From Cool Girl to She-devil:A Feminist Study of Gone Girl

Liu Di

Jilin International Studies University,Changchun,China

Email:413516272@qq.com

[Abstract] Gone Girl,written by Gillian Flynn,is usually seen as a scathing allegory of contemporary feminism.The story is narrated in the first person in alternative chapters by husband Nick and wife Amy.It portrayed an anti-heroine image of the wife Amy who is rebellious and cold-blooded.In order to punish her husband who gets himself involved into adultery with a young woman,Amy arranges her disappearance and further frames Nick for her "murder".Flynn once said in an interview that she had killed feminism.This thesis aims at analyzing this so-called she-devil from the perspective of feminist theory and criticism and explaining how its author shaped her anti-heroine into a postmodern feminist fighter.

[Keywords] Gone Girl;feminist theory and criticism;she-devil;postmodern feminist fighter

Introduction

Gillian Flynn is a contemporary American writer,screenwriter,and producer.She has written three novels till now andGone Girlis her latest and the most representative one.This novel was published in 2012 and ranked No.One on the Bestseller Fiction Chart of theNew York Timesfor eight consecutive weeks.Flynn's novels are rich in the manifestation of feminism.She boldly uses materials such as love,marriage,family ethics and even crimes to reach her goals of writing.

In an interview about the creation of the novel,Flynn,admitting herself as a feminist,said it was the outcome of deep thinking towards the limitations of feminist movement.She thought one of the limitations was to deny the dark sides in women:women were born with virtues like kindness,loving,...whereas the fact is females also possess the qualities such as selfishness and pragmaticism.According to her,those evils in women are important for the knowledge of this sex and should be highlighted.She wrote this novel to prove that women are not born with kindness and they also have the potential for violence like men.However,what is the positive aspect of a woman's being evil?Flynn didn't give readers further explanations.This thesis,therefore,aims to analyze the process of how Amy reinvents herself as a she-devil in reality from a cool girl in her parents'book seriesAmazing Amyin the light of the feminist theory and criticism and expound the realistic significance of the novelGone Girl.

Cool Girl in Amazing Amy

In the patriarchal society,if a woman wants to get the recognition,she has to establish herself as a submissive,modest,silent and affable female image who is known as the"angel in the house",which is indeed the product a patriarchal family.The first formulation of the patriarchal family was made by Sir Henry Maine,a nineteenth-century historian of ancient jurisprudence."Maine defined it(family)as follows:'The eldest male parent is absolutely supreme in his household.His dominion extends to life and death and is as unqualified over his children and their houses as over his slaves.'The chief contribution of the family in patriarchy is the socialization of the young(largely through the example and admonition of their parents) into patriarchal ideology's prescribed attitudes towards the categories of role,temperament,and status.Although slight differences of definition depend here upon the parents'grasp of cultural values,the general effect of uniformity is achieved,to be further reinforced through peers,schools,media,and other learning sources,formal or informal.While we may niggle over the balance of authority between the personalities of various households,one must remember that the entire culture supports masculine authority in all areas of life and—outside the home—permits the female none at all.To insure that its crucial functions of reproduction and socialization of the young take place only within confines,the patriarchal family insists upon legitimacy." (Gilbert,1980,pp.34-35)

InGone Girl,Amy Dunne is a girl from New York City.Before her marriage,she was the real-life version of Amy,the little witch whom everyone admired.She is independent,graceful,beautiful and funny.But no one knows the great pressure she is suffering from her parents and the outside world.At the beginning of her marriage with Nick,she is full of fantasies about love and marriage.She gets herself ready to be devoted into a happy marital life.In order to meet the needs of her husband,she plays the role of a good wife.She is considerate and tolerant to her husband,putting him first in everything.By the third year of their marriage,however,Nick has become increasingly aloof,ignoring her feelings and even going out with friends on their anniversary night.Then,both husband and wife were unemployed,which made Amy completely lose the feeling of being loved.In addition,the economic crisis of her parents affected the unemployed couple,and Amy completely lost her economic security.When her husband Nick offers to move back to his hometown to care for his mother who is in her terminal cancer,Amy is forced to leave the city where she grew up.All of this makes Amy feel like a throwaway object.She feels like that she has lost her human dignity.

Amy's father,her husband and even her ex-boyfriend all have a tendency to dominate the life of other members in their families.Amy's father writes about Amazing Amy in his books according to his own likes and dislikes without any consideration of his daughter's feelings;Nick chooses his love with regard of her outlook,the part of her character attracted to him and her wealth,regardless of what she really has in her mind.As for Nick's father who is more like a tyrant,he treats Nick's mother as a slave,a woman whose only function in the family is for him to express his disgust and even hatred towards the opposite sex.Amy's ex-boyfriend finds pleasure in imprisoning women by superficially looking after them."Desi(Amy's ex-boyfriend)is a white-knight type.He loves troubled women....it is fortunate for Desi — the eating disorder,the painkiller addictions,the crippling depressions.He is never happier than when he's at a bedside."(Flynn,2014,p.361)These men take women as part of their possessions.They are ignorant of women's spiritual world.They don't care what they really want,either.In the household,they possess the supreme masculine authority to shape the females as prescribed by the patriarchal ideology.They can't bear to see the real faces of the women.Therefore,Amy has to hide her real self since she was young to be loved and cared for.With the development of the times,the modern power mechanism gradually makes this naked patriarchal oppression more hidden.If Nick's father still uses more primitive methods in the oppression to Nick's mother,Amy's father,husband and ex-boyfriend are more secretive in their control of Amy.Amy faces the invisible violence from the patriarchal family before and after her marriage.But even so,Amy at first chooses to stand rather than rebel against all this.She pretends to be a cool girl or to be more exact,the angel in the house until she realizes that even so she still has to face the possibility to be discarded,just like an object.

