I enjoyed Gone Girl when it came out, so when the book became part of the zeitgeist I was thrilled. I was more than a little baffled, though, when people started saying that the book/movie was anti-feminist or even misogynist.
I get where some people were angry that Amy lied (twice) about being raped because false rape claims make people cynical about sexual assault. But, I think the fact that Amy also faked her own death and left a really compelling trail of evidence for a fake murder leading toward her husband because she decided she hated him (mostly for being a lazy, boring douche) kind underscores the point that she was crazy as fuck.
For all her crazy, Amy was also weirdly likeable, and almost every woman who I’ve talked who has read the book or seen the movie has commented that while Amy is clearly an awful person, she’s also sometimes on point, as in this oft-cited paragraph:
Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me, I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl.
Men actually think this girl exists. Maybe they’re fooled because so many women are willing to pretend to be this girl. For a long time Cool Girl offended me. I used to see men – friends, coworkers, strangers – giddy over these awful pretender women, and I’d want to sit these men down and calmly say: You are not dating a woman, you are dating a woman who has watched too many movies written by socially awkward men who’d like to believe that this kind of woman exists and might kiss them. I’d want to grab the poor guy by his lapels or messenger bag and say: The bitch doesn’t really love chili dogs that much – no one loves chili dogs that much!
And the Cool Girls are even more pathetic: They’re not even pretending to be the woman they want to be, they’re pretending to be the woman a man wants them to be. Oh, and if you’re not a Cool Girl, I beg you not to believe that your man doesn’t want the Cool Girl. It may be a slightly different version – maybe he’s a vegetarian, so Cool Girl loves seitan and is great with dogs; or maybe he’s a hipster artist, so Cool Girl is a tattooed, bespectacled nerd who loves comics. There are variations to the window dressing, but believe me, he wants Cool Girl, who is basically the girl who likes every fucking thing he likes and doesn’t ever complain. (How do you know you’re not Cool Girl? Because he says things like: “I like strong women.” If he says that to you, he will at some point fuck someone else. Because “I like strong women” is code for “I hate strong women.”)
The thing is, I didn’t find Gone Girl to be anti-feminist at all. In fact I think that by becoming a book read by people who don’t normally read, it changed the nature of how psychological thrillers feature women, and I’m delighted by that. Because the thing is, Amy is not a victim.
I read a lot of thrillers and mysteries, and while women’s roles in them are evolving, they are still frequently the victims. Even when a thriller features a strong female protagonist, a cop or a lawyer let’s say, she is almost always solving the murder of another woman. Mysteries and thrillers are built upon the bodies of fictional dead women, and if that women is white, petite, and young all the better. Just like when these crimes happen in real life, this particularly blend of victim (the blonde with the toothy smile) gets the most air time, lures in the most consumers.
You can justify this as saying that it’s reflective of reality: women are often the chosen victims of serial killers and other monsters who feature heavily in mystery fiction, and women are more often the victims of sexual violence, which is also a staple of the genre. Thrillers also frequently feature the death or disappearance of children to win readers with the same chill factor.
The reason that children make such compelling victims in fiction is that we assume they are inherently innocent. That’s why it’s hard to read about or watch a child get injured or die (fuck you, Game of Thrones, fuck you). The female murder victims of mystery fiction are often pushed under that same innocence umbrella. They are often young, attractive, and if they are not of middle or higher class, it’s made clear that something made them special, that they did not belong where they were. The reader empathizes with them.
The reality is, the poor, the itinerant, people of color, the mentally ill, and members of the LGBTQIA community are far more likely to be victims of violence, murder and sexual assault than affluent white woman, but these people rarely make it into mainstream thrillers. So it’s hard to justify all the dead bodies of women as representative when they aren’t.
Gone Girl subverted this trope. The novel’s twist wasn’t Amy’s murder, but the fact that not only was Amy not a victim, she was dangerous, too. And it made me realize that there were several books that embrace the theme of the dangerous powerful female character that I loved. If you’re curious, here are some recommendations:
I recently read The Good Girl by Mary Kubica ( A | BN | K | G | AB ). The thriller centers around the abduction of the daughter of a powerful Chicago judge. Parts of the novel takes place during the period of time of Mia’s disappearance and others take place after. The hook is that after her traumatic rescue, Mia cannot remember the months she spent with her abductor. I won’t ruin it for this audience, but the book is not the typical female-in-jeopardy situation.
