Following its release, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl established itself as a literary and cultural phenomenon. The 2012 novel revolves around the crumbling marriage of Nick and Amy and the dark secrets of their marital life, domestic home, and individual identities that are exposed when Amy goes missing. It centers upon the mystery and investigation of Amy’s disappearance, the suspicions that Nick has murdered her, and ultimately, the revelation that Amy has cleverly framed her husband in revenge for his adultery and lies. The novel quickly became a New York Times bestseller, and over one million copies were purchased within four months following its initial publication (Memmott). The novel, falling somewhere within the crime, thriller, or mystery genres (its genre categorization seems to be somewhat elusive or ambiguous), had a profound effect upon contemporary reading audiences and elicited stunned responses from literary critics. Entertainment Weekly writes that “Flynn pulls the rug out from under you – and, by the way, you didn’t even realize you were standing on one;” they praise the novel as “twisted and wild,” noting its introduction of a villainous “maniac you could fall in love with” (Giles). Another review asserts that Gone Girl “thrills and delights while holding up a mirror to how we live” (Harwood). Further, a critic from the New York Times states that the novel “almost requires a game board to show how Nick and Amy move” (Maslin) and the Chicago Tribune emphasizes the novel’s conventional function as a thriller, with “tantalizing secrets and red herrings” (Gutman). Time argues that the novel “may be postmodern” but embodies the “form of a thoroughbred thriller about the nature of identity and the terrible secrets that can survive and thrive in even the most intimate relationships” (Grossman).

These critical appraisals of Gone Girl and the devices which aid its categorization in the mystery/thriller genre bear striking resemblance to scholarly and critical views on the “sensational” aspect of the Victorian sensation fiction genre. Just as Gone Girl has attained its status as a popular novel and a cultural phenomenon, the Victorian sensation genre is first and foremost deemed “sensational” because of its once similar effect upon the contemporary Victorian reading audience. Though the sensation novel was deemed low-brow by Victorian literary critics (which is not necessarily the case with Gone Girl), the genre experienced immense “popularity, often across a range of readerships” and a “commercial, as well as cultural, success” (Gilbert 2). Further, the sensation genre of nineteenth-century England often dealt with the same “plots of secrecy, mystery, suspense, crime, and horror” that propel the action of Flynn’s 2012 novel (Pykett 5). These parallels between sensation fiction and the 2012 “thriller” Gone Girl extend beyond simply the critical and readerly response. In the following blog post, I argue that Gillian Flynn actually borrows from and updates many of the sensation genre’s plot devices, narrative techniques, character tropes, and settings to create her own modern manifestation of a sensational domestic thriller. Whereas the Victorian sensation genre is often confined by scholars to a short period of time (between the 1860s and the 1870s in England), Flynn’s novel allows us to see the ways in which the sensation genre (or perhaps the sensational formula) remains influential for writers of more recent novels. Both Gone Girl and sensation novels like Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) provoke similar responses from their respective audiences because they rely upon the same narrative foundations and force us to probe underlying anxieties surrounding the corruption of marriage, the dark secrets of the domestic realm, and the limitations of feminine agency and identity.

Lyn Pykett, who has contributed tremendously to scholarship on the Victorian sensation genre, writes that sensation fiction plots focus upon “duplicity, deception, disguise, […] intrigue, jealousy, and adultery,” among many other elements of crime and mystery, in order to draw in the reader’s attention and stimulate surprise and horror (Pykett 5). These same elements play a central role in the pages of Gone Girl. Amy disguises her true self behind a “cool girl” persona as she marries Nick Dunne, ensuring that their marriage is predicated on lies, and when her husband eventually tires of her and cheats (hence, adultery or bigamy), Amy mysteriously disappears. This propels Nick into the throes of a potential murder investigation which elicits both local and national media attention, and Flynn’s readers eagerly follow along as the clues of Amy’s fate come together. Much of the reader’s curiosity and the novel’s sensational aspect relies upon Flynn’s narrative withholding of information, particularly in her constant flipping between Nick and Amy as primary narrator. New pieces of evidence gradually manifest and our judgment of character culpability wavers when we are pulled from Nick’s perspective to Amy’s written diary entries. This directly mimics the “techniques of narrative concealment and delay” that often characterize Victorian sensation fiction (5). Pykett notes that Wilkie Collins, frequently considered one of the most significant authors of sensation fiction, developed “the split or shared narrative which used a variety of first-person narrators” (5). Thus, Gone Girl’s own narrative structure is able to evoke the same response that occurred with the reading of sensation fiction by mirroring the conventional narrative structure of the sensation genre. Just as Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone utilizes various narrators and letters to muddy the reader’s clarity and the ability to discern the truth, Flynn employs both Nick and Amy’s subjective (or feigned) to make it unclear whether we should sympathize with or believe the assertions of one character over the other. This narrative structure produces shock, particularly when Flynn reveals Amy’s manipulations of narrative voice in Part Two, because it asks us to consider narrative reliability and surprises us when this reliability is shown to be tenuous.

