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.
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- 1.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 3.
- 2.
Nick’s anxiety with regard to his genetic inheritance and the idea that he might come to re-enact the sins of his forebears mirrors that of Camille in Sharp Objects (Flynn’s debut novel), in a sense—both harbour fears that they may consciously or subconsciously replicate the misdeeds of their parents. Bill’s periodic visitations are actually prompted by Amy: “I [whispered] over and over again into Bill Dunne’s spiderweb brain: I love you, come live with us, I love you, come live with us. Just to see if it would catch […] I love the idea of Bill Dunne, the living totem of everything Nick fears he could become, the object of Nick’s most profound despair, showing up over and over and over on our doorstep.” (Ibid., pp. 355–356.) This orchestrated “return of the repressed” underscores the extent to which Nick has internalised his father’s hateful behaviour, despite his determination not to. Nick indulges in a number of misogynistic rants as the novel progresses, displaying an increasing fondness for the word “cunt”. Like his father, who is compelled to spit the word “bitch” at troublesome women, Nick continually reverts to this verbal tic when challenged or outdone by the women around him. Amy uses it too; she reflects that Andie is “a good girl (for a cunt).” (Ibid., p. 335).
- 3.
Ibid., p. 41.
- 4.
The fact that both Nick and Amy separately make this observation is telling—they are both described as uncommonly good-looking but their interfacing monologues reveal an ugliness of character which gives the lie to their alluring veneer and indicates that they are actually disposed towards similar lines of thought. While talking to Shawna Kelly, a middle-aged woman who flirts with him during the initial search efforts, Nick shrewdly categorises her dislike of the detective as “the mantra of all attractive women. ‘Women don’t like me all that much.’ She shrugged.” (Ibid., p. 96) It is worth noting that the unattractive detective Boney and Margo (who is described by Nick as “strange-faced”) display a breadth of moral reasoning of which the protaganists are seemingly incapable.
- 5.
Ibid., pp. 299–300.
- 6.
Ibid., p. 476.
- 7.
Margo’s fleeting uncertainty signifies that their sibling bond is so invasive that she may have intuited that Nick has been nursing violent desires with regard to Amy.
- 8.
Ibid., p. 65.
- 9.
Eleven thousand, seven hundred and sixty-six American women were murdered by their husbands or intimate partners between 2001 and 2012, according to FBI statistics. Three American women are murdered daily by a current or former spouse or partner (Alanna Vagianos, “30 Shocking Domestic Violence Statistics That Remind Us It’s An Epidemic”, Huffington Post, 23 October 2014). Indeed, the novel ends with what appears to be another spousal murder: “a Nashville singer discovered his wife was cheating, and her body was found the next day in a Hardee’s trash bin near their house, a hammer covered with his fingerprints beside her.” (Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 405.) This is actually the fulfilment of one of Nick’s unrealised fantasies; at one point, he contemplates the possibility of “hitting [Amy] with a hammer, smashing her head in until she stopped talking, finally, stopped with the words she suctioned to me: average, boring, mediocre, unsurprising, unsatisfying, unimpressive. Un, basically. In my mind, I whaled on her with the hammer until she was like a broken toy, muttering un, un, un until she sputtered to a stop.” (Ibid., pp. 390–391).
- 10.
Ibid., p. 223.
- 11.
Ibid., p. 111.
- 12.
Ibid., p. 266.
- 13.
The 2002 murder of Laci Peterson served as one inspiration for Flynn; the body of Peterson, seven-and-a-half months pregnant at the time of her disappearance, washed up on the shore of San Francisco Bay in April of 2003. Her husband Scott was subsequently found guilty on two counts of murder and sentenced to death. The conjunction of public fascination and extensive news coverage inspired Flynn to construct a fictional recreation of what she calls “the selection and the packaging of a tragedy […] what’s going to make it believable that the media’s going to descend on this? It’s hard for anyone to claim that they don’t know how these things work anymore because we’re so immersed in it, on the internet and TV and movies. There are no really new stories anymore.” (Stephan Lee, “‘Gone Girl’ Author Gillian Flynn talks Murder, Marriage, and Con Games”,Entertainment Weekly, 26 June 2012). The degree to which media narratives are superimposed over these acts of violence and used as both a distancing tactic and a means of establishing cathartic proximity lends them an obscene glamour—the thrill of the familiar. Nick observes, at one point, that “society was utterly, ruinously derivative (although the word derivative as a criticism is itself derivative). We were the first human beings who would never see anything for the first time. We stare at the wonders of the world, dull-eyed, underwhelmed. Mona Lisa, the Pyramids, the Empire State Building […] the thing that makes me want to blow my brains out, is: the secondhand experience is always better. The image is crisper, the view is keener, the camera angle and the soundtrack manipulate my emotions in a way reality can’t anymore.” (Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 96.) Ironically, his own reality becomes sensational fodder for millions of strangers, a “secondhand experience” neatly packaged and disseminated via the well-worn wife-killer narrative. It is telling that Nick and Amy are skilled at “packaging reality”, even outside of their fractured relationship—having both spent much of their adult lives working in magazine journalism, they (like Sharp Objects’ Camille) are practised at editing and interpreting events to render them palatable.
- 14.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 81.
- 15.