If you really want a mind fuck (and a super absorbing, original read) check out So Much Pretty by Cara Hoffman. The disappearance of a young woman disrupts a community, but it’s not as much a story about the missing woman as it is about how her disappearance shapes one particular girl growing up in that community. So Much Pretty asks the question, how would you process violence against women if you weren’t raised in a society that conditioned you to accept it?
Chelsea Cain’s Gretchen Lowell series (the first book is Heartsick) ( A | BN | K | G | AB | Scribd ) features a female serial killer who is super smart, super scary and is playing mind games with a detective she once captured and tortured. That series is phenomenal and irreverent and so readable, so if you like thrillers at all, go get it right now. Go. I’ll wait…. Back now?
Normal by Graeme Cameron is delightfully weird fun. Told from the perspective of a serial killer who is keeping a woman captive in his basement, we see her through his eyes only. This sounds like it would 1000% squicky and DNW, but Cameron makes his unnamed protagonist, if not likable or emphatic, engaging enough that it’s easy to keep reading. The woman in captivity is not what her captor is expecting though, and while I did have problems with the book (the only woman we see explicitly murdered is a drug addicted prostitute which is a lazy and dehumanizing way of saying “you don’t need to feel too bad here”) Normal dumps the traditional thriller formula on it’s head and then dances a jig on it.
I’m not suggesting that Gone Girl inspired all these books–in fact So Much Pretty preceded it, but by entering the public conversation and garnering so much media attention, it brought these other books to the spotlight. It gave them a table at Barnes and Noble.
Unfortunately I can’t reveal a lot of what happens in these other thrillers without ruining them entirely and I desperately want you to read them because they are so good. What they do have in common is that the woman who should be the victim isn’t–at least not in the expected way. The woman in these books–petite, white, and attractive all–have a more dynamic story to tell. They are in their own right a little bit dangerous.
I hope that this trend in psychological thrillers continues. I like fiction where you can’t expect the expected, and some of that comes from casting women as the body in the ditch. To me the killer in the basement is far less scary than a book that makes you question what the fuck is going on here? and by moving female characters out of the “victim” space and into something more complex and explored, it gives female characters more credit, makes them more human. The “innocent” blonde haired, blue eyed Midwestern girl gone missing will always draw readers — hell, it draws me — but I want my fiction to do more, to be a little bit more, and to give me the unexpected. I want more than the body in the woods. I want my female characters to be a little bit dangerous too.
An older book in the same vein is Josephine Tey’s The Franchise Affair (inspired by an 18th century missing-woman case) – although I can’t say why without restoring to major spoilers. Suffice it to say that it’s yet another subversion of the trope, and a cracking good read.
I haven’t read or seen Gone Girl, but reading about it, I guess I just assumed that Amy was an updated version of the femme fatale archetype. Was I wrong? Is she different than other, older versions of the dangerous, deceptive woman who uses charm or lies to get what she wants?
It all looks really interesting, especially the super-smart female serial killer – sounds like exactly my kind of catnip.
…but every time I come across The Cool Girl Monologue, it makes me uncomfortable, and definitely not because I ~*recognise the truth of her statements*~ or something. Like, yes, people, and specifically women, frequently have to pretend to be what they aren’t for various reasons, sometimes those reasons include “attracting/keeping the mate”, so I see how it can feel relatable if one ever had to be in such situation. But it bothers me when it looks like people take it as Universal Truths. Of course, the imaginary woman Amy describes doesn’t exist as described, she’s an exaggeration – but it doesn’t mean that real life women who might resemble the description are all “fake” just because an unreliable (co-)narrator in a book thinks or claims to think they definitely are.
Sorry. Rant over.
Love the analysis of GG and thanks for the recommendations. Going to buy several of these books right now! I want to be in a book club with you, Elyse!
@Redcrow: The wife of my best (male) friend of 15 years read Gone Girl as her one “it” book of the year, and my hideously unattractive but otherwise super-duper Cool Girl ass suddenly had to go, so I get ranty every time I see the Cool Girl Monologue mentioned, too.
“Someone wrote this in a BOOK so it’s a FACT.”
*smdh* Spare me from the occasionally literate.
I hate women-in-jeopardy stories. I mean, okay. Have a woman in jeopardy if you must for plot reasons, but don’t make that the entire focus of the book. Woman getting *out* of jeopardy is okay. Woman being brutalized is not okay. I’m not to the point of reading “cozy” mysteries only, but the level of violence in fiction overall is creeping up over my okay level.
The thing about GONE GIRL is that it’s not anti-feminist, but rather misanthropic: There are no heroes, two two protagonists are both fairly awful human beings, and there’s really no one to root for per se.
