GONE GOTH: FEMINISM AND THE FEMALE REVENGER

IN TITUS ANDRONICUS AND GONE GIRL

A Thesis Presented to the Faculty

of
California State University, Stanislaus

In Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements for the Degree
of Master of Arts in English

By
Tara Dybas
December 2017
 CERTIFICATION OF APPROVAL

GONE GOTH: FEMINISM AND THE FEMALE REVENGER

IN TITUS ANDRONICUS AND GONE GIRL

by
Tara Dybas

Signed Certification of Approval page

is on file with the University Library

Dr. Tony Perrello, Adviser Date

Professor of English

Dr. Susan Marshall Date

Professor of English

Dr. Molly Crumpton Winter Date

Professor of English
 © 2017

Tara Dybas
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
 DEDICATION

For Ron, Lorrie, Richard, and Hannah Dybas, who have given me the best life

possible and continue to be outstanding role models, friends, supporters, caregivers—

the four people on this earth that I love most (besides my cat, obviously).

iv
 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This project would not exist without Dr. Tony Perrello, to whom I owe my

Shakespearean proclivities. It has been almost five years since I took a course on

Shakespeare with Dr. Perrello, and almost five years since my love of Shakespeare

began. In that time Dr. Perrello has mentored me, shared his expansive early modern

knowledge and insight with me, and supported me in my thesis project and general

M.A. career. He has also become a trusted friend. I cannot thank him enough, nor

express my gratitude and my immense amount of respect and admiration for him.

Dr. Susan Marshall has always supported me in my endeavors, even when I

come to her with outrageous ideas. She has become more than a mentor, she is my

friend and confidante. Without her encouragement I may never have begun graduate

school. An enormous amount of gratitude and appreciation is due to you, Dr.

Marshall. For trusting me to be your assistant in a Shakespeare course, for always

leaving your office door open for me, for believing in me and supporting me.

I did not have the fortune to meet and work with Dr. Molly Crumpton Winter

until this very year, but in that year Dr. Crumpton Winter has also stepped into the

role of mentor to me. Without her overwhelming support as Department Chair, as

Thesis Committee member, as mentor, as professor, as inspiration for my own career,

I may not have kept my sanity in this program. Thank you for pushing me towards all

of the opportunities I have been fortunate enough to receive in my career at

Stanislaus, and thank you for supporting me always.

v
 Every professor I have come into contact with at Stanislaus has contributed to

my undergraduate and graduate career. Professor Paula Barrington-Schmidt, Dr.

Matthew Moberly, Dr. Scott Davis, Professor Robin Baldridge, Dr. Jesse Wolfe—you

have all supported me here at Stanislaus anywhere from six years to one semester,

and I truly could not be more grateful. Stanislaus is my home and the English

department has been nothing short of amazing thanks to your support.

My M.A. cohort, too, deserves thanks. Alexandria Montiel and Jacqueline

Hollcraft get special thanks as dear friends and for their constant support. Jessica

Armendarez (and Elena), Jonathan Byron, Heaven Lindsey-Burtch, Amber

Youngman, Andrew Inman, Rhonda Lee Randle, Gemma Keane, Maria Torres, you

have all been so supportive to me. Thank you for allowing me to complain, to talk

through ideas with you, for providing me encouragement and friendship. The

anxieties of this program are not manageable without you.

Jamiee Cook and Amy Kuehl are not technically part of my M.A. cohort, but

have also been enormously supportive in my graduate school endeavors and as dear,

dear friends. Thank you for letting me unload my anxieties onto you both and for

always talking me down. Your support is so important to me.

Finally, my family, who deals with the brunt of my stress. In the last few years

my family—Ron, Lorrie, Richard, and Hannah Dybas, have been the most

instrumental in my success. I really could not have managed both my academic career

and my personal life without the love and support of my family. Thank you for

allowing me to force the Titus and Gone Girl films on you so that I could talk at you

vi
about my thesis. Thank you to Richard and Hannah for coming with me to a less-

than-stellar park production of Titus Andronicus. Thank you to Richard for helping

me to flesh out my ideas and for reading this project—twice. Knowing that I have

five people who care about this project and me as a person has been beyond helpful,

that you have all allowed me to de-stress and talk through my project with you has

been nothing short of wonderful.