The character of Abbott, whose rabble-rousing diatribes against Nick prove significantly influential in terms of public perception, is hugely reminiscent of American news commentator Nancy Grace, a controversial but popular figure who proclaims herself “a tireless advocate for victim’s rights.” (Nancy Grace, About Nancy (Atlanta: Nancy Grace Official Website, 2012)). Grace/Abbott’s success is dependent, in large part, on popular narratives of female victimisation and the conservative paradigms therein, but her ability to exploit and explore these narratives may be read as an act of subversion in itself—Diane Negra describes these female-led news narratives as “a peculiar collision of victimized and apparently empowered female personalities […] such coverage sets a particularly/peculiarly postfeminist scene as these authoritative cable personalities symbolically ‘lead’ the search for the lost woman.” (What a Girl Wants? Fantasising the Reclamation of Self in Postfeminism (New York: Routledge, 2009), p. 45.) In a sense, Grace/Abbott is embroiled in a struggle, not unlike that of Amy, to contextualise and demarcate the limits of female victimhood. The result is a reactive discourse which encourages a hegemonic understanding of victimisation and vulnerability. Thus the missing woman (in this case Amy) moves from complex individual to archetypal figure. The phenomenon of “Missing White Woman Syndrome” is a product of this reductive practice—many mainstream news outlets have been accused of insidious prejudice with regard to their obsessive focus on cases involving conventionally attractive, young Caucasian women, despite the fact that “the US population is roughly 50 per cent male and 35 per cent non-white […] there is a preponderance of reports regarding the abduction, murder and disappearance of white women and white female children. Most of the women are below the age of 40 or young girls or teenagers, and they are often blonde and attractive.” (Regis A. DeSilva, “End of Life Legislation and the Semiotics of the Female Body”, in Death and Dying: A Reader (London: SAGE Publications, 2009), p. 28).
- 16.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 34.
- 17.
Ibid., pp. 221–222.
- 18.
While Nick worries about the malign influence his father’s sadism may have had on his psychological development, Amy bitterly contemplates the invisible wounds she bears as a result of her own cosseted but emotionally suffocating upbringing: “[my parents] made me this way and then deserted me […] they never, ever fully appreciated the fact that they were earning money from my existence […] then, after they siphoned off my money, my ‘feminist’ parents let Nick bundle me off to Missouri like I was some piece of chattel.” (Ibid., p. 238).
- 19.
Ibid., p. 300.
- 20.
The barely-suppressed glee of these spectators is expressed most candidly by Greta, a young woman who attempts to befriend Amy while she hides away in a shabby rented cabin (under the pseudonym “Nancy”). Greta, a woman “with brown eyes and a split lip… [and] a perfectly round bruise the size of a plum near her left breast” (Ibid., pp. 259–261) is unmoved by the news coverage surrounding the disappearance of “Amazing Amy”, noting that she “‘sounds [like] a spoiled rich girl […] high-maintenance. Bitchy […] she sounds like a rich, bored bitch.’” (Ibid., p. 263).
- 21.
Ibid., p. 265.
- 22.
Ibid., p. 344.
- 23.
Ibid., p. 347.
- 24.
Ibid., p. 347.
- 25.
Ibid., p. 264.
- 26.
This dichotomy is invoked by Andie when she speaks publicly about the affair; Amy notes that she has traded her usual “fuckable” aesthetic for a “tiny and harmless [look]… she looks like a babysitter, and not a sexy porn babysitter but the girl from down the road, the one who actually plays with the kids.” (Ibid., p. 438).
- 27.
These internal contradictions undercut any potentially empowering interpretations of Amy’s invective on gender politics. While critics have wavered between reading her as “[a] misogynistic caricature” (Robert Palmer, “Gone Girl and the Specter of Feminism” MT, 20 August 2012) and a “feminist psychopath” (Eliana Dockterman, “Is Gone Girl Feminist or Misogynist?”, Time, 6 October 2014), few have acknowledged that her paradoxical reasoning and self-serving appropriation of many of these gendered paradigms renders her arguments distorted and problematic, to say the least.
- 28.
Gillian Flynn , Gone Girl (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 299.
- 29.
Ibid., p. 7.
- 30.
Ibid., p. 245.
- 31.
Ibid., p. 373.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 275.
- 33.
Amy’s choreographed disappearance may be read as merely an extension of this treasure hunt—Nick describes the annual anniversary game as “Amy always going overboard, me never, ever worthy of the effort. Happy anniversary, asshole.” (Ibid., p. 20.) The trajectory of her own unmaking is not dissimilar; Nick proves slow on the uptake and is ultimately condemned by his own psychological shortcomings.
- 34.
Nick, Desi and Tommy O’Hara (an old boyfriend of Amy’s) are all falsely accused, at various points in the novel, of having sexually victimised Amy. The ease with which she presents herself as a sexual assault survivor signifies a detached awareness of the cultural discourse around sexual violence and rape survivors. This is a type of victimhood which carries its own coded authority, tied as it is to a crime as pervasive as it is invisible. Flynn’s tongue-in-cheek dismissal of the “brave rape victims” (Oliver Burkeman, “Gillian Flynn on her Bestseller Gone Girl and Accusations of Misogyny”, The Guardian, 1 May 2013) populating contemporary crime fiction highlights the potentially destructive implications of the exploitation of this trope.
- 35.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 325.
- 36.
Gillian Flynn, Gone Girl (New York: Random House, 2012), p. 553.
- 37.
Ibid., p. 553.
- 38.
Anne Helen Petersen, “The Problem With ‘Gone Girl’ Is That There’s No ‘Cool Girl’”, Buzzfeed, 3 October 2014.
- 39.
Robert Palmer, “Gone Girl and the Specter of Feminism”, MT, 20 August 2012.
- 40.
Gillian Flynn, “Hi reddit! I’m Gillian Flynn—Author of Sharp Objects, Dark Places and Gone Girl—AMA!”, Reddit, 22 April 2014.
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Burke, E. (2018). From Cool Girl to Dead Girl: Gone Girl and the Allure of Female Victimhood. In: Joyce, L., Sutton, H. (eds) Domestic Noir. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-69338-5_5
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