{"id":1215,"date":"2016-06-11T20:47:44","date_gmt":"2016-06-11T18:47:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/?p=1215"},"modified":"2016-06-11T20:47:44","modified_gmt":"2016-06-11T18:47:44","slug":"gone-love-from-elizabeth-bennet-to-amy-dunne","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/2016\/06\/11\/gone-love-from-elizabeth-bennet-to-amy-dunne\/","title":{"rendered":"GONE LOVE: FROM ELIZABETH BENNET TO AMY DUNNE <\/strong>"},"content":{"rendered":"

I assumed that there would be already a handful of academic articles on Gillian Flynn\u2019s 2012 best-selling novel Gone Girl<\/em>, adapted for the screen by David Fincher in 2014 from a script by the author herself. Not at all. My university\u2019s meta-searcher, Trobador, has returned 712 results, only 2 of which appear in the MLA database\u2013both turned out to be journalistic pieces (a third piece is a biography of Flynn). Cultural Studies has always been accused of being merely academic journalism, too concerned with the contemporary\u2013with the transient and the banal in the worst cases. I\u2019m sure that pieces about the Spice Girls read now as terribly dated and as obscure as the analysis of a 16th century villanelle, yet I do believe that academics should react promptly to their surroundings and I\u2019m quite surprised that Gone Girl<\/em> has escaped our collective radar. Perhaps it\u2019s just too early and a flood of articles on Flynn\u2019s novel are now going through the sluggish process of peer reviewing\u2026 After all, I decided to read this novel (not quite my cup of tea\u2026) only after listening to my UB colleague Cristina Alsina deliver an excellent paper during a recent seminar on crime fiction and the family, so there you are. <\/p>\n

June 2016 is, of course, too late to review a book published four years ago and this is not what I intend to do here: I wish, rather, to consider why the trope of love and marriage is receiving such a degrading treatment in contemporary fiction. For this is the case in Gone Girl<\/em> to an extent that is simply painful to read.<\/p>\n

One of the best books I have read on romance is David Shumway\u2019s Modern Love: Romance, Intimacy, and the Marriage Crisis<\/em> (2003), which I discovered only after the author finished a three-month stay in my Department, during which I found it impossible to connect with him at all\u2026 Shumway explains with great lucidity that what is destroying long relationships\u2013at least in US society\u2013is women\u2019s constant demand for total intimacy, inspired by the traditional romantic discourse originating in fiction. This may sound misogynistic in my simplified summary but it is not at all: Shumway is also adamant about American men\u2019s inability to respond to that demand for intimacy if only at a very basic level. <\/p>\n

The main contribution, I believe, that Gone Girl<\/em> makes to the fictional representation of love and marriage is turning intimacy into the most brutal form of hell one can imagine, a life sentence. The romantic ideology that women have incorporated into their relationships with men, Flynn argues, is fundamentally psychopathic, as her heroine Amy proves; men, like Amy\u2019s average husband Nick, try desperately to avoid needy women for, understandably, the stress of responding to a constant demand to be loved and to be fully understood is impossible to sustain. The joke in Gone Girl<\/em>, however, is that Nick tries to escape his wife\u2019s extreme ideas of what constitutes a successful marriage only to find that his young mistress is as needy as Amy (though, of course, sexually more pliant). Ironically, Flynn does give Nick a perfect relationship with a woman, his twin Margo, perhaps suggesting that being siblings (free from \u00abtwincest\u00bb) is preferable for men and women to being married.<\/p>\n

If you pare it down to a basic plot line, Gone Girl<\/em> deals with the extreme measures to which a wife may resource in order to keep her cheating husband. Divorce is simply impossible because neither Nick nor Amy can go back to being the autonomous person they were before they met (if that\u2019s what they were). Second lesson about modern love, then: marriage annuls the capacity to be yourself, as many recently divorced people find out. Gone Girl<\/em> is a horrifying novel, then, not just for how far Amy takes her radically sick romantic ideology (and for how Nick eventually responds to it), but for what it tells about marriage, particularly in American life and fiction. The acknowledgements turn Gone Girl<\/em>, besides, into an even more bizarre product if that were possible, since Flynn thanks with total enthusiasm her husband for his support (and for having married her!). If I were her husband I would, however, worry: Flynn\u2019s grim novel was intended, as the author declared, to make couples consider each other with suspicion and wonder \u2018who are you?\u2019 Now: how does this connect with the author\u2019s own happy marriage, I wonder?<\/p>\n