Lastly, I must thank my cat, Tiger, who is the living version of a security

blanket. Tiger has patiently sat upon my papers, in the crook of my arm (making it

impossible to type), and rubbed her tiny, furry face on the corners of my laptop in an

effort to gain my attention the entire time I have worked on this project.

vii
 TABLE OF CONTENTS
PAGE

Dedication ............................................................................................................... iv

Acknowledgements ................................................................................................. v

Abstract ................................................................................................................... ix

CHAPTER
I. “She is Righteous”; Introducing the Female Revenger ........................ 1

II. “A Wilderness of Tigers”; The Queen of Goths in Early Modern

England ................................................................................................. 15

III. “I’m It, Baby”; Amy as a Product of Mainstream Feminism ............... 26

IV. “Be Won at Last”; Tamora’s Legacy in Amy ....................................... 38

V. “We Are All Working from the Same Dog-Eared Script”; Gone Girl
Perception and Problems....................................................................... 67

References ............................................................................................................... 78

viii
 ABSTRACT

The main objective of this project is to examine the female revenger in William

Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. The female revenger

often signifies cultural attitudes about a given society, as she exhibits behaviors that

indicate male anxieties over what women are capable of. The female revenger is thus

an apt vehicle in understanding the shifting status of women through history. Titus

Andronicus and Gone Girl are central to this examination. The early modern era is

credited with the popularization of the revenger character, and Titus Andronicus

presents one of the first developed and central female revengers in an Elizabethan

drama. Gone Girl is one of the more recent representations of the female revenger.

Both texts rely on similar character tropes as Tamora and Amy utilize motherhood,

aggressive sexuality, subjectivity, and several other facets of stereotypical femininity.

The differences between the two texts indicate the shift in female subjectivity that

allows for success. This examination necessitates a gloss of feminist movements that

led to an increase in female agency and subjectivity. Without cultural shifts in

attitudes towards women, Gillian Flynn could not have expanded on the female

revenger trope popularized by William Shakespeare.

ix
 CHAPTER I

“SHE IS RIGHTEOUS”; INTRODUCING THE FEMALE REVENGER

“Nature I say, doth paynt them furthe to be weake, fraile, impacient, feble and
foolishe: and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruell and
lacking the spirit of counsel and regiment. And these notable faultes have men in all
ages espied in that kinde...” -John Knox, The First Blast of the Trumpet against the
Monstrous Regiment of Women

Medea feigns forgiveness for Jason’s adultery when she gives Glauce a

poison-laced dress to wear and then murders her children by Jason. Cersei Lannister

of HBO’s Game of Thrones poisons Tyene Sand and forces her mother, Ellaria, to

watch her die and decompose as revenge for killing Cersei’s own daughter. Judith

uses her sexual appeal to overpower the Assyrian army leader, Holofernes, and

decapitates him for his crimes against the Israelites in the Hebrew Book of Judith.

Jessica Lange’s character in FX anthology series American Horror Story: Coven

decapitates a minotaur and sends the head to the minotaur’s lover—the leader of a

rival group of magic-practicing women. Female revenge illuminates the dominating

cultural attitudes towards women in the historical period in which we find female

revengers. Tamora of William Shakespeare’s 1593 Titus Andronicus illustrates

exactly how vengeful women are perceived by early modern audiences, and how

women who subvert cultural norms are punished for their bad behavior. Tamora’s

inability to subvert femininity as a tool of revenge stems from these cultural attitudes;

she is only able to subvert patriarchal order as long as she is ultimately destroyed as a

means of reaffirming that patriarchal order. The extent of the destruction she causes is

1
 2

allowed only because she becomes a signifier of the containment of femininity at the

behest of patriarchal control. Patriarchal control is even empowered by Tamora and

other similar characters, as she gives male rulers a problem over which they may

exert that control. Tamora and female revengers like her help to establish the

boundaries of feminine agency and containment in culturally and historically situated

texts. A Jacobean influx of misogynist pamphlets and higher rates of accused

witchcraft in women follow Titus Andronicus. Tamora represents, then, the

uncontrollable femininity that began to threaten patriarchal forces under Queen

Elizabeth I and that led to King James I’s actively seeking patriarchal affirmation.

After periods of rising female subjectivity, agency, and concurrent feminist

movements, a character like Tamora would have been more likely to succeed in a

twenty-first century arena than she was in Elizabethan England. Gillian Flynn’s 2012

novel Gone Girl features an updated Tamora who does just that: main character Amy

undermines the patriarchal control represented by her husband to the extent that the

novel ends with the suggestion that a matriarchy is the only solution to male

dominance. Amy uses feminist advancements and female subjectivity to dominate her

husband, whom Amy feels has made her into a woman she did not choose to be.

Nick’s adultery and his refusal to accept Amy’s complicated personality makes Amy

feel as though she is not in control of her own narrative—her ability to exert

personhood is interrupted by patriarchal forces.

Tamora fails at destroying Titus because of the limitations of the early modern

era. Amy is strengthened by her superior ability to control the language surrounding
 3

the perception of her life. Amy champions Tamora by not only destroying Nick, but

refashioning him into the man she wants him to be. Tamora and Amy reflect the

status of women in the early modern era and the twenty-first century, occupying

spaces typically reserved for male characters and signifying the limitations or

expansive agency afforded women in their respective time periods. An examination

of the feminist movements that led to the change in female status between Tamora

and Amy and narrative elements reveal that Titus Andronicus and Gone Girl are

literary case studies in how female revenger characters have been molded by cultural

attitudes of women.

