Tom Ripley as Supervillain Antihero in Highsmith's Novel

Introduction: The Problem of Tom Ripley's Motivations

That Patricia Highsmith's 1955 novel The Talented Mr. Ripley engenders so many differing opinions in its readers is a testament to the complexity and nuance Highsmith gives to the character of Tom Ripley. From the start, Tom is a con man whose specialty lies in telling people exactly what they want to hear. In many regards, this ability extends to the audience itself, leaving Tom's motivations and inclinations open to interpretation. Leading interpretations of Tom Ripley tend to focus either on the evidence for Tom's potentially homosexual attraction to Dickie Greenleaf, or else examine how Tom's criminal actions can be viewed as a kind of reaction or revenge against his social class and status. In the latter case, this perceived revenge is itself inherently tied to Tom's embodiment of white masculinity.

Although there is evidence to support both of these positions, they are ultimately insufficient in explaining the motivations and logic of Tom's actions, because they cannot account for the manner and tone of Tom's eventual escape from justice. Specifically, both interpretations misread Tom's final words concerning the uncertainty of his fate, treating them as evidence of a paranoid psyche or an ominous premonition. Instead, when examining the character of Tom Ripley in his immediate historical, political, and literary context as an example of the quintessential supervillain antihero, one can see how his potential queerness and demonstrations of problematic white masculinity are ultimately circumscribed within Tom's participation in a larger political reaction against the failure of ideals following World War II.

Before discussing the extant interpretations of Tom Ripley, it is useful to provide a brief background of Patricia Highsmith's career in order to contextualize The Talented Mr. Ripley within both Highsmith's body of work and Western culture at large. Highsmith began her career as a comic book writer during World War II, but by the time she published The Talented Mr. Ripley, she had already written multiple novels, including Strangers on a Train, which was adapted into a film by Alfred Hitchcock the year after its publication. Aside from a brief stint writing romance comics, the majority of Highsmith's work features male characters involved in crime or espionage — even her time writing comics concerned superheroes and detectives fighting America's political enemies during World War II.

Highsmith's Career and the Adventure Genre

This larger genre of detective, superhero, and spy stories was still extremely popular when Highsmith published The Talented Mr. Ripley in 1955, as evidenced by the fact that Ian Fleming's third James Bond novel and Agatha Christie's thirtieth Hercule Poirot novel saw publication the same year. What makes Tom Ripley stand out from figures in those books, of course, is the fact that he is the criminal rather than the detective, and he ultimately wins in the end. However, before discussing Tom Ripley's status as a supervillain-esque antihero in greater detail, one must address existing interpretations of his character in order to better demonstrate how the interpretation offered here ultimately transcends and improves upon those readings.

Arguably the most commonly discussed interpretation of Tom Ripley revolves around the question of his sexuality. This is such a widely discussed topic that there is no point attempting to highlight every variation of this approach, but it is helpful to examine one study in particular: its treatment of queer characters in Gothic fiction of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries helps demonstrate, in a roundabout way, the importance of understanding Tom Ripley within the context of the comic books and adventure novels of the mid-twentieth century. As will be seen, while one can certainly trace some of Tom's cultural and narrative origins to the representation of queerness in Gothic literature, Tom's potential repression of homosexual desires should not be seen as a repudiation of homosexuality in particular, but rather of sexuality in general.

The Queer Reading: Haggerty and Its Limits

In his book Queer Gothic, George Haggerty argues that, ultimately, "Tom triumphs by accepting terms that the 1950s demand for a queer," in that he represses his homosexual attraction to Dickie by killing him — a move Haggerty interprets as Tom having "sacrificed genuine emotion and moved into a world in which every emotion is faked" (Haggerty 176, 177). Haggerty's analysis is instructive because it simultaneously identifies a meaningful shift that occurs in the novel but misinterprets it, distracted by the contemporaneous presence of details concerning Tom's sexuality. In short, while Haggerty and other critics who focus on Tom's sexuality interpret the hints of homosexual desire for Dickie as evidence of his underlying motivations, in reality this desire is merely one element of a character motivated by a much larger and ultimately more political interest — one that transcends sexuality or class while containing both within it.

What is interesting about Haggerty's interpretation is that he essentially recognizes that Tom's queerness is not the most important or central element of his character, yet fails to imagine what those more important elements actually are. This ultimately leads him to misinterpret Tom's actions and desires. As Haggerty notes, "Highsmith does not want merely to label her character a 'queer' the way he might be labeled a spy, as an end point to her investigation of his character. In a sense, that is where she begins" (Haggerty 171). At the same time, Haggerty ultimately interprets Tom's most important actions as evidence of shame explicitly concerning his homosexuality, rather than seeing what is actually happening: Tom's rejection of sexuality itself as a constituent part of the social structure he has chosen to reject and corrupt.

Haggerty argues that "Tom is ashamed before Dickie, and killing him can bring his desire to fulfillment at the same time that he destroys the object of desire and with it the source of shame" (Haggerty 175). In Haggerty's view, Tom is ashamed of his desire for Dickie and cannot simply move on, so he must kill Dickie in order to consummate a kind of physical transmission while simultaneously ridding himself of that desire. While Haggerty's observation about the consummation that occurs with Dickie's death is accurate, he errs by suggesting that Tom's motivating emotion is shame. This leads to a secondary misinterpretation concerning the reason for Tom's ultimate success. However, before explaining that success, one must address the critique of Tom and Dickie's relationship from the perspective of class, because this too highlights important elements of Tom's character while ignoring crucial details.