mistress here, even if she is dead. She’s the real Mrs de Winter, not you. It’s you that’s the shadow and the ghost. It’s you that’s forgotten and not wanted and pushed aside.’” Mrs. Danvers’ obsessive friendship with Rebecca is a dark mirror of the narrator’s own, as the two Mrs. De Winters—who never meet in the flesh—develop their identities in dialogue with one another (literally: they even share a name).

Ultimately, it is revealed that Rebecca—far from being the ideal wife—was an amoral seductress (and, it is implied, bisexual), who conned Maxim into marrying her, and that Maxim—far from still pining for her—murdered her in a fit of jealous rage. The narrator, rather than being horrified by this, seems relieved—at least he loves me. But it is through dialogue with Rebecca, mediated through Danvers, that the narrator grows up, and becomes more like the woman she has been so taught to fear. “It’s gone forever,” Maxim laments after he tells his wife what he has done. “That funny young, lost look I loved won’t ever come back. I killed that when I told you about Rebecca. It’s gone. In a few hours, you’ve grown so much older.” But that process of maturation is largely due to the relationship between the narrator and Rebecca herself.

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To reduce any of these novels to a straightforward sublimation of queer desire into violence—as so many lesser examples of the trope have done—is to flatten their complexity. Rather, the mingling of the erotic and the creative, in these books, reveals the way in which sex itself can often be about so much more than physical desire. Ripley’s, the Second Mrs. De Winter’s, Carmilla’s desires are all absolutely erotic: in each case, the atmosphere of the novel is suffused with sensuality to the point of claustrophobia. But, that sexuality is so intimately tied up with identity that it is impossible, for both the characters involved and the reader, to meaningfully separate the two.

In writing my own novel, Social Creature—a very conscious female-led response text to The Talented Mr. Ripley—I was conscious of the pitfalls of falling into the “evil lesbian” trope. I wanted the friendship between my two main characters, obsessively close friends from contrasting social backgrounds—to reflect the variety of defining experiences I’d had with other women. Some were women I’d been close friends with. Others were women I’d dated. But still others—and this was the ambiguous terrain I wanted to explore—were women to whom my relationship was more ambiguous. They were women against whom I defined myself, or who defined themselves against me. They were women on whom I had a “crush,” but a crush whose nature I did not then have the language to pick apart: a combination of erotic desire and a desire for emulation. Women whom I’d kissed, or wanted, but also, in self-doubt, told myself it didn’t count. There have been women, platonic friends, who—asking for fashion advice for a heterosexual date—have changed in front of me, and I have experienced a brief lightning-flash of desire. And there have been women with whom I’ve been intimate when—when admiring their lingerie, say—my pleasure has come spiked with competition. (“Why am I not the girl to wear beautiful lingerie under my dress,” I wondered, before going out and promptly buying my own). When I was younger, I struggled heavily with the boundaries of self-definition: self-identifying at varying points at both ends of the Kinsey spectrum. With time I’ve become more comfortable with the ambiguity of those relationships: a terrain carved out as “queer.”

But, in writing Social Creature, I wanted to give my central characters the opportunity to go beyond sublimation. What happens, I wondered, when subtext becomes text. Late in the drafting process, I changed a scene that had been a kiss to a scene of sexual intimacy. In context, the scene is far more about power than it is about desire—one of the characters, consciously playing up the trope of “performative bisexuality,” initiates it for the benefit of a third party. I worried, at first, that the scene would read as exploitative: a disingenuous cry for attention from the reader, as well as the other characters in the story. But in the end, that scene became pivotal for the book. Rather than sublimating their queer desire into violence, our leads channel their relationship—with all its complicated power dynamics—into sex. The way they interact sexually reflects the wider totality of their relationship.

There is a popular saying: “everything is about sex except sex—which is about power.” (It’s commonly, erroneously attributed to Oscar Wilde.) In the best stories of obsessive friendship, those two are inextricably intertwined. The erotic is just one sphere along which the desire for self-definition manifests itself. Carmilla, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Rebecca alike are about people forming their identity—sexual and otherwise—from the people around them.

In that sense, it’s little surprise that both Highsmith and Du Maurier — two queer writers with admittedly complicated relationships to their sexuality—would have embraced the psychological thriller as the perfect genre to explore those contradictions. For both women, queer identity involved a painful degree of dissembling: the creation of an artificial self with which to navigate the public world. It involved a constant necessity of becoming: forming an identity in emulation of those who seem, like Dickie Greenleaf, like they have it all figure out.

As Highsmith wrote in her journals, “I am troubled by a sense of being several people…There is an ever more acute difference—and an intolerableness—between my inner self, which I know is the real me, and various faces of the outside world.”  The story of the obsessive friendship, at its best, isn’t just a cautionary tale about queer desire. It’s a way of exploring—through the dark mirror of metaphor—the queer experience, as well.