Amy’s success looks not like equality, which twenty-first century social

movements tend to espouse, but a complete reversal of patriarchal order—a forced

matriarchy that serves the needs of Amy totally. In 1971, Joanna Russ wrote “What

Can a Heroine Do? Or Why Women Can’t Write” in an effort to call for literary

representations like Amy. Russ believes that “…it is impossible to write a

conventional success story with a heroine, for success in male terms is failure for a

woman, a ‘fact’ movies, books, and television plays have been earnestly proving to us

for decades” (83). The interiority and complexity of Gone Girl is a necessary

development in the production of literature written by and about women. As symbols

of male anxiety, female revengers typically represent current attitudes towards

women, making Tamora and Amy not only studies in early modern revenger

conventions and how they have evolved, but studies in how feminist movements have

evolved and gained control over media representation of women and subjective
 4

narrative in recent decades. Tamora and Amy are both situated in the female revenger

character trope that was developed in the early modern era and are looming signposts

for attitudes of women in their respective time periods. That they follow such similar

narrative trajectories makes them a prime case study in character trope and feminist

study.

One of the more problematic issues to contend with in the development of

Tamora’s character is that she is nearly erased or supplanted by Aaron in the last act

of the play. Lucius attributes the events of the play to Aaron and spares few words for

Tamora; Aaron is “Chief architect and plotter of these woes” (5.3.121).1 Mutius

removes agency and purpose from Tamora by assigning her revenge plot solely to

Aaron. With the proliferation of anti-heroes or loveable villains in recent film

franchises and in television,2 there is a notable cultural reverence for villainous

characters. For this upward tick in beloved male villain characters, female villains

face more uphill battles in being unapologetically bad and still retaining the loved

status that their male counterparts enjoy unencumbered. For that reason it is

interesting to examine the roots of female revenge as evidenced in Tamora and to

trace the development of feminist movements and narrative histories to understand

where Amy has improved on Tamora’s germinal female vengeance. That is, if
1
It is true that Aaron devises most of the revenge plots—Bassianus’ death, Lavinia’s rape,
Titus’ sons taking the blame for Bassianus’ death, et cetera. Aaron is only allowed agency
because of Tamora’s rise in power through Saturninus, and Aaron targets the Andronici for
her sake.
2
Loki of the Marvel Universe, Frank and Claire Underwood of House of Cards, any Jessica
Lange character in any American Horror Story season, nearly every main character of Suicide
Squad, Hannibal Lecter both in the original films [The Silence of the Lambs, Red Dragon,
Hannibal] and the more recent television reboot Hannibal, The Joker in the Batman film
franchise, and so on.
 5

Tamora was given free reign and allowed to be unapologetically villainous and

unapologetically female, what would her success look like? How could she use her

femininity to her advantage in the twenty-first century when her femininity is

unacceptable and unsuccessful in Titus?

Tamora as female revenger has gained traction in recent scholarship on Titus

Andronicus, though she seems to have been excluded from discussion of the

Shakespearean greats like Iago, Macbeth, or Richard III. Tamora’s legacy in the play

is not as enduring as the legacy of Aaron or Titus; the harshest punishment is reserved

for Aaron while Tamora is specifically left to rot into nonexistence; “But throw her

forth to beasts and birds of prey:/Her life was beast-like, and devoid of pity;/And,

being so, shall have like want of pity (5.3.197-99). If Aaron is given the treatment

reserved for the antagonist, Tamora is left in the lurch.

Amy, too, promised to be a champion of female revenge as the rave reviews

poured in for Gillian Flynn’s novel. David Fincher’s 2014 film continued to receive

positive reviews from critics, but Gone Girl caught the ire of major feminist groups

and critics who took issue with Amy’s using false rape accusations to further her

machinations and her entrapment of husband Nick Dunne.3 Feminist critics of the

novel and film appropriately question how Amy could be a feminist character if she

spends so much energy on a man instead of leaving the relationship. In the novel,

Nick notes this disparity in Amy’s personal feminist ideology: “It’s not stand by your

man anymore, it’s divorce the fucker” (393). Amy is problematic to be sure, but, like

3
See p. 31 for continued discussion of this issue.
 6

Tamora, seems to have been excluded as feminist by those outside the niche study of

the anti-hero in media and literature. A literary case study of female revengers and

their quest for agency from the early modern era to the twenty-first century will

necessarily include the problems still inherent in the female revenger trope.

Ultimately, strides have been made in how allowable female revenge is in popular

culture, although the character has not changed much. Instead, it is the shift toward

female subjectivity that has changed the sociological climate surrounding Gone Girl.

