‘Sometimes I think illness sits inside every woman, waiting for the right moment to bloom. I have known so many sick women all my life. Women with chronic pain, with ever-gestating diseases. Women with conditions. Men, sure, they have bone snaps, they have headaches, they have a surgery or two, yank out a tonsil, insert a shiny plastic hip. Women get consumed.’[1]
It is the consumption of women that pervades Gillian Flynn’s excellent first novel Sharp Objects. The novel uses Gothic devices and themes to expose the often precarious nature of women’s lives in the twenty-first century. This is most obviously evident in the fate of two young girls, the disappearance of which brings the protagonist, Chicago reporter Camille Preaker, back to her small-town home, Wind Gap. However it is the depiction of Camille’s own family that explores the true precarity experienced by women at the mercy of toxic masculinity and abusive parenting.
There is toxicity at the heart of the Wind Gap community and particularly Camille’s family, a toxicity that becomes physically manifest in the bodily trauma experienced by the novel’s female characters. The murder victims are mutilated in a very specific way, referencing the harm that they themselves may have done to others. Camille also embodies the damage that such toxicity can do. Since the death of her younger sister, Marian, when Camille was thirteen, she has self-harmed, carving her own narrative in single words upon her body. This self-harm is juxtaposed with the harm that Camille experiences at the hands of others. One of her earliest sexual experiences, as a teenager, is a gang rape at the hands of male fellow students, and throughout her childhood and adolescence her mother emotionally rejects Camille. Flynn’s use of the family in this way locates Sharp Objects firmly in Gothic fiction’s traditional ambivalence towards the family. In his essay ‘Technogenealogies: Family Secrets’ David Punter explores Gothic fiction’s engagement with ‘the family’. He concludes that ‘the “family” is not, in fact, a stable unit; rather it is the soul of uncertainty.’ Punter thus argues that ‘the notion of the family is (…) being continuously remade, reshaped, and often according to social variation and political expediency.’ As a consequence the ‘Gothic is absorbed with the family (…) with its habits, with its disruptions, with its development. But above all (…) with its secrets.’[2]
It is from such toxic family secrets that Sharp Objects derives its power to unsettle and unnerve the reader. Camille’s stepfather, Alan, is a disinterested figure lacking agency and influence, in common with nearly all of the novel’s male characters. Camille’s biological father is absent; she is an outsider even within her own family. Camille’s mother, Adora, represents the centre of the Preaker family. Flynn, by placing such emphasis upon the novel’s mother figure, evokes Sigmund Freud’s analysis of what constitutes the ‘realm of the frightening, of what evokes fear and dread.’[3] Freud uses the term ‘uncanny’ or the German unheimlich (unhomely) to identify a particular kind of fear, one that permeates Gothic fiction. For Freud ‘the uncanny is that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.’[4] Traditionally motherhood is supposed to represent the most heimlich or homely quality we ever encounter. It is thus Flynn’s complex and compelling characterization of Camille’s mother that gives Sharp Objects its uncanny core. The suggestively named Adora seeks adoration at all costs. As a consequence in Sharp Objects the soft, comforting edges of maternity are instead sharp and give pain. It this central Gothic device that is sustained throughout the novel, ensuring that the novel unremittingly unsettles the reader and exposes the precarity experienced by those whose protectors become their abusers.
[1] Gillian Flynn, Sharp Objects (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, [2006] 2010), p. 262.
[2] David Punter, The Gothic Condition: Terror, History and the Psyche (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2016), pp. 87-88.
[3] Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’, in The Uncanny, trans. by David McLintock (London: Penguin Books, 2003), pp. 121-162, (p. 123).
[4] Freud, p. 124.
Precarious Gothic 