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From Cool Girl to Dead Girl: Gone Girl and the Allure of Female Victimhood
Abstract
This chapter focuses on Gillian Flynn’s most recent novel, Gone Girl (2012), and the fetishisation of female victimhood as a cultural phenomenon. This novel centres on a female protagonist whose canny ability to control the dynamics of her own apparent helplessness is unmatched by her literary predecessors. Her successful exploitation of the popular news narrative surrounding missing and murdered white women highlights the potentially harmful cultural implications of this cultural fascination with particular kinds of victimhood. The aim of this chapter is to evaluate Flynn’s success (or lack thereof) in exploring the obsession with female victimhood as a type of symbolic subjugation, which may be interpreted as simultaneously reassuring and restrictive.
Feminist anger is having a moment, but the double meaning of 'mad' as angry and crazy has shaped the representation of women in popular crime fiction since Lady Audley burned down the house over 150 years ago. But when is anger just, when is it revenge, and when is it maddening? This Element will explore the ethics and efficacy of anger in female-centered crime fiction from its first stirrings in the 19th century through second wave feminism's angry, individualist heroes until today's current explosion of women who reject respectability and justification. It will also examine recent challenges to our understanding of the genre posed both by feminist care ethics and by intersectional crime fiction. This Element considers anger as the appropriate affect for women fighting for justice and explores how it shapes the representation of female detectives, relates to the crimes they investigate, and complicates ideas around justice.
This article explores two predominant images of Gillian Flynn’s female characters: the monstrous mother and the missing/dead girl. These two representations of Flynn’s female characters showcase the link between female criminality and transgression on the one hand, and the female characters’ traumatic history and family dysfunctionality on the other. This article argues that Flynn’s use of these two tropes reveals the conflicting facets of female crime, victimhood, and agency in her thrillers, and by so doing her work subverts the murky domain of the portrayal of criminal women in relation to motherhood, mental illness and trauma.
From domestic goddess to desperate housewife, What a Girl Wants? explores the importance and centrality of postfeminism in contemporary popular culture. Focusing on a diverse range of media forms, including film, TV, advertising and journalism, Diane Negra holds up a mirror to the contemporary female subject who finds herself centralized in commodity culture to a largely unprecedented degree at a time when Hollywood romantic comedies, chick-lit, and female-centred primetime TV dramas all compete for her attention and spending power. The models and anti-role models analyzed in the book include the chick flick heroines of princess films, makeover movies and time travel dramas, celebrity brides and bravura mothers, 'Runaway Bride' sensation Jennifer Wilbanks, the sex workers, flight attendants and nannies who maintain such a high profile in postfeminist popular culture, the authors of postfeminist panic literature on dating, marriage and motherhood and the domestic gurus who propound luxury lifestyling as a showcase for the 'achieved' female self.
Like a cut that won't stay closed, noir scars the landscape of twentieth-century American culture, shearing off scabbed-over surfaces of everyday life to reveal the festering puss and clotted blood that lies beneath. Such is the ambiguous promise of noir, to uncover the infectious wounds that have been imperfectly scabbed over by the work of ideology. Noir thus invites us to reopen the cleavages of social violence, demanding that we cut away the irregular sutures provided by our idealizing fictions of the world and confront the wound in its intransigent refusal to disappear.