Classically, a revenger is something of an anti-hero character who has a

specific injustice on which to focus their vengeance. One of the more famous

revengers in the early modern era is Hieronimo of Thomas Kyd’s 1587 The Spanish

Tragedy.4 Hieronimo as revenger is different from the typical villain, like Macbeth of

the eponymous play, because Hieronimo focuses on a specific injustice; his son’s

suspicious death at the hands of a state official. A revenger, too, typically elicits more

sympathy than a standard villain, as there is some justification for his actions. Titus

himself can be classified as a revenger. He brutally murders his son Mutius and

Chiron, Demetrius, his daughter Lavinia, and Tamora, but as the play focuses on his

justified search for revenge, his actions are forgivable to a certain extent. He has been

forced to retaliate with violence as Tamora shows no signs of relenting. The revenger

typically goes mad in his quest for revenge and ultimately destroys himself in his

attempt to right social wrongs, as is the case with Hieronimo and Titus. Male

revengers are unique, too, because they behave badly but are technically the heroes of

4
Bel-Imperia acts as a prototypical female revenger to a lesser extent (but is more successful,
argues Liberty Star Stanavage).
 7

their own stories. Stevie Simkin in Early Modern Tragedy and the Cinema of

Violence notes that there are conflicting attitudes about how an early modern

audience would receive male revengers. Simkin says that the reception of male

revengers is complicated because “they are on the one hand evil, and on the other

positioned as the protagonists of their respective dramas. The frequent use of asides

and soliloquies… identifies them as the audience’s most likely point of entry into the

world of the play” (67). Revengers are bad, but they are sympathetic; they are the

heroes of their own stories, if not morally heroic characters. The subversion of

powerful figures and institutions (but ultimate reification) is part of the catharsis of

revenge tragedies. Audiences participate in institutional subversion and find a sense

of pleasure in that participation.

Tamora occupies a unique position as female revenger because she is not only

villainous, she also experiences an injustice that she is unable to rectify through

proper channels. Typically a revenger of any gender subverts law or state institutions

as those institutions fail to serve their purpose. Simkin says that “the revenger

becomes a powerful projection of society’s frustration at times when it sees…

spiralling crime and a weak or incompetent effort on the part of the government to

enforce law and order” (65). In Hieronimo’s case, he is unable to seek state-

sanctioned justice because the state itself is directly involved in the murder of his son.

Titus is unable to seek redress not only because he does not know who is behind the

plot to destroy his family, but because that person, Tamora, is also married to the king

and highly influential in state decision-making. Tamora is unable to seek proper

 8

justice for the ritual slaughter of her son because the killing presumably falls under

traditional ritual-slaughter: state-sanctioned and, at the time, appropriate.

The female revenger is a distinct category of the revenger because of the

typical tropes involved in constructing a feminized version of revenge. Liberty Star

Stanavage in her dissertation Domesticating Vengeance: The Female Revenger in

Early Modern English Drama, 1566 – 1700 argues that female revengers are more

capable of carrying out revenge than their male counterparts. Stanavage discusses the

typical outcome of male revengers, noting the proclivity for male revengers to

become insane or to feign madness and eventually destroy themselves in the process

of seeking vengeance. Titus himself at least appears to lose his sanity; revenger

Hamlet is famously wracked with guilt and indecision. Stanavage points out that

revenge overtakes [the revenger’s] reason by inflaming the passions. He is

driven mad by his inability to reconcile his desire for vengeance and social

identity he has always performed. Only by establishing a new identity, fully

focused on revenge, and rejecting his social connections can the revenger

perform effectively. The Senecan rhetoric of the danger of uncontrolled

passion is demonstrated by the indiscriminate behavior of the revenger, whose

revenge becomes inherently excessive. (71)

Stanavage finds a link between the excess of passion elicited by revenge and the early

modern belief in the leaky body of the female, who is never driven to excess but is

excessive by nature of her femininity. The concept of the leaky body refers to

menstrual blood, as “menstrual blood in early modern society was one of a series of
 9

signifiers that apparently ‘proved’ that women were naturally predisposed to ‘leak’.

...women did not have control over the workings of their own bodies” (Simkin 103).

Unable to contain their bodily humours, women were similarly unable to control their

emotions. That women are irrational and full of excess emotion that had to find an

outlet in their overall behavior is a direct consequence of the permeable boundaries of

the female body. In many revenge narratives, however, the leaky body and depiction

of femaleness as inherently close to insanity as its base operating mode can be

considered an advantage. Capable of handling the excess of passion that a revenge

plot entails, “the female revenger possesses a fundamentally different relationship

with revenge than the male revenger, one based in her unfixed Galenic body and its

increased vulnerability to the passions” (Stanavage 63). The female revenger thus has

an advantage in carrying out revenge as she is capable of focusing her energy and

identity on vengeance without despairing, without going mad, and perhaps without

the stipulation that she must be destroyed.