The thing I wonder about GG: Considering how Amy was smart enough to manipulate virtually everyone around her and plan the perfect (fake) murder, why couldn’t she get a job and do great in the business world? My theory: A large part of the novel was the difference between the expectations and realities of marriage, and Amy expected for her husband to just take care of her and provide for her. When life took a downward turn (goodbye NYC nightlife, hello small bar in the midwest!) she got vicious, not ambitious.
Great post! I loved Gone Girl, and I also want to give a shout out to two books: Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives (edited by Sarah Weinman) and Queenpin by Megan Abbott. Both of these books features women at the center while acknowledging the role that societal expectations shape their stories.
Queenpin is awesome, as is everything Megan Abbottt writes!
I agree that the Cool Girl exists and some women pretend to get attention. But yes, that bit is coming from Amy. It is better in her mind to ruin other people’s lives and frame your husband for murder than for some women who might or might not really like chili dogs and burping. You have to remember it’s the evil, warped wench who thinks this. I’ve read enough of GamerGate and know women who liked playing Dungeons and Dragons up until they were accused of only playing so they could pick up guys.
I grew up around someone with Borderline Personality Disorder and if she had been more cunning, she could have been Amy.
Interesting post topic! I’m bookmarking some of these into a Wish List.
“There are no heroes, two protagonists are both fairly awful human beings, and there’s really no one to root for per se.”
Midway through the movie, the only one I was concerned about was the cat.
I have a love/hate relationship with the Cool Girl monologue. Yes, that girl doesn’t exist (Let’s start by the fact it’s Cool Girl and not Cool Woman), but it ends up defining the not-Cool Girl as an aspiration.
Which is as destructive and irrealistic as Cool Girl.
But yes, we need to break this wheel were “Victims of crime are always white women” feeds “White women are always the victims in media, be it outright fiction or news reporting.”
God, how many serial killers flew under the radar for decades by avoiding white women? How many remain there?
So, yes. Yes to intelligent female psychos in our fiction, yes to non-asshole male victims, yes to almost anything that challenges that stupid view were female psychoes are “anti-femenine”.
Off to put my money where my mouth is.
I absolutely loved Gone Girl. Amy is fascinating. I do think I’m the only person who doesn’t find Nick to be a terrible human. An idiot, sure, and not a good husband. But there is no way he is as awful as Amy.
I’ll have to check out some of these suggestions.
I used to be a huge mystery fan, but I hardly ever read them any more because of the OTT violence aimed largely at women. Yes, and occasionally kids. Ugh.
For the most part, I also like a book with at least some likeable characters.* I only recently picked up Gone Girl when it went on sale and have yet to read it because I’d heard (as @jimthered noted) that everyone, particularly the two mains, are such horrid people. That seems to be very common in mysteries/suspense now (Girl on a Train?)–and I’d say that it’s also the case in the Chelsea Cain books (the only ones on your list that I’ve actually read). Gretchen is evil. Maybe fascinating in some way, but mostly repellent. And while I’d like to sympathize with Archie, I just found him to be a sad sack numpty. As a result, the series just became more and more of a slog.
I guess this is why I’ve turned more to Romance and UF/SFF.
(*An exception would Minette Walters’s books. Dark and depressing with despicable characters, but I still love many of them for some reason.)
@Maite:
“God, how many serial killers flew under the radar for decades by avoiding white women? How many remain there?”
Well, it’s not just white women. It’s “bad” women vs. “good” women. If killers go after prostitutes of any color they’re still likely to remain undetected for a ridiculously long time (Green River, Gilgo Beach, etc.). But if they go after “good” women, particularly white housewives and coeds, LE and the media will be all over the cases.
The “Cool Girl” monologue pisses me off so much I have no desire to read the rest of the book.
“I used to be a huge mystery fan, but I hardly ever read them any more because of the OTT violence aimed largely at women.”
Some mystery authors you might like: Stephanie Barron, Anne George, Steve Hockensmith (Holmes on the Range series), Dorothy Sayers (some 1940’s style race/class issues, but not bad), Elizabeth Daly, C.S. Harris (the original dead body may be female, but there’s not gratuitous violence later. Some kick-ass ladies too).
@cleo I always think of the femme fatale as sexy, mysterious and ultimately unknowable. Amy from Gone Girl is a point of view character. And repugnant. I don’t know if that disqualifies her, but I think it’s different.