Gone Girl in Marriage

In the second part ofGone Girl,Boy Meets Girl,Flynn depicts a female character of premeditated evil,extreme dishonesty and utter ruthlessness,the kind of scheming witch,a monster indeed.Unlike her archetype Lilith mentioned inThe Madwoman in the Atticwho got punished by God,our anti-heroine Amy,this time,reconstructs herself by killing herself.She carefully arranges her disappearance from their house on the 5th anniversary of their marriage.She meticulously and cleverly built up clues left behind so that her husband Nick will be framed for her "murder".When Amy finishes her plots,she says:"I'm so much happier now that I'm dead."(Flynn,2014,p.247)She feels so because this is the only way for her to get rid of the control of her patriarchal family,her parents and her husband.It is through the killing of herself that she gets the rebirth.As an anti-heroine,her utter ruthlessness lies in the fact that she can employ false charges of abuse and domestic violence to garner attention,exact revenge and punish a man.Ironically,Flynn uses the ironic Item 22 to describe Amy's suicidal plan:"Cut myself has been on the list a long time.It takes a very special discipline to slice oneself past the paper-cut layer,down to the muscle.You want a lot of blood,but not so much that you pass out,get discovered hours later in a kiddie pool of red with a lot of explaining to do.I held a box cutter to my wrist first,but looking at that crisscross of veins,I felt like a bomb technician in an action movie:Snip the wrong line and you die.I ended up cutting into the inside of my upper arm,gnawing on a rag so I wouldn't scream.One long,deep good one.I sat cross-legged in my kitchen floor for 10 minutes,letting the blood drizzle steadily until I'd made a nice thick puddle.Then I cleaned it up as poorly as Nick would have done after he bashed my head in.I want the house to tell a story of conflict between true and false." (Flynn,2014,pp.247-248)Obviously,with this narrative,Flynn tries to illustrate how feminism has taken the more ordinary difficulties of manwoman relationships and made them into a tale of predatory male monster and suffering female victim.It is no doubt that unemployment and infidelity are problems bad enough in a marriage,but these no longer particularly garner outstanding sympathy.You need a greater tale of woe to gain society's empathy nowadays.This is exactly what Amy does — inflating her ordinary problems into a tale of physical and emotional abuse that she pretends to have reaches the point of desperation and despair,with her own part carefully plotted to look entirely innocent.To achieve all this,she is aided by a smitten,fatuous society which is ready to believe the woman.Before the time she departs,Amy even minutely fabricates a tale of Nick's growing abuse and her mounting fear of him through a diary she makes sure to be discovered by the police in her absence.

With this technical missing,Amy successfully gets rid of the mental manipulation of her patriarchal family and thus leads to her way of self-reconstruction.

She-devil in Reinvention

Amy is not the first heroine in literature who rebels against the patriarchal culture.Becky Sharp inVanity Fairand Scarlet Ohala inGone with the Windare both rebellious female characters.They share something in common:they are both independent and full of self-consciousness;they are both brave enough to face their own desires and are courageous to stand out and fight for them.It is because of these common traits that these two women are regarded as monsters in the traditional male culture.To pursue their dreams and realize their ambitions,they take the advantage of their feminine charms.Their images are anti-traditional but their means to achieve their goals are not,which means that these anti-traditional female characters are not absolutely anti-traditional.The realization of their selfvalue and self-consciousness is still based on the criteria of male-culture.What they did didn't break the patriarchal rules.

However,according to Virginia Woolf,female writers are not able to write until they are able to kill the angels in the house,and even the opposite,the monsters.It is no doubt that here monsters refer to those females who are charmingly beautiful but cold-blooded and ambitious,just like Becky and Scarlet.But Amy Dunne inGone Girlis a little bit different.Compared with her two ancestors,Amy is more decisive and uncompromised.Her whole plot is completely unconventional,which reveals the features of modern feminism.It has been built on layer upon layer of fabrications,exaggerations and distortions of reality.Amy's plan was,at first,to really kill herself,and her body to be found to seal her husband Nick's conviction in a court of law.But when she sees the possibility of getting her husband back and forcing him to shape up according to her will,she changes her mind.On her road of escaping,Amy had her stash of money stolen.She had no other choice but to turn to her ex-boyfriend Desi for rescue.This is an old admirer of "Amazing Amy".When Amy finds that she puts herself in the danger of being imprisoned by Desi,she killed him mercilessly.She is special in the way that she is able to confront her male oppressors head-on in her life.Amy believes that life without a soul is death."He killed my soul,which should be a crime."(Flynn,2014,p.268)she wrote in her diary.In order to live with dignity,Amy is willing to change herself into a devil because,for her,what is the most unbearable is to lose her dignity.

Conclusion

Gone Girlaccuses the harm and struggle of modern marriage to women through violent and even illegal plots.In a society where people are indifferent to the oppression women suffer,Flynn writes well of what seems to be an overreaction.It is in this tense and exciting drama that women in the face of the oppression of the patriarchy of the desperate resistance are reflected incisively and vividly.As Amy said at the end of the story:"I am officially in control of our story.It feels wonderfully symbolic.Isn't that every marriage is,anyway? Just a lengthy game of he-said,she-said?Well,she is saying,and the world will listen,and Nick will have to smile and agree.I will write him the way I want him to be:romantic and thoughtful and very very repentant……" (Flynn,2014,p.453) In spite of the numbness of people,some women prefer to stand out by themselves and have their voices heard in their own ways no matter you want or not.At the cost of turning themselves into she-devils,they hold the speech right firmly into their hands.