Revenge, rather than destroying the female revenger, gives her an appropriate

channel through which to focus her already excessive passions. Tamora is capable of

acting under threat and mayhem and is easily able to calm Saturninus after Titus

threatens the state. Even in the midst of complicated revenge plots—both on hers and

Titus’ parts—Tamora speaks to Saturninus soothingly: “Why should you fear? Is not

your city strong?/...King, be thy thoughts imperious like thy name” (4.4.77, 80).

Tamora is thus capable of working within intense passion and hatred—excess—

because of her leaky early modern body and her status as woman. The stereotype of
 10

women as changeable or fickle, quick to excessive emotion, and overly emotional is

the very facet of femininity that makes them more capable of revenge plots in the

classic sense. Stanavage says that Tamora’s “willingness to model different positions

and actions, her ability to shift from mother… to lover to wronged revenger, without

being trapped in any of these roles, allows her to pursue revenge in continually

shifting forms” (100). Stereotypes of the female body and its changeability reinforce

Tamora’s vengeful capabilities, although they are also the impetus for her destruction.

Tamora has every reason to crave revenge against Titus after the ritual

slaughter of her son, but she is a product of 1593. Whatever justification she has as

revenger is overshadowed by her status as Goth and woman, and therefore Other. Her

ability to assert subjectivity is undermined by Titus’ inherent ability to self-fashion in

relation to Tamora. Marked as barbarous Goth from the outset, Tamora has no chance

of dominance. No oversexualized, brutal, sex-traitor of a woman could thrive in an

early modern play. Tamora succeeds in murdering or raping and mutilating by proxy

Bassianus and Lavinia and assigning blame to two of Titus’ sons, but ultimately she

is destroyed. Chiron and Demetrius are slaughtered and Tamora unknowingly

cannibalizes them before she herself is murdered. There is justification for Tamora’s

vengeance, and she succeeds to a certain extent, but as an early modern female

revenger she is not able to dominate the narrative of the play.

Four-hundred years later a twenty-first century audience enjoys a similar

character who does champion over the object of her revenge. Gone Girl’s Amy is a

woman with the inherent capability to carry out meticulous revenge plots according to
 11

Stanavage. Amy obsessively makes checklists, double and triple checks them, creates

a detailed calendar for her revenge plot, spends over a year working out her revenge,

and ultimately retains if not entirely fortifies her identity. Stanavage believes that

women’s literary vengeance “[is] a different model of revenge, one specifically

gendered, in which revenge could be imagined to empower a woman where it

overwhelmed a man” (3-4). A few centuries after Tamora’s creation, she is vindicated

by representations of female vengeance in characters like Amy. Amy and Tamora

share a core as vengeful, powerful female characters, but the allowance of time,

shifting gender stereotypes, and extensive feminist theory have given rise to new

female characters and female revengers who do not face inherent destruction merely

for their use of gender for morally ambiguous or downright evil deeds.

Tamora was created in a period that experienced a growing understanding of

personhood which Stephen Greenblatt calls “self-fashioning:” a sense that individuals

have an active role in the perception of their character and do actively manipulate the

narrative that their life presents. As it was a fledgling concept in the early modern era,

self-fashioning or subjectivity was a practice of those with agency; elite, upper-class,

and male. Tamora is unable to self-fashion or exert subjectivity because she is both

woman and Goth, hopelessly othered by the dominant male forces in the play. That

the play is named for and centers on Titus as loathed and respected revenger signifies

his ability to self-fashion at the expense of Tamora’s subjectivity. The two compete

for narrative control as Tamora covertly destroys Titus’ family and Titus pushes back

in reaction. In categorizing the typical elements of self-fashioning in Renaissance

 12

literature, Greenblatt proposes that “self-fashioning is achieved in relation to

something perceived as alien, strange, or hostile. This threatening Other—heretic,

savage, witch, adulteress, traitor, Antichrist—must be discovered or invented in order

to be attacked and destroyed” (9). Self-fashioning is intrinsically linked to otherness

and therefore limited to dominant groups within binaries. If self-fashioning and the

subsequent subjectivity of its agent is established, it must come at the expense of

women, people of color, or similarly disadvantaged groups. Tamora and Aaron are

subsequently the perfect Others against whom Titus can reestablish his narrative as

dominant Roman war-hero after losing ground to Tamora and Aaron’s machinations.