It is the infectious recurrence of noir in twentieth-century culture that has made it both so seductive and so hard to theorize. It seems to be both everywhere and nowhere at once, simultaneously eluding generic definition while at the same time parasitically infecting a host of other genres, metastasizing their stable contents into something alien and lethal.1 I want to suggest that it is precisely the elusive and parasitic qualities of noir that give it its critical versatility and force. Noir is not so much a genre, as a negative deformation and phantasmatic volatilization of other genres such as the hard-boiled detective story, the crime story, and the romance narrative.2 It remakes the substance of these other genres, drawing out their negativity and reworking their positive or utopian content into self-canceling allegories of failure and futility.3
As I have argued elsewhere, noir is best characterized as a resolutely negative cultural fantasy about the relationship of the subject to the law, one that finds expression in a wide range of twentieth-century literary and filmic texts and that functions as both a condensation of and a catalyst for various forms of social negativity that are distinct to the middle decades of the twentieth century.4 In defining noir as a historically specific cultural fantasy, I am both synthesizing and reworking earlier definitions of noir that tend to categorize it as either a historical expression distinctive to the thirties, forties, and fifties and/or as a specific fantasy structure that obsessively replays a set of transhistorical psychoanalytic meanings. On the one hand, for historically-minded critics such as Lee Horsley, E. Ann Kaplan, Alain Sliver, Frank Krutnick, Robert Corber, Paula Rabinowitz, William Marling, and David Reid and Jayne L. Walker, noir is theorized as either an expression of post-World War II malaise or as a coded form of Depression-era social protest. On the other hand, for psychoanalytic theorists such as Slavoj Žižek , Joan Copjec, Christopher Metress, and Elizabeth Cowie, noir is theorized as narrativizing a specific ontological or critical fantasy structure.5
In positing noir as a historically specific negative cultural fantasy, I am offering a definition that attends equally to psychoanalytic and historical resonances. This definition of noir attempts to account not only for its elusiveness and mobility, its ability to fasten itself onto a number of different genres and its openness to a range of different political positions, but also for the diversity of cultural fantasy work it undertakes, work that is at once socioeconomic and subjective, markedly public and putatively private.
It is this ability to bridge and volatilize the public/private divide, even as it marks the divide's ideological persistence that made noir an ideal vehicle for addressing the ideological campaign to privatize women's roles and subjectivity in postwar American culture.6 It is, of course, a critical commonplace that one of the central preoccupations of noir is postwar gender relations.7 Much of the literature on film noir, in particular, emphasizes that the genre's representation of gender as a site of antagonism is an imaginative response to the large scale entrance of women into the industrial workforce during World War II and the attendant postwar crisis of masculinity produced by this entrance. This historicization, derived as it is from film studies, has been challenged by David Reid and Jane L. Walker, who argue that both the representation of gendered antagonism we associate with noir and the large-scale entrance of women into the workplace predates the war (61–67). Given that the history of noir does indeed stretch back...
Gone Girl and the Specter of Feminism
- Robert Palmer
Palmer, Robert, 'Gone Girl and the Specter of Feminism', MT, August 20 2012,
https://moviethots.wordpress.com/2012/08/20/gone-girl-and-the-specterof-feminism/.
30 Shocking Domestic Violence Statistics That Remind Us It’s An Epidemic
- Alanna Vagianos
Vagianos, Alanna, '30 Shocking Domestic Violence Statistics That Remind Us It's
An Epidemic', Huffington Post, 23 October 2014.
Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation
- Helen Birch
Birch, Helen, Moving Targets: Women, Murder and Representation (Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1994).
Is Gone Girl Feminist or Misogynist?
- Eliana Dockterman
Dockterman, Eliana, 'Is Gone Girl Feminist or Misogynist?', Time, 6 October
2014.
Gillian Flynn on her Bestseller Gone Girl and Accusations of Misogyny
- Oliver Burkeman
Burkeman, Oliver, 'Gillian Flynn on her Bestseller Gone Girl and Accusations of
Misogyny', The Guardian, 1 May 2013.
How “Gone Girl” Is Misogynistic Literature
- Nile Cappello
Hi reddit! I’m Gillian Flynn-Author of Sharp Objects, Dark Places and Gone Girl-AMA!
- Gillian Flynn
Flynn, Gillian, 'Hi reddit! I'm Gillian Flynn-Author of Sharp Objects, Dark Places
and Gone Girl-AMA!', Reddit, 22 April 2014, https://www.reddit.com/r/
books/comments/23ojta/hi_reddit_im_gillian_flynnauthor_of_sharp_
objects/.
“Gone Girl” Author Gillian Flynn talks Murder, Marriage, and Con Games
- Stephan Lee
Introduction to Women Crime Writers
- Sarah Weinman
Sarah Weinman, "Introduction to Women Crime Writers", http://womencrime.loa.org/?page_id=187 [accessed 9 September 2016].