Why, then, the insistence on the marriage plot if all couples we know are actually unhappy? There seems to be a kind of circularity at work: the romantic idea of the happy marriage for life was constructed by the first novels and now the novel is deconstructing it. This, of course, is based on a misreading of the original fictional romance. Take Pride and Prejudice<\/em> (1813) and you will see that Elizabeth and Darcy are surrounded by unhappy married couples, beginning with her parents, the Bennets. Actually Austen plays a peculiar conjuring trick by placing the disagreements that eventually surface in most marriages at the beginning of the relationship between her heroine and hero. The fantasy of the happy-ever-after ending consists of supposing that in some magic way Elizabeth will avoid the pitfalls of her parents\u2019 union as she\u2019s marrying a man who shares her own idea of intimacy. In the 2005 film version of Pride and Prejudice<\/em> with Keira Knightley as Elizabeth, English actress Rosamund Pike plays her demure elder sister Jane, a spider-woman patiently spinning her web to catch rich bachelor Charles Bingley (he and not Darcy is the \u201csingle man in possession of a good fortune\u201d and \u201cin want of a wife\u201d). Pike also plays the patrician Amy Dunne in Fincher\u2019s adaptation, which links Austen and Flynn very conveniently for my argumentation here. Jane and Amy, after all, are not so different in wanting a nice husband but the intervening 200 years have turned this aspiration into something aberrant.<\/p>\n

The pathology of the good marriage is extended in Gone Girl<\/em> to Amy\u2019s parents, a couple of soul mates, as Amy describes them, who have cannibalized their daughter\u2019s childhood as material for a successful series of children\u2019s books, Amazing Amy<\/em> (later, Amy calls her mendacious memoirs Amazing<\/em>). Rand and Maryelizabeth Elliot appear to be truly committed to each other but also quite phony, no doubt because Amy, an only child, hates them for exploiting her economically and emotionally. If, then, the happy, long-lasting marriage is, as Amy claims, damaging for the children because it sets high romantic standards impossible to fulfil, than what should be the target for couples? Since Flynn\u2019s own happy private life contrasts so sharply with that of her heroine Amy, or so she claims, perhaps what we are witnessing is not so much the degradation of the marriage ideal, as it exists in actual social practice, but the inability of current (American?) fiction to narrate happiness. Even worse, rather than plain unhappiness women novelists are offering a monstrously false form of happiness, twisted beyond all recognition. On the other side of the Atlantic, incidentally, Glynn\u2019s British peer E.L. James has refashioned happiness as sado-masochism in her Grey<\/em> series, perhaps concurring more than we imagine with her American colleague.<\/p>\n

Initially, I was going to use Michael Kimmel\u2019s controversial Guyland: The Perilous World Where Boys Become Men<\/em> (2009) to comment on the current degradation of the romantic discourse. The need for mutual seduction, Kimmel hints, is vanishing, replaced by a predatory view of sex common among American young persons aged 18 to 25. I realized, however, that this is not yet the generation that Flynn is addressing but rather that of the thirtysomethings in need of abandoning guyland (and girlland). Flynn is suggesting in Gone Girl<\/em> that marriage has become a fiction which both members of the couple embrace when the hedonistic lifestyle of the twentysomethings runs its course and individuals start feeling a vague need to settle down. The biggest gap in her novel is not connected, ultimately, with Amy\u2019s improbable masterminding of her elaborate final trap for Nick but with how and why Amy and Nick fall into the marriage trap of their own volition.<\/p>\n

Amy offers quite a good diagnosis regarding Nick\u2019s self-deception: he falls for the \u2018cool girl\u2019 which she so proficiently impersonates. Yet since plain Nick is so easy to read for Amy, I wonder why she targets him as the object of the obsessive marriage plot which she builds for both. In Flynn\u2019s reading, indeed, marriage is a piece of fiction which we women write throughout our lives with men in secondary roles and if Amy is exceptional this is because she writes two versions: the one her diary captures, intended paradoxically for public consumption, and the private one she forces on Nick. Since Flynn makes Amy so exceptionally abusive, readers\u2013like myself\u2013who resist reading women\u2019s fiction about violent women may miss her main point: the idea that men are also addicted to the trashy marriage plot that women churn out (Fincher\u2019s film, in contrast, simply places Amy in the long line of dangerous blondes, a classic femme fatale<\/em>, though married). <\/p>\n