As soon as women are afforded subjectivity of experience in literature or

social culture, Postmodern theories of literary and cultural analysis eschew the

subjective. Feminist theory and theories that rest on lived experiences—queer theory,

race theory—are discarded by postmodern rejection of the subjective. Thus women

are are now afforded subjectivity, but subjectivity has also been rejected as a

definitive or appropriate praxis to employ in establishing academically appropriate

sociological theories. That is, the postmodern rejection of subjective experience is

another mechanism employed to discount gender, queer, and race theories. Edit

Zsadányi refers to the postmodern proclivity for eschewing subjectivity, which is

inherently at odds with feminist criticism. As subjectivity relies heavily on the ability

to speak as a means of asserting that subjectivity, Zsadányi says that “to speak as a

woman or speak for women is inseparable from the issues and politics of identity...

just as the subject position comes to be occupied by women, postmodern theoretical

 13

systems reach the stage of questioning the concept of the subject itself” (19). In a

theory of subjectivity or self-fashioning, women’s agency came about only as a result

of their ability to assert their subjectivity over dominant masculine narratives. The

shift in subjective experiences between Titus Andronicus and Gone Girl is the

impetus for Amy’s success; she is written by a woman, and as a character she

successfully rewrites or re-fashions her identity. Unfortunately Amy is afforded

subjectivity in the midst of a rejection of subjectivity as a valid and authoritative

voice in theoretical communities.

Stanavage notes that although female revengers use revenge as a tool of

empowerment for a self already inclined to excess of passion, female revengers of the

early modern era actually exist as symbols of male anxiety about women. The

representation of female revengers tends to revolve around their existing as an

embodiment of male anxiety. Tamora confirms early modern patriarchy’s worst fears

about women: she uses her sexuality for material gain, she subverts motherhood as a

tool of control over men, and she acts morally evil. In The Deed's Creature: Masque,

Execution, and the Female Villain on the Renaissance Stage, Amy Perkins and

Maurice Charney find that “the relentless Renaissance preoccupation with the nature

of ‘woman’ is a result of a desire to control by representation the puzzling, alluring,

and therefore frightening Other” (11). By creating a character who represents early

modern fears over what women are capable of (and as Stanavage argues, they are

capable of plenty), Tamora reaffirms patriarchal need for order over the destructive,

excessive female Other. In Greenblatt’s terms, the self-fashioning patriarchal figures

 14

in Rome’s state institution rely on the failure of the othered Tamora to craft the

narrative of a patriarchy in control. Amy’s use of false rape accusations, her apparent

lack of moral conscience, her ability to deceive, and her own subversion of

motherhood and femininity represent the issues that patriarchal forces still attempt to

control. Amy, like Tamora, is still representative of male anxieties, but does not serve

as patriarchal affirmation as a result of this status.

The female revenger represents the extent to which women can upset

patriarchal order. In the early modern era, the female revenger is presented in order to

reaffirm male control, so a character like Tamora is not able to succeed and is

inevitably destroyed as a means of containing the female Other. Amy still represents

male anxieties. She, however, uses her capability for vengeance to empower herself

and overwhelm her male counterpart. Stanavage addresses this, noting that “the figure

of the female revenger is fundamentally not about women at all, but instead expresses

anxiety about the stability of masculine identity in the early modern world” (2). The

female revenger uses male anxieties as tools of counter-oppression, making Amy’s

representation as female revenger and fearful femininity more nuanced, but ultimately

successful. Amy does what Tamora is unable to do and appropriates tools of

patriarchal control as tools of patriarchal destruction. Masculinity is no longer a stable

construct.
 CHAPTER II

“A WILDERNESS OF TIGERS”; THE QUEEN OF GOTHS IN EARLY MODERN

ENGLAND

It is difficult but not impossible to make assumptions about early modern

perceptions of gender in literature, as the cultural milieu has changed drastically in

even the last few decades. It is made more difficult by the lack of first-hand accounts

of Elizabethan theater productions. Examining female cultural figures and the

attitudes towards them is one of the most accurate ways of examining characters like

Tamora, as the virgin/whore dichotomy present in early modern cultural attitudes

makes most female public figures either a foil or a complementary figure. The

reaction to Queen Elizabeth I as a public figurehead indicates cultural attitudes

towards women, as does the reaction towards French Queen Mother Catherine de

Medici. Similarly, social issues such as infanticide or witchcraft and hysteria were

tools of control used to demonize women’s actions that contradict heavily ingrained

gender roles. Tamora is thus illuminated from an early modern lens as she is a literary

foil to Queen Elizabeth I and complement of real and literary Catherine de Medici.

She also participates in a failed infanticide, a rising problem in the early modern era

as a result of lack of birth control and inability to afford children. Likewise, Tamora’s

behavior is inherently “hysteric,” a catchall medical term used to describe deviant

female behavior. Hysteria is intrinsically linked to witchcraft as well, as the term was

born out of a scientific revolution that sought to create scientific explanations for

15
 16

witchcraft. Witchcraft and hysteria accusations were sometimes applied to real

disorders that had inexplicable symptoms. More often, the medical terms were

applied to women who merely exhibited deviant behaviors. Public figures and

common women’s social issues of the early modern era illuminate Tamora as female

revenger and as representative of male anxiety—male anxiety which could only be

present if Tamora exhibits hysterical and therefore undesirable feminine traits.

