Feminism in Gillian Flynn’s Novels: violence, malice and amorality as the basis of a post-feminist agenda

Abstract

In the last years, US American author Gillian Flynn became both famous and eminent for writing extremely violent, malicious and amoral women characters in her novels Sharp Objects (2006), Dark Places (2009) and Gone Girl (2012). In her essay “I was not a nice little girl…”, Flynn herself explains that she despises the lack of violent women in literature. According to her, such characters have been spoken lightly of and judged unfavorably, because violence in literature is ascribed to men rather than women. As a consequence, Flynn claims that women in literature must have the mere ability to be as violent, malicious and amoral as male characters and that these attributes must not be affected by gender presuppositions. As this feminist claim has not been discussed in terms of literature and gender equality, it is the goal of this dissertation to analyze how Flynn uses the previous waves of feminism and how she moves beyond these waves in order to achieve a post-feminist agenda, in which all negative character traits and attributes, including violence, malice and amorality, must be considered a basic prerequisite of emancipation. Thus, the key question of this dissertation is: “How does Gillian Flynn use but move beyond the various waves of feminism in order to suggest a post-feminist agenda in which violence, malice, and amorality are necessary for achieving complete gender equality?”. In Flynn’s novels, nearly every character is unable to subject to culturally presupposed gender roles and stereotypes of femininity and masculinity. Morally reprehensible behavior patterns are often a result of this inability and are implicitly ascribed to the post-feminist media culture in the USA that uses the idea of “post-feminism” to socialize Americans into believing that gender equality has been achieved and feminism is no longer needed. In her criticism, Flynn demands that the perception, correlation and evaluation of certain character traits must not be affected by but instead be detached from all gender concepts of media culture. In this dissertation, this feminist idea is analyzed with regard to social, cultural and historical conditions in the USA. The premise of this analysis is that violence, malice and a lack of morals in literature must be used as feminist tools to reveal, explain and question unconscious changes and paradox experiences of the post-feminist media culture in the contemporary USA. To answer the above-mentioned key question, the historical and cultural elements of the three waves of feminism and the theoretical approaches that were developed during each phase are mainly focused on in this analysis. Margaret Fuller’s Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845), Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique (1963) and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990), which each represent one wave of American feminism, allow an examination of specific aspects that are used in Flynn’s novels to show that gender-related problems are still present in the American media culture and that emancipation requires more accurate representations as well as the acknowledgement of diverse women characters that can be equally violent, amoral and malicious. This dissertation also examines the social and psychological effects of culturally presupposed gender roles that are created and affected by media culture, in which, according to Flynn, the rejection of strong female characters is part of a patriarchal and gender-based oppression. Thus, Flynn demands that authors must be allowed to write characters that are not affected by presupposed gender roles and rules of post-feminist media culture. When examining in how far Flynn’s claim is truly post-feminist, the term “post-feminism” is not used to express that feminism is over but as an approach that goes beyond the three waves as it demands a radical postulate of self-determination and self-fulfillment, including the acknowledgement of violent and amoral female characters. This means that accurate media representations of women must be diverse and not affected by gender presuppositions. Demanding these representations makes Flynn’s post-feminist agenda helpful in developing a consciousness for the necessity of diverse women characters as a prerequisite for gender equality. The literary freedom of writing female characters, whose violence, malice and lacking morals must not be acknowledged as an exception but as a norm, ultimately leads to a better understanding of presupposed gender roles in the post-feminist media culture in the USA.