“Is Gone Girl feminist or misogynist?” At the time of publication, Gillian Flynn’s bestseller unleashed an onslaught of discussions around this particular subject. Amy, a woman who falsifies rape, frames her husband for her murder because he fails to live up to her expectations and his potential before trapping him with a pregnancy. Is this the stereotype of the scorned woman revenge? Surely, this is all proof that the story is misogynist for painting a woman with such a dark brush. But, why stop at Amy Dunne? The question can be extended to the protagonists of Flynn’s previous novels—Camille from Sharp Objects, the alcoholic reporter who cannot cope with her relationship with her mother, who sleeps with a source, and Libby from Dark Places, who sells family memorabilia and her own tragedy to true crime fetishists. Are they misogynistic portrayal of women too? Maybe, the answer to those questions depends if you look at Flynn’s dark heroines and their behaviors through a male or female lens.
Personally, I chose to look at them through the female lens. Flynn knowingly or unknowingly gave us, whether we wanted or not, the dark side of feminism—if women can be anything they want, then they can be terrible people too, selfish, unbalanced, spiteful, and be front and centered about it. Flynn’s heroines also challenge the institutions and notions often used to measure a woman’s value: being a good wife, a good mother, being a carer, having a nurturing nature. Before, unlikable women often hovered on the fringes of stories: the nurse Ratched, the Mrs Danvers or the first Mrs De Winters. Female protagonists and women in general are supposed to be likable, charming, safe; stereotypes and expectations pushed on them from a young age. Those stereotypes are even plastered on shirt for girls to wear—slogans to remind them they should “be kind”, “smile”, “be a little princess”, etc… So when they’re not, it’s jarring, and it’s uncomfortable being confronted with an image the male lens has used to demean women—she is emotional, unhinged, women are not allowed anger, otherwise they are deemed unstable, irrational.
When it came to writing my own stories I happily walked through the door Flynn had opened. I wanted my female protagonists to be whatever they could be, I wanted them to be interesting, not likeable. My debut novel, Nobody But Us plays with the very idea and stereotype of what is expected of young women—to be agreeable, charming, conform to the expectations stamped on t-shirts. But what happens if you scratch that veneer, if a woman uses those stereotypes as mean of deception. I wanted my main character, Ellie to be a woman with flaws, who owns her anger, with impulses, and cold calculation, with a sexuality. Ellie embodies the idea of dark feminism Flynn instilled in her main protagonists—if women can be anything they want, they can damn well be dark too.
However, I’m not the first writer who walked through that door. On the contrary, I’m merely the latest one in a long line. By the time, Gone Girl became the bestseller phenomenon it is, publishers realized there was a real demand for dark, flawed and/or unreliable female protagonists, and they embraced the trend. Writers influenced by Flynn brought their own brand of flawed or dark female protagonists. Every novel with an unlikeable and unreliable female protagonist was pegged as the next Gone Girl. The first that springs to mind, of course, is Rachel from Paula Hawkins’s bestselling novel, The Girl On The Train. You can see shades of Camille from Sharp Objects in Rachel’s alcoholism as her way to cope with the fallout of a toxic relationship, but also like Amy, the feeling that—as a narrator—she can’t be trusted. That’s the unnerving part that Flynn has channelled, women who are supposed to be trusted and dependable can be deceiving.
Samantha Downing’s My Lovely Wife takes the notion one set up further, pushing the envelop of the unlikeable female protagonist. We have to keep reading to see how far the darkness run, maybe because we want to try to find something that will excuse her behavior or maybe to secretly enjoy watching a woman fully embrace being the bad one. Another example is Jessica Knoll’s debut novel Luckiest Girl Alive, which centers around Ani FaNelli, an unapologetic social climber, willing to play the game and the system to get ahead. Women are not supposed to be that ruthless and ambitious.
The fascination for darker female protagonists also ventures to other areas where conventional women’s behavior is challenged. Ali Land’s Good Me, Bad Me explored the darker side of women through the mother-daughter relationship, one where the mother has given in to her darker killing impulses and her daughter wrestling with the idea that she might just be her mother’s daughter, and can she escape nature, thanks to nurture. Louise O’Neill’s Asking For It explores another darker side of female protagonists through toxic friendships. It reminds us that victims don’t need to be perfect or even likeable in order to deserve support and justice.
There wouldn’t have been a rise in the number of dark female protagonists if there wasn’t an appetite for it. Maybe, this thirst for flawed female protagonist comes from the fact that by making them the heroines of their own stories, Flynn and other authors (myself included) have given those characters interiority—desires, doubts, vulnerability, motivations. We have humanized these protagonists in a way side characters like Mrs Danvers or nurse Ratched never got the chance.
All those novels feed another endless fiction debate—should main characters be likeable? Do we really mean main characters or just women? Do we have issues with making unlikeable women the heroines of their own story? Or does the rise of dark female protagonists come from the fact that women have to do so little to lose some reader’s compassion and be deemed unlikeable in the first place? Men are offered a lot more leeway and need to do a lot more before they lose some reader’s compassion. We make excuses for them—boys will be boys, he’s under so much pressure, he didn’t really mean it, etc… There certainly seems to be a double standard.
In Nobody But Us I use Emily Brontë’s Jane Eyre to explore that double standard and the bias towards men’s behavior. When asked, most people would describe Jane Eyre as a gothic romance, and many readers root for Jane and Mr Rochester to end up together. But in my eyes Mr Rochester is not a nice man and definitely not a romantic lead: he toys with Jane — a woman much younger than him and his employee on top of it—and makes her jealous for his own amusement or to assert his power and dominance. Most readers feel sorry for him, and for his being tricked into marriage with Bertha. Personally, I feel sorry for Bertha, a woman plagued by mental illness, first betrayed by her brother and then her husband, locked away instead of cared for. We seem to be more forgiving when it comes to male protagonists and their likability. I haven’t really come across the notion of unlikeable male characters. They are normally deemed fascinating or complex. Morally corrupt male protagonists have inhabited the thriller and crime genre for a long time, from Tom Ripley, to Patrick Bateman.
Maybe in the end, we enjoy Flynn’s main protagonists and the rise of similar dark female characters because they scratch the veneer of suburbia and subvert the symbols of the middle/upper class world. This is another thing I wanted to play with writing Nobody But Us—the appearance of the enviable couple, the pretense of the perfect girlfriend and what it might hide, how a woman can manipulate those expectations to serve her own agenda.
So to go back to the beginning, is Gone Girl misogynist, or are Flynn’s dark heroines just resisting sexist stereotypes and social pressures to confirm to certain ideas of how a woman should act? In some ways, the question itself feels misogynistic, denying women the right to be a spectrum of individuals, forcing them to conform to the slogans plastered on t-shirts, the expectations society and centuries of conditioning have placed upon them. The rise of the dark heroine in fiction—and especially in psychological thrillers—may come from the fact that, we root for them because they deviate from the accepted norms and expectations society wants to push on women. They scheme, swear, are promiscuous, and lash out, and even better, they rarely apologize for their actions. Now women can be complex characters, and celebrated for it too. Dark female protagonists are here to stay.
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