Amy in Gone Girl

Flynn: “For me, [feminism is] also the ability to have women who are bad characters … the one thing that really frustrates me is this idea that women are innately good, innately nurturing. In literature, they can be dismissably bad – trampy, vampy, bitchy types – but there’s still a big pushback against the idea that women can be just pragmatically evil, bad and selfish … I don’t write psycho bitches. The psycho bitch is just crazy – she has no motive, and so she’s a dismissible person because of her psycho-bitchiness.”

Monstrous women have often been portrayed as something that must be stopped at any cost, and whoever stops the monster, usually a man, is then the hero, even if the person who created the monstrous woman is a man. Popular cinema and art have also mostly concentrated on the phallic woman as a strong feminine character, however, could this indeed be a problematic notion? Perhaps a woman using her yonic power, even if it is for monstrous reasons, could very well be more empowering to women. We clearly see this theory unfold in the tale of Medusa, where Poseidon rapes the virginial Priestess she previously was, and Athena curses her out of jealousy when she finds out. Men then sought her out, but not because of her beauty, but to kill her, and Perseus is crowned the hero for doing so (Leeming, 2013). Contemporary versions of the monstrous woman, such as Amy Dunne in Gillian Flynn’s “Gone Girl” (2012), who is changed throughout her life to be the ideal woman by her parents and the men in her life, including her husband, contrasts Medusa’s story by not ever being stopped (Flynn, 2012). This change is similar to Medusa’s curse, as Amy now does not know fully who she really is. Throughout the book and film adaptation, Amy displays psychopathic tendencies, frames her fake murder on her husband, and even kills a previous boyfriend. Amy Dunne and Medusa’s characters beg the question whether if monstrous women can have valid feminist points and messages, since they are perhaps only monstrous from being a product of a patriarchal society.

Unlike Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, Medusa is stopped through death, whereas Amy wins. Even only with reference to the Vagina Dentata in Medusa’s snake hair we see how her myth will end because, as Creed points, the threat of castration must go, as the myth “generally states that women are terrifying because they have teeth in their vaginas and that the women must be tamed, or the teeth somehow removed or softened – usually by a hero figure – before intercourse can safely take place” (Creed, 1993, pg1), and once again, the hero was Perseus, reaffirming phallic power. Amy Dunne’s husband, Nick Dunne, tries to stop her after figuring out she is trying to frame him for her fake murder, but we quickly realise that he is no hero figure, just as we realise Perseus is not for slaying the ‘monster’ Medusa had become. This parallels with Amy Dunne’s character because it is the rules of being a woman, or “Amazing Amy” whom her parents had made into children’s books based on her, that pushed her to have a psychotic episode. Although most of what Amy Dunne wrote in her diary about him to portray Nick as a terrible person was false, he was still having an affair with a younger “cool girl” and had made Amy feel invisible in their marriage (Flynn, 2012). This was enough of a motive to break free from the “cool girl” persona she had been pressured to live all her life and become truly monstrous, which parallels with the monstrous mother in Sherman’s piece. She fakes her own death and intelligently frames her husband for it, leaving behind “clues” to his involvement in the “murder”. She then comes across trouble during her escape and must ask a pervious boyfriend, who is obsessive over her, for help. She then fakes assaults by him using cameras around his home and then kills him just as he reaches climax during intercourse using a box knife, signifying using her vagina as a luring weapon for this murder, and thus feminising the use of the knife she uses to kill. This penetration using a possible phallic object is also a total gender reversal, with his neck being the penetrated vagina. This almost links to the ‘normal’ arrangement of women in horror because “they frame the vagina as vulnerable” (Harrington, 2017, pg7) but with a twist; she is using this vulnerability of being a supposed victim to manipulate the media and police, as well as the people in her life. Horror also uses the vagina “as a site of terror” (Harrington, 2017, pg7), where Amy Dunne has used this vulnerability against people, particularly males.