Tamora cannot be separated from her status as mother. Tamora’s impassioned

plea for first-born son Alarbus’ life is the catalyst for every subsequent event in the

play. She positions herself as mother to Saturninus, too, as “If Saturnine advance the

Queen of Goths/She will a handmaid be to his desires,/A loving nurse, a mother to his

youth” (1.1.130-32). Parenthood is an important concept in Titus Andronicus beyond

Tamora; Titus is introduced as having lost sons, eventually kills his own son, and

feels deeply the dishonor that accompanies the rape of Lavinia. Aaron, too, is only

redeemed through his love for the child Tamora would just as soon see destroyed.

Queen Elizabeth I remained unmarried and therefore childless throughout her life,

citing a loyalty to her country. Her subjects may have had a wavering belief in her

capacity to rule in the first place; had she married and had children, her loyalties

would have been split in several different directions. Margarita Stocker says that

“should female rulers marry, their subordinate role as wives contradicted their

authoritative role as queens. Inevitably, their husbands would rule them, and hence

their nations” (73). Elizabeth’s ability to rule was predicated on her remaining
 17

unmarried, occupying a liminal space in which a woman could be her own person

without father or husband or male heir to take precedent.

Queen Elizabeth I is often seen as sexless, a necessary reputation to have in

order to maintain effective rule as a Queen standing alone. In her famous Tilbury

Speech, Elizabeth I remarks, “I know I have the body of a weak and feeble woman,

but I have the heart and stomach of a king…” (qtd. in Neale 309). Elizabeth had to

distance herself from her sex as femininity is often synonymous with uncontrollable

passion, indecision, and deceitfulness. Gail Kern Paster says that the early modern era

ascribed strange significance to the womb, suggesting that

the womb seems to function as a kind of quasi-independent force in the

female body, like an agent within. Such a characterization, while it elevates

the womb to a potentially threatening importance, offers the counteradvantage

of representing the womb as a political entity, a potentially disorderly force

needing pacification and colonization but capable of negotiating terms of

external control and regulation. (175)

Clearly, Elizabeth had to eschew all links between herself and an uncontrollable

womb with its own agency.

Concepts of the body politic also become difficult when a female ruler is in

place. Traditional belief held that “man was the head of womankind, woman merely

the body, [so] female sovereignty placed the body over the head. Consequently the

national body itself became female: weak, passive and impotent” (Stocker 73).

Elizabeth as woman was already a threat to the national body. Marrying, becoming
 18

pregnant, and giving birth thus had even more dangerous implications for the country.

Pregnancy and childbirth are precarious situations in which women become

changeable, their bodies expanding and becoming host to children; Paster says that

there is “a conventional construction of the female body as dangerously open” (181)

and subject to changeability. Furthermore, “even normal, survivable pregnancy was

conceptualized as a disease state. ‘The greatest disease that women can have,’ wrote

Guillemeau, ‘is that of the nine Moneths…” (qtd. in Paster 182). Such a drastic

change in Elizabeth’s body in pregnancy would be evidence of disease, an inconstant

mind, and a country in upheaval. Pregnancy would almost certainly destroy her

carefully constructed authority. It would come as no surprise to an English audience

that Tamora could not effectively rule because she is married and has children, not to

mention that as Queen to Saturninus’ King, she should not be allowed to make

authorial decisions in the first place. It could be argued that Tamora is able to

dissemble in speech and countenance because pregnancies have opened her up to

changeability.

Queen Elizabeth I would be a real-life foil to Tamora, a way for a woman to

rule effectively and transparently. Queen Elizabeth I tried to distance herself from her

sex and the implications of her femininity in order to rule without being undermined

by her gender, or a husband and children. Tamora would also remind English

audiences of how dangerous a female ruler could be, and would call to mind

Catherine de Medici. Christopher Marlowe’s The Massacre at Paris was first

performed around 1593, shortly after or around the time that Titus Andronicus was
 19

first performed between 1588-1593. Catherine de Medici is not central to Massacre,

but Jo Carney writes in her dissertation 'I'll Find a Day to Massacre Them All':

Tamora in Titus Andronicus and Catherine De Médici of the similarities between the

two characters. Catherine was an especially potent French Queen Mother, often

making herself a part of her sons’ rule. Carney quotes Job Throckmorton, who felt

that “the French queen’s female reproductive body… is especially threatening: not

only is she a beast herself but her ‘loins’ produce yet more monsters, a ‘litter’ and a

‘brood’ who perpetuate her evil designs” (420). Unlike the sexless Queen Elizabeth I,

Catherine is the most direct historical precedent for Tamora’s character. Both women

are bound to their children and are made monstrous by their ability to breed monsters.

Tamora is not only involved in her sons’ murder of Bassianus and rape and mutilation

of Lavinia, she encourages them by demanding that their mother-son relationships

rest on their actions; she says that “The worse to her, the better loved of me”

(2.3.167). Tamora is inseparable from the deeds of her children, as her children are

often the agents of her capability for evil. Tamora is contextualized by how she

performs motherhood as monstrous, like Catherine, and an early modern audience

may have understood her in like terms.