Tellingly, the cover of the Penguin edition of In a Lonely Place is a still from Nicholas Ray's 1950 film. Persephone Books also capitalize on the existence of two film adaptations in their online blurb for The Blank Wall
- John T Irwin
John T. Irwin, Unless the Threat of Death is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled
Fiction and Film Noir (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press,
2006), p. 204. Tellingly, the cover of the Penguin edition of In a Lonely
Place is a still from Nicholas Ray's 1950 film. Persephone Books also capitalize on the existence of two film adaptations in their online blurb for The
Blank Wall (see http://www.persephonebooks.co.uk/the-blank-wall.html).
In a Lonely Place: Paranoia in the Dream Factory
- James W Palmer
James W. Palmer, "In a Lonely Place: Paranoia in the Dream Factory",
Literature/Film Quarterly, 13.3 (1985), 200-207 (p. 201).
Her brief assessment of Ray's film reaches the conclusion that "however unintentionally, something of Hughes's protofeminist analysis does survive the adaptation
- Lisa Maria See
- Hogeland
See also Lisa Maria Hogeland: "The film raises the question of the extent
to which the investigation itself is a trigger for Dix's violence", "Afterword"
in Dorothy B. Hughes, In a Lonely Place (New York: The Feminist Press,
2003), pp. 225-50 (p. 246). Her brief assessment of Ray's film reaches the
conclusion that "however unintentionally, something of Hughes's protofeminist analysis does survive the adaptation", p. 247. For an insightful
reading of Hughes's novel, and Ray's film, see Christopher Breu, "Radical
Noir: Negativity, Misogyny, and the Critique of Privatization in Dorothy
Hughes's In a Lonely Place", Modern Fiction Studies, 55.2 (2009),
199-215.
Phantom Ladies: The War Worker, the Slacker and the 'Femme Fatale'", New Review of Film and Television Studies
- Mark Jancovich
Mark Jancovich, "Phantom Ladies: The War Worker, the Slacker and the
'Femme Fatale'", New Review of Film and Television Studies, 8.2 (2010),
164-78 (p. 172).
For Emrys, the "glamorous" portrait "embodies the male gaze of the infatuated artist rather than the living woman" (p. 119) both in the film and in the novel. While I agree with this point, I would argue that the film tries to obscure the extent to which this image of Laura-the Laura Waldo and Mark
- A B Emrys
- Wilkie Collins
Preminger used "a photo of Gene Tierney touched up to look like a painting", (A.B. Emrys, Wilkie Collins, Vera Caspary and the Evolution of the
Casebook Novel [Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2011],
p. 119). For Emrys, the "glamorous" portrait "embodies the male gaze of
the infatuated artist rather than the living woman" (p. 119) both in the
film and in the novel. While I agree with this point, I would argue that the
film tries to obscure the extent to which this image of Laura-the Laura
Waldo and Mark fall in love with-is a projection of their masculine desires.
Caspary explains that "the cane was a symbol (Freudian) of Waldo's impotence and destructiveness, actually the theme of the novel
- Laura
- Otto's
In a 1971 article entitled "My Laura and Otto's", Caspary explains that
"the cane was a symbol (Freudian) of Waldo's impotence and destructiveness, actually the theme of the novel" (Saturday Review, 26 June 1971,
36-7, p. 37). She also recalls her unsuccessful battle with Preminger about
retaining Waldo's deadly walking stick in the film.
Caspary's choice of the name of her protagonist predates her discovery of Collins, who is widely identified as one of the pioneers of detective fiction. On Caspary's adoption of the "Wilkie Collins method of having each character tell his or her own version" of the story, see Emrys
- Emrys
Emrys, p. 114. Caspary's choice of the name of her protagonist predates
her discovery of Collins, who is widely identified as one of the pioneers of
detective fiction. On Caspary's adoption of the "Wilkie Collins method of
having each character tell his or her own version" of the story, see Emrys,
p. 112 and ff.