Little Tales of Misogyny by Patricia Highsmith

After a recent book swap with Aunty G, I received an enormous bag of books which included Patricia Highsmith’s Little Tales of Misogyny. Many of the stories in this collection weren’t misogynistic, but they were all nasty.

The first story, The Hand, was misogynistic. A man asked a father for the hand of his daughter, and received her actual left hand in a box.

Oona, the Jolly Cave Woman was the story of a physically unattractive, yet sexually irresistible woman who didn’t need to be clubbed on the head for her to have sex with the men in her clan. Perhaps not surprisingly, Oona inspired the men of her clan to create art, words and music. This story left me wondering what to make of it, and hoping that no one was looking over my shoulder to see what I was reading while I was on the train to work.

Apart from Oona, who was a victim of her own sexuality, the women in the rest of the stories in this collection were generally horrible. Rest assured, for those who like fictional wrong-doers to be punished, these horrible women mostly died at the end of their story.

The coquette from The Coquette was murdered by her lovers. The lesson from that story is to make sure that your rival lovers don’t start talking to each other about you and then gang up on you.

The woman in The Dancer was also murdered, after making her lover and dancing partner jealous of each other.

The woman in The Mobile Bed-object was drowned in a canal by her most recent lover and the woman in The Victim mysteriously disappeared after a date with a man in Tangiers. The wife in The Invalid, or, the Bed-ridden came to a bad end too, after pushing her husband (otherwise known as her meal-ticket) too far.

However, the woman in The Fully Licensed Whore, or, The Wife managed much better after she murdered her husband and got away with it. She inherited his insurance money, received a widow’s pension and retained the title of ‘Mrs,’ which allowed her to do what she wanted to in future and remain respectable.

The stories were very short, but were so similar that they stopped being shocking about half-way through. I suppose the humour would be described as black or satire, although I never found myself laughing. Very often the women were raped, sometimes children were raped, and even though these characters were horrible, they were nearly all murdered at the end of their story. The lesson was not to be the woman in any of these stories, which also included The Prude, The Evangelist or The Perfectionist, but I found the repeated murders of the women at the end of each story to be overly similar for the stories to have impact.