 

Furthermore, the setting of Gone Girl imitates that of the sensation novel and augments the 2012 novel’s “sensational” aspect in much the same way. Flynn sets her novel in modern-day, primarily in the sleepy town of North Carthage, Missouri at Nick and Amy’s ordinary, middle-class home. Gone Girl opens with Nick’s description of their “rented house right along the Mississippi River,” which he deems “a generically grand, unchallenging […] new house that my wife would – and did – detest” (Flynn 4). As the novel unwinds, we become privy to the dark and menacing aspects of Amy and Nick’s marital lives, the secrets which they each hold, and the tenuous foundations of their relationship. The scene of the crime, Amy’s ostensible murder, takes place in the living room of their generic home, and Nick notes the strangeness of this domestic crime as the police arrive to investigate, looking like “they were dropping by a neighborhood picnic” (32). Further, Nick bristles as the police’s interference in his personal life and his control over this domestic realm; when a female officer prevents him from opening a clue left by Amy, he becomes furious that “this woman presumed to tell me what to do in my own home” (59). Just as the media and the police detectives intrude upon the Dunnes’s domestic abode and the innerworkings of their private lives, the novel allows the reader to look up-close at Amy and Nick, shedding the superficial façades which they have constructed around them. The 2012 novel thus functions in a way which mimics that of the Victorian sensation novel, where the domestic violence and ensuing journalistic and police response “violate[s] the sanctuary of the home” by turning “private affairs” into “public spectacle” (Pykett 2-3). As Pykett notes, sensation novels dealt “pre-eminently with tales of modern life” rather than those set in the past or in exotic locales (5). Sensation novels created an unsettling anxiety in their contemporary readers by placing the “action […] of crime and passion” within the “otherwise prosaic, everyday, domestic setting of a modern middle-class or aristocratic English household,” corrupting an idealized view of domesticity held during the period (8). Flynn’s choice to set Gone Girl in the contemporary, ordinary American household puts the novel’s mystery, duplicity, and emotional violence in closer proximity to the experience of the everyday reader, and thus, generates more “sensational” responses of shock and intrigue. At first glance, we cannot believe that the seemingly perfect, ideal couple of Gone Girl are capable of such profound deceit, manipulation, and violent motive, and the criminal or mysterious action which ensues juxtaposes jarringly against the quiet town in which it takes place.

Most importantly, the violence of sensation fiction often centered around that of “family members” and “marriage partners” (Pykett 2) which especially exposed anxieties, fears, or doubts about the nature of marital life and “marriage customs” (2) seen as the “cornerstone of Victorian society” (13). Gone Girl’s entire narrative structure and plot centers upon Nick and Amy’s crumbling marriage and the disguises that both characters assume in their marriage to one another. The novel reveals and perpetuates anxieties about gender roles and domestic ideals that prevail in our own modern-day, and these anxieties particularly mimic those that spurred Victorian sensation fiction. As Lyn Pykett notes, sensation novels “reproduced and negotiated broader cultural anxieties about the nature and status of respectable femininity and the domestic ideal,” probing the nature of gender roles in utilizing subversive characters like the “fast woman” and the “feminized male who lacks a clear social role” (13). These transgressive or subversive notions regarding the role of men and women in marriage play a central role in Gillian Flynn’s construction of the sensational collapse of Nick and Amy’s modern-day marriage. Amy becomes the villainous, “fast” woman who deserts her domestic role as a wife and cleverly outwits her husband, while Nick slowly morphs into the unemployed, careless misogynist who cannot fulfill his expected “manly” role as a financial and sexual provider. When Nick and Amy’s idealistic façades wear off in the face of the 2008 economic downturn, they shirk their expected marital roles, propelling the novel’s crime plot and Amy’s bitter revenge against her husband’s deceit. Reviewers of Gone Girl explicitly identify the novel’s ability to probe questions of marriage and gender roles in its stylistic function as a thriller: Entertainment Weekly writes that, despite Gone Girl’s shocking twists and turns, the novel truly stuns when it forces the reader to ponder “how tenuous power relations are between men and women, and how often couples are at the mercy of forces beyond their control.” Both the sensation novel, such as Lady Audley’s Secret, and Gone Girl make gender roles central in order to generate their sensational crimes as those that challenge the “social and moral status quo” (13).

