Highsmith interested me a lot while writing my third paper and I couldn't help relating her to Gloria while I was reading Queenpin. Highsmith felt unattached to people and was similar to Gloria in that she never wanted a relationship with anyone. The difference is that she had sex and affairs with everyone, while Gloria refrains from it all. Highsmith had a love for destroying other relationships and loved to be the other women. She found some satisfaction in breaking love as the way Gloria reacts when killing Vic I think, a strong need to destroy. In an biography written about her there was a quote taken from Highsmith where she says, “I learned to live with a grievous and murderous hatred very early on. And learned to stifle also my more positive emotions.” I think this is the way the mobsters work, they all have the same mentality. Gloria is training her new girl so that she can learn to live with murderous hatred and stifle her positive emotions to become more successful.
Here's the interesting article on the review of her biography: Highsmith
I think that is an interesting point you brought up. I find it very interesting that a lot of criminals and Highsmith rebelled against various forms of conformity, yet criminal organizations and gangs try to make everyone conform to the same code of loyalty and honor (no snitching, etc.). While this is some sort of reverse nobleness where the "bad guys" have to be loyal to one another to take advantage of or undermine an already corrupt world, in Queenpin, the narrator must betray her mentor and undermine her to make it to the top. Since both these characters are women and are even more victimized than men by a corrupt, sexist, patriarchal world, then it seems that Abbott is providing a pretty hopeless and nihilistic commentary on how a sexist world corrupts the victims of it too. Perhaps the rough sex the narrator is into is a reflection of her own self hatred and subconscious desire to be punished by a man [just an idea, I'm not judging anyone's sexual preferences]). This seems similar to the idea in Himes's novel (which I'm pretty sure James Baldwin explicitly states in one of his works) that racism corrupts African-Americans as much as it does white people. I guess this seemingly hopeless conclusion about future gender relations is appropriate for noir though. To play devil's advocate though, maybe Abbott is actually asserting that women betraying other women is good though since now they feel to be just as competetive as men are in crime and business (the whole survival of the fittest thing); however, this type of competition seems to be the thing that causes classism and inferiority complexes and is the antithesis of the goals of feminism. I suppose there is no place for hopes of loyalty, a meritocracy, and human progression in noi though.
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