Highsmith has admitted “ a specific inspiration” for the story and for the character of Carol: a “blondish woman in a fur coat,” whom Highsmith once encountered while working at Macy’s where the woman bought her daughter a doll for Christmas. “In the book, Therese is Pat’s alter ego, so she isn’t a character - she’s the voice of an author.” Highsmith chose the title Carol because, Nagy explains, “Pat herself was Therese and the object of her desire wasn’t herself, luckily, it was someone else.” Written from the perspective of Therese Belavit (played by Rooney Mara), a young New York shop girl, the book is “basically an interior monologue of her thoughts,” Nagy said in an Indiewire interview.

At the moment of her decision she asks, “What use am I to her if I’m living against my own grain?” Alternatively, Joan Schenkar in her book The Talented Miss Highsmith: The Secret Life and Serious Art of Patricia Highsmith contends that it is more likely Highsmith “was invoking a biblical reference to another work she had once taken to heart - the Gospel text Andre Gide inserted into The Counterfeiters, his novel about the transgressive love of adolescence: ‘If the salt have lost its flavor wherewith shall it be salted? - that is the tragedy with which I am concerned.’” (MacMillan 2010, pg. Instead, she makes the most difficult decision a mother could make - to give up custody of her daughter - rather than become a shell of a person and let her real self disintegrate into a pile of indistinguishable grains of salt. Nagy states that it is a biblical “reference to Lot’s wife, the story of Lot’s wife and the price of literally turning back.” Like Lot’s wife, Hagar, Carol (played by Cate Blanchett) can not return to her former life, pre-Therese, and a sham marriage that has long forced her to deny her true desires. Highsmith later commented that The Price of Salt had come from something she was thinking of in the Bible. At a New York City panel discussion on November 17, 2015, Phyllis Nagy, the writer of the screenplay, who was friends with Highsmith, offered some insight into the title’s significance and Highsmith’s motivations.Īccording to Nagy, Bloomsbury Publishing wanted Highsmith “to finally claim the novel as her own and…because it had been known under the pseudonym of Claire Morgan she felt it was more appropriate to have a clean start… always wanted to title it ‘Carol’ and so she did.” Much speculation has arisen over the meaning of the story’s original title The Price of Salt and why Highsmith chose to change its title.

When Bloomsbury republished the book in the 1990s, they changed the title to Carol. Carol (2015) is the film adaptation of Patricia Highsmith’s 1952 novel previously titled The Price of Salt, written under the pseudonyum Claire Morgan.

The price of salt author