ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the dilemmas faced by her anxiety-ridden heroes-in-waiting', and considers the effects of this, expressed both thematically and structurally, on her readers. Highsmith begins with a conflation of the results of the snails' mating and a reference to the symbolic and literal Law embodied by Vic's pursuer: Hortense spent twenty-four hours laying her eggs about five days later, and Detective Havermal was still prowling the community'. The chapter discusses in detail the Kantian conception of radical evil in relation to Tom Ripley. The level of anxiety and discomfort that marks Highsmith's characters, while protecting them to some extent within the waiting room, also closes off any experience of the world as a stable or secure zone. For Lacan, evil was discovered by Freud to lie beyond the pleasure principle, as das Ding or the Thing, reaching beyond affect into a space that borders on the Real, and that is linked to the Death Drive.
