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The Subversion of the Male Tradition in Crime Fiction: Liane Moriarty’s Little Lies

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Domestic Noir

Part of the book series: Crime Files ((CF))

Abstract

Avanzas Álvarez offers an analysis of the ways in which Liane Moriarty’s acclaimed best-seller Little Lies subverts traditional, patriarchal, and masculine discourses in crime fiction. Focusing on the three female main characters, the chapter examines the portrayal of specific female and feminist issues in contemporary society: Domestic violence, motherhood, and sexual assault. As well as considering how the main characters resolve these issues, both as individuals and as a community, Avanzas Álvarez also explores how the Bakhtinian project of carnival (Trivia Night) challenges masculine discourses in crime fiction and creates space for diverse female and feminist narratives.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Sally Munt, Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel (New York: Routledge, 1994), p. 3.

  2. 2.

    Munt 1994.

  3. 3.

    Linden Peach, Masquerade, Crime and Fiction (New York: Routledge, 2006), p. 63.

  4. 4.

    Eva Holland, “‘What if locking the door won’t keep the bad things away?’—Eva Holland on Domestic Thrillers”, One Book Lane (2014).

  5. 5.

    Simone de Beauvoir introduced the female lived experience in the phenomenological tradition with The Second Sex ([1949] 2011), and insisted on the importance of inscribing the specificity of women’s lives in contemporary theory and the arts.

  6. 6.

    Sarah Weinman, ed., Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense (New York: Penguin Books, 2013).

  7. 7.

    Liane Moriarty, Little Lies (London: Penguin Books, 2014).

  8. 8.

    Moriarty 2014: 19.

  9. 9.

    Lenore E.A. Walker, The Battered Woman Syndrome (New York: Springer, [1979] 2009), p. 91.

  10. 10.

    Walker [1979] 2009: 91.

  11. 11.

    Even though Foucault’s panopticism refers to the control of population by invisible forces, the strategies are similar, though in smaller scale, to the ones used in domestic-violence power relationships. Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage Books, [14] 1995).

  12. 12.

    Moriarty 2014: 260.

  13. 13.

    Walker [1979] 2009: 94

  14. 14.

    E.M. Lewis, “The effects of intensity and probability on the preference for immediate versus delayed aversive stimuli in women with various levels of interspousal conflict”. Unpublished manuscript, University of Illinois at Chicago Circle.

  15. 15.

    Moriarty 2014: 309.

  16. 16.

    Moriarty 2014: 310.

  17. 17.

    Moriarty 2014: 354.

  18. 18.

    Moriarty 2014: 204.

  19. 19.

    Walker [1979] 2009: 84.

  20. 20.

    Moriarty 2014: 107.

  21. 21.

    Morairty 2014: 160.

  22. 22.

    Carisa R. Showden. Choices Women Make: Agency in Domestic Violence, Assisted Reproduction, and Sex Work (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), p. 38.

  23. 23.

    Moriarty 2014: 74.

  24. 24.

    Moriarty 2014: 57.

  25. 25.

    Walker 2009: 279.

  26. 26.

    Judith Butler theorises in Gender Trouble (1990) that traditional performances of femininity are “drag”, since they try to imitate an original that does not exist. When Celeste decides to dress for her date with the counsellor, she performs those elements of traditional femininity that she thinks normative in order to normalise her abusive marriage. However, her appearance is clearly a façade trying to imitate an image (constructed by her situated experience as white, Australian, economically successful) that, like original femininity, does not exist.

  27. 27.

    Moriarty 2014: 134.

  28. 28.

    Walker 2009: 85.

  29. 29.

    Moriarty 2014: 360.

  30. 30.

    Moriarty 2014: 318.

  31. 31.

    Moriarty 2014: 10.

  32. 32.

    Moriarty 2014: 20.

  33. 33.

    Moriarty 2014: 33.

  34. 34.

    Moriarty 2014: 35.

  35. 35.

    Moriarty 2014: 193.

  36. 36.

    Moriarty 2014: 83.

  37. 37.

    Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, Manifesta: Young Women, Feminism, and the Future (New York: Farrar, 2000), p. 136.

  38. 38.

    In The Beauty Myth (1992) Naomi Wolf criticises the emergence of the fashion and cosmetic industries as a patriarchal construction to deprive women of the money they earn, and the power derived from said work. She coined beauty routines and the so-called “self-care” culture a third shift for women, who upon arriving home still had to undertake domestic duties, and work on their appearance to remain beautiful and desirable.

  39. 39.

    Suzanne Ferris and Mallory Young, Chick Flicks: Contemporary Women at the Movies (New York: Routledge, 2008), p. 59.

  40. 40.

    Moriarty 2014: 93.

  41. 41.

    Moriarty 2014: 27.

  42. 42.

    Iris Young proposes a phenomenological approach to feminism that creates all lived experience by women as similar due to owning of a female body in society. She coined the expression “breasted experience” for this in 2004. However, this could be considered exclusionary to those women without breasts.

  43. 43.

    Moriarty 2014: 230.

  44. 44.

    Moriarty 2014: 191.

  45. 45.

    Moriarty 2014: 83.

  46. 46.

    Petrak and Hedge, The Trauma of Sexual Assault: Treatment, Prevention and Practice (New Zealand: Wiley, 2002), p. 177.

  47. 47.

    Moriarty 2014: 195.

  48. 48.

    Andrew Solomon, Far from the Tree: Parents, Children, and the Search for Identity (New York: Scribner, 2012), p. 477.

  49. 49.

    Moriarty 2014: 61.

  50. 50.

    Moriarty 2014: 356.

  51. 51.

    Peter Burke, Popular Culture of Early Modern Europe (Aldershot: Scholar Press, 1994).

  52. 52.

    Tymothy Hyman, “A Carnival Sense of the World”, in Carnivalesque, eds. T. Hyman and R. Malbert (California: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 8–73.

  53. 53.

    Mikhail Bakhtin, Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics (trans. E. Caryl) (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984), p. 123.

  54. 54.

    Moriarty 2014: 159.

  55. 55.

    Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilisation: the Carnivalesque in 18th Century English Fiction and Culture (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 73.

  56. 56.

    Christiana Gregoriou, Deviance in Contemporary Crime Fiction (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 96.

  57. 57.

    Moriarty 2014: 383.

  58. 58.

    Gregoriou 2007: 96–97.

  59. 59.

    Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality I: The Will to Knowledge (UK: Penguin, [1976] 2013).

  60. 60.

    Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones, Detective Agency: Women Rewriting the Hard-Boiled Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).

  61. 61.

    Burke 1994: 202.

  62. 62.

    Gregoriou 2007: 97.

  63. 63.

    Moriarty 2014: 424.

  64. 64.

    Munt 1994.

  65. 65.

    Moriarty 2014: 444.

  66. 66.

    Charlotte Beyer, “She Decided to Kill her Husband: Housewives in Contemporary American Fictions of Crime” in Violence in American Popular Culture [2 volumes], vol. 1 (USA: Praeger, 2015), p. 71.

  67. 67.

    Gregoriou 2007: 101.

  68. 68.

    Gregoriou 2007: 102.

  69. 69.

    Moriarty 2014: 449.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. University of Oviedo, Oviedo, Asturias, Spain

    Elena Avanzas Álvarez

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  1. Elena Avanzas Álvarez
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom

    Laura Joyce

  2. University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom

    Henry Sutton

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Álvarez, E.A. (2018). The Subversion of the Male Tradition in Crime Fiction: Liane Moriarty’s Little Lies . In: Joyce, L., Sutton, H. (eds) Domestic Noir. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69338-5_10

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