Emergence of New Woman in Gilliam Flynn’s Gone Girl

Abstract

Domestic Noir, a literary subgenre of crime fiction, is a term introduced by the English writer Julia Crouch in 2013 and explains the genre as opposing the traditional idea of home as the safest place for women. Like most crime novels, domestic noir explores dark themes; in particular, crime within romantic relationships and the family home. Placing women as both the victim and the perpetrator, domestic noir shows how women can challenge and break the stereotypical gender roles placing them as a New Woman in front of male supremacy. Placing noir fiction as a cultural commentary on the gendered inequities of domestic life, this new genre tries to place women not only as a victim to domestic violence but as a problem solver also. This paper tries to explain this new trend in domestic sphere giving special focus to the American writer Gilliam Flynn’s work The Gone Girl. Placing a threat to the male dominance in domestic sphere, the heroine - violent yet cunning Amy Dunne in Gilliam Flynn’s The Gone Girl challenges the male dominance in family relations thus underlines a sense of decay and complication in traditional gender roles. The heaven like husband–wife relationship is here questioned and apart from portraying women as mere victims in domestic violence, domestic noir discusses how traditional and stereotypical women is replaced by a New Woman in domestic space who can even trap their male counterpart against the malice he did in marriage and thus proclaimed the emergence of a new woman though in a violent manner.

Keywords

Domestic Noir, Domestic Violence, Gender Roles, New Woman, Victimisation, Crime and Gender

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