A reader called Gone Girl<\/em> the story of \u201ca jerk and a bitch\u201d and even though Mary Elizabeth Braddon\u2019s sensation masterpiece Lady Audley\u2019s Secret<\/em> (1862) is there to remind us that mean, scheming wives have not been invented by Flynn, it is still shocking to see that Amy and Nick are presented as an extreme instance of modern love. Try, if you can, to call Pride and Prejudice<\/em> the story of \u201ca jerk and a bitch\u201d and you will understand at once what I mean by the contemporary degradation of the romantic discourse on love and marriage. Or to put it the other way round: while I very much dislike Austen\u2019s novel as a dangerous fantasy about men\u2019s willing submission to women through love, I am appalled by Flynn\u2019s nasty little tale for, instead of denying Austen\u2019s daydream it claims that it works\u2013on the basis of the most atrocious mutual dependence you may imagine. Never mind that this is not love at all as it should be felt, for it is love as we have been told it should feel by countless romantic novels.<\/p>\n

Not the girl but love is gone, burnt out by the cynicism dictating that sentimentalism is tacky. Amy never tricks herself that she and Nick are like Elizabeth and Darcy yet she builds her own repulsive marriage plot because she does want that fiction to be her life (and Nick\u2019s). This is both cynical and desperate, a decision born of her realization that modern love is hollow at the core and intimacy two-edged, for there are things you might not want to know about your spouse. Is Gone Girl<\/em>, then, a good novel that will stand the test of time like Pride and Prejudice<\/em>? Not at all but it is fascinating as a symptom of the malaise that is rotting the marriage plot in fiction and in life from the inside (no wonder that Flynn\u2019s background is also the economic decadence of Amy and Nick\u2019s America). <\/p>\n

This malaise is not, however, as Flynn might believe, limited to her pathetic couple: her novel participates of the terrifyingly decadent imagination surfacing all over American fiction (think The Hunger Games<\/em>). What made me gasp for fresh air when I closed the book was not Amy\u2019s wickedness but the sheer ugliness of Flynn\u2019s fabulation, the hours spent plotting the hideous details of how Amy plots her own life. Bret Easton Ellis did the same, and arguably even with more bravado, for contemporary American men 25 years ago in American Psycho<\/em> (1991). It has taken American fiction, then, a quarter of a century to present us with the female version. To many people this might read as a healthy exercise in female sincerity, even as a feminist step forward. For me, however, the decision to focus on a psychopathic woman as an instance of the psychopathologies of a whole society is a setback, for I still believe that for a society to progress its fiction needs to provide it with role models. The kind of urge that Amy, the anti-role model, satisfies is a luxury that women cannot afford in our patriarchal times\u2013I know the argument is not new but think of Hillary Clinton and now think of how little she needs Amy Dunne to exist.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ll end, then, by bemoaning the way love has been dealt with in fiction: it deserves better than the implausible plotting that both Jane Austen and Gillian Flynn give it for drastically different reasons. I wish both Elizabeth Bennet and Amy Dunne were gone girls but I\u2019m sorry to see that only love is gone.<\/p>\n

Comments are very welcome! (Thanks!) Just remember that I check them for spam; it might take a few days for yours to be available. Follow on Twitter the blog updates: @SaraMartinUAB. You may download the yearly volumes from http:\/\/ddd.uab.cat\/record\/116328. See my publications and activities on my personal web http:\/\/gent.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/<\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I assumed that there would be already a handful of academic articles on Gillian Flynn\u2019s 2012 best-selling novel Gone Girl, adapted for the screen by David Fincher in 2014 from a script by the author herself. Not at all. My university\u2019s meta-searcher, Trobador, has returned 712 results, only 2 of which appear in the MLA […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":98,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,15],"tags":[212],"class_list":["post-1215","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cultural-studies","category-film-adaptations","tag-gender-studies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/98"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1215"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1215\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1215"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1215"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/webs.uab.cat\/saramartinalegre\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1215"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}