In particular, Amy and Nick often note the ways in which they conform to or defy conventional roles of wife and husband. For example, Nick relies on Amy’s money to open his bar, but winces at the idea of being “a man who borrowed from his wife” (Flynn 7). Even more so, the novel frequently delves into what it means to be a wife and the place of feminine identity in marriage. One of Amy’s first (contrived) diary entries notes: “I have become a strange thing […] I have become a bore, I have been asked to forfeit my Independent Young Feminist card. I don’t care” (38). This “cool girl” identity becomes untenable and eventually disintegrates as their marriage develops; when this happens, Nick asserts the discrepancy between the “woman I fell in love with” and the “new, brittle, bitter Amy” who shed her first façade like a snake (49). The novel even deals with the implications of feminine identity in marriage as it relates to Nick’s own mother. After Nick’s mother divorces her verbally abusive and misogynistic husband, her sister praises the reemergence of the “old Maureen,” which causes Nick to wonder “if the woman who raised us was an imposter” (61). These various examples demonstrate how the novel’s superficial mystery plot, revolving around the disappearance of Amy and the marital bitterness between Amy and Nick, enables the reader to examine deeper anxieties about feminine agency and the limitations of marriage on women. This explicitly mirrors the way that the sensation novel “reveal[s] and exploit[s] the fear that the respectable Victorian family had some dark secret at its core” and probed the “issue of the women’s role within the family” (Pykett 13).

According to the Chicago Tribune reviewer, Gone Girl lacks a certain realism; she writes:

For all its strengths, this isn’t a book for those inclined to true-to-life fiction […] Flynn has no qualms about shaping reality to suit the needs of her high-wire plot. At times, there’s a slightly cartoonish aspect to her cast of characters, and more than once, their over-the-top scheming strains credulity […] But what “Gone Girl” lacks in realism, it more than makes up for in inventiveness and narrative bravura. (Gutman)

This critical view of Gone Girl is particularly interesting because it specifically parallels a common critique of the Victorian sensation novel. As Lyn Pykett (and many other sensation critics and scholars) asserts, “character is quite often subordinated to incident and plot” in the sensation novel (Pykett 5). As we can see with Gone Girl and other Victorian sensation novels like Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, this is not always the case, as sensation fiction often combined “realism and melodrama, the journalistic and the fantastic, the domestic and the romantic or exotic” (5). There are instances where Gone Girl or Lady Audley’s Secret elicit sympathy from the reader through emotional, affective means, especially in regard to the repressed and violent female “villainesses” which drive their “sensational” plots. Amy hopes to provoke sympathy by characterizing herself as the abandoned wife, because Nick, “who brought me here, who uprooted me to be closer to his ailing parents, seems to have lost all interest in […] me” (Flynn 139). Furthermore, her parents’ passive-aggressive judgment of her failings enables the reader to understand Amy’s bitterness and insecurities; she notes that “whenever I screw something up, [Amazing Amy] (Amy’s literary alter-ego in her parents’ children’s books) does it right” (26). Gone Girl is just as much a psychological, inner examination of the societal and cultural expectations of marriage (and the problems that result from these expectations). However, Flynn’s focus on constructing a carefully-woven, formulaic, and shocking plot (as well as a clever plot twist) ultimately overshadows the development of character in her novel, which is chiefly the case with Victorian sensation fiction.

Gillian Flynn has never explicitly named the sensation genre as an inspiration for her 2012 bestselling novel, but the way in which she constructs her plot, weaves her narrative devices, and focuses upon the domestic horrors of everyday life, home, and marriage enables me to make a connection between her modern domestic thriller and the popular Victorian sensation novel. The two work in much the same way to shock their respective readers and obliquely call into question the problems inherent in societal institutions of marriage and family. It seems that the “Victorian” holds influence over Flynn to some extent; she directly calls out the “Victorian” three times in Part One of Gone Girl (Flynn 4, 8, 102). Amy even likens her plight to that of a Victorian heroine “forced to leave her ancestral home” (102). The novels stylistic and thematic elements thus augment the sense that Flynn’s thriller relies upon already-established genre conventions occurring in the Victorian sensation genre.

 

Works Cited:

Flynn, Gillian. Gone Girl. Random House LLC, 2012.

Gilbert, Pamela K. “Introduction.” A Companion to Sensation Fiction, Blackwell Publishing Ltd., 2011, pp. 1-10.

Giles, Jeff. “Gone Girl review – Gillian Flynn.” Entertainment Weekly, ew.com/article/2012/06/06/gone-girl-review-gillian-flynn/. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019.

Grossman, Lev. “My So-Called Wife.” Time, 11 July 2012, time.com/4132733/my-so-called-wife/. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019.

Gutman, Amy. “A marriage gone missing.” Chicago Tribune, www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/books/ct-xpm-2012-07-28-ct-prj-0603-gone-girl-20120728-story.html. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019.

Harwood, Seth. “‘Gone Girl,’ by Gillian Flynn: review.” SFGate, www.sfgate.com/books/article/Gone-Girl-by-Gillian-Flynn-review-3621248.php. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019.

Maslin, Janet. “The Lies That Buoy, Then Break a Marriage.” The New York Times, www.nytimes.com/2012/05/30/books/gone-girl-by-gillian-flynn.html. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019.

Memmott, Carol. “‘Gone Girl’ goes over the top in sales, expectations.” USA Today, www.usatoday.com/story/life/2012/10/08/gillian-flynn-gone-girl/1611423/. Accessed 17 Feb. 2019.

Pykett, Lyn. “The Sensation Phenomenon.” The Nineteenth Century Sensation Novel, Northcote House Publishers, 2011, pp. 1-23.