I devoured Gone Girl as a book but was left at the end feeling slightly sickened by how I’d eaten it up, and very thankful that the world I live in does not resemble the world of that novel. I need to like *someone* in the book at least a little. I didn’t with Gone Girl, at least not by the end.
I am SO glad you didn’t mention the current “supposed Gone Girl imitator” Luckiest Girl Alive by Jessica Knoll. While I deeply enjoyed the flipping of Amy’s personality in Gone Girl, the protagonist of LGA just pissed me off. A NO1CURR character if there ever was one.
I’ve never read Gone Girl and I don’t plan on watching the movie. It just doesn’t appeal to me. (I thought about reading it a while back, but then the local media spoiled it a few months ago and made me realize that it isn’t for me–there was a woman who may have been kidnapped, but it also looked like she faked the whole thing for awhile.)
I wonder if the reason victims in thrillers are always white women goes back to the idea that white women, above anyone else, need to be protected. So much of racism is fed by that one idea. If a black man so much as looked at a white woman, statistically, he was more likely to find himself strung up from some Magnolia tree. As a white woman, as a human being, I find this idea to be repugnant. I am no better than a black, Hispanic, Asia, etc. woman. I don’t have magical properties that make me more valuable than other women (but still less valuable than a man). I’m getting off track, here, but my point is that the reason white women tend to be victims in fiction is because we’re used to seeing white women as victims in need of protection by the strong white man. It doesn’t matter that realistically, middle to upper-middle class white women are not typically victims of serial killers. (Susan nailed it on the head. These types of killers tend to choose victims that aren’t going to be missed (prostitutes and homeless people make great victims because people aren’t going to be filing missing persons reports on them, making it less likely that they’ll be caught).) People are more likely to be sympathetic to a white, female victim because they have been taught to be.
Thank you, @MirandaB. I really appreciate the reccies. I’ve read Barron, Sayers, and Harris and enjoy them. I still quite like a lot of historical mysteries because they don’t seem to focus on serial killers and gratuitous violence against women in the same way as many contemporary mysteries. I checked my Kindle and actually have a couple of George and Hockensmith books that I’d forgotten I own so I guess I need to move them over to the device and check them out. 🙂 And I put Daly on my wish list.
Read every word, but didn’t take time Counting Female vs. Male correspondents on these generally well-expressed analyses. I try never reading any writing from the beginning bias of a preconception: Had NO idea what the title meant or what kind of characters would play significant roles in plot revelations. Felt rather as though the author was designing the novel with those types of “surprise reverses” desired in the film version–which I then felt no desire to pay the admission (my true admission). Well-crafted plot and characters–but everything was cleared up fully on paper. No ambition to take one side or the other–after THE END. Thanks for everyone’s intriguing new reading raves!
I haven’t read Gone Girl and don’t plan to. Judging by the vast amount of buzz, it sounded too nihilistic for my taste. Reading this post puts me in mind of Echoes of Lies by Jo Bannister as a possible antidote to the woman as victim convention and also as a book that explores some complex ethical issues. There is some extremely graphic violence, but it absolutely not exploitative and is integral to the plot. In spite of the violence, Bannister’s work is primarily psychological suspense. Echoes of Lies is the first book in the Brodie Farrell mystery series and I highly recommend it.
Coming to this article late, but had a few thoughts/suggestions to share. I LOVE a good mystery/thriller, particularly one where a female protagonist works the lines between “good” and “bad” and I do think this is directly related to the fact that I LOATHE stories that rely on the sufferings of a female victim solely to engage the reader without offering agency or remedy to the victim. Elizabeth Haynes (esp. Into the Darkest Corner) often writes protagonists who have pulled themselves out of bad situations and use that experience to navigate the (thriller/mystery) driving each plot. I love SJ Bolton’s Lacey Flint series (ultimately more thriller than police procedural), but they do feature scenes of violence against women – the impetus for Flint’s involvement in each case.
Grebe and Traff, Rosamund Lupton, Jamie Mason are all authors whose thrillers feature women who choose to/are forced to walk the line between right/wrong or ethical/unethical to find a conclusion to their story. Jennifer Hillier tells a great dark and twisted story – her second book, Freak, is about the girlfriend of a serial killer.
A classic mystery/thriller author is Vera Caspary – she wrote psychological noir with women at the center, including Laura, The Man Who Loved His Wife, and Bedelia – all of which have been reissued under the Femmes Fatale imprint.
I second the recommendation of Megan Abbott and Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives: Stories from the Trailblazers of Domestic Suspense from Sarah Weinman. There is a set of mysteries from the 50s being released in September that features an intro from Weinman – find them and read them!