In understanding Tamora as mother, it is important to examine the rise of

infanticide in the Renaissance. Parenthood is a major theme in Titus Andronicus and

links Tamora with both Aaron and Titus, all three of whom face the prospect of losing

a child and proclaim an intense love and devotion to their children. Aaron is the only

exemplary parent, as both Tamora and Titus facilitate (or perpetrate) the deaths of at
 20

least one of their children. Tamora’s asking Aaron to dispose of their newborn son

would have been a particularly prescient image in the Elizabethan mind, as

infanticide became an overwhelming English problem among women who could not

afford more children or otherwise did not wish to expand their family. According to

Margaret L. King, infanticide “was just about the only licit means of family limitation

in an era when the poor faced the rigid limits of scarce resources and the wealthy

adhered to equally rigid laws of inheritance” (King 10). Poor women could not afford

children, and wealthy women were subject to primogeniture laws and therefore

expected to bear sons. Wealthier women were perhaps less inclined to have multiple

children as large estates could not provide for them when only first-born sons would

inherit the estate. Tamora, then, not only uses her sexuality for political and social

gain, she also engages in a practice that became increasingly dangerous and visible.

Indeed, infanticide was linked to the occult, as King says that “the rage against

infanticides recalls and is linked to the simultaneous rage against witches. Infanticide

was the major cause after witchcraft for the execution of early modern women, and

many prosecuted witches were charged with infanticide” (10). This cultural

phenomenon makes Tamora even more dangerous than simply her willingness to

murder and have sex—she is not only breaking every social code of womanhood, she

is also linked to the occult.

The link between infanticide and witchcraft is more clearly illustrated in

Shakespeare’s Macbeth. Lady Macbeth directly links infanticide with an invocation

of spirits:
 21

...Come, you spirits

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe, top-full

Of direst cruelty. (1.5.39-42)

Later, Lady Macbeth equates her bravery to her willingness to commit infanticide, as

she chides Macbeth’s cowardice by claiming she

[has] given suck, and know

How tender ‘tis to love the babe that milks me:

I would, while it was smiling in my face,

Have plucked my nipple from his boneless gums

And dashed the brains out… (1.7.54-58)

Lady Macbeth asks that spirits fortify her with cruelty, and her cruelty translates to

infanticide. Tamora and Lady Macbeth were created as the discourse surrounding

uncontrollable femininity shifted from demonological explanations to a medical

diagnosis called the Mother, later hysteria. Edward Jorden’s 1603 A Briefe Discourse

of a Disease called the Suffocation of the Mother “fixed a new category within

medical literature, one that offered unruly sexual desire and corrupted maternity as a

rational answer to—and extension of—traditional demonology” (Levin 25).

Witchcraft and hysteria became central diagnoses of disorderly women of the early

modern era, both issues assigned to any woman who displayed behaviors out of sync

with patriarchal expectations. Symptoms included fainting, odd behavior, and

aggressive sexual desire, but Joanna Levin finds that

 22

far from being a benign “ailing nurturer,” the early modern hysteric replayed

the contradictions of her satanic predecessors: she was both disorderly and

passive; she was a “disturbing threat to phallic power” and (largely) a

paternalistic construct; she was and was not a mother; she was deceptive yet

utterly somatized; and she both confounded patriarchal authority and provided

the occasion for its legitimation. (25)

Witchcraft and hysteria became terms to classify women’s behavior in order to

dismiss their health issues as well as to constrain women to their typical roles—

women’s fear of falling ill from demonic possession or pacts with the devil or

hysteria was a means of controlling women’s behavior. Tamora demands to be seen

as a mother both to her children and to her lovers, and her extramarital relationship to

Aaron is considered aggressive sexuality. As witchcraft is linked to infanticide and

hysteria is linked to witchcraft as well as the womb, Tamora’s motherhood and her

unruly behavior immediately call to mind descriptions of demonic and hysterical

early modern women. Already othered by her status as Goth and woman, Tamora

elicits fearful femininity through her relationship to the occult and to hysteria. Her

perversion of femininity and refusal to be controlled by patriarchal forces is indicative

of the witch or hysteric.

An early modern audience might have understood Tamora’s actions as

appropriating masculinity, which Lavinia confirms: although Tamora “bear’st a

woman’s face” (2.3.136), she has “no womanhood” and is a “beastly creature”

(2.3.182). Lavinia’s judgment as well as other attempts to liken Tamora to beasts—

 23

her sons are “bear-whelps” (4.1.95), and she is a “ravenous tiger” (5.3.194)—are

attempts to separate her from her femininity. Stanavage argues, however, that “it is

not despite their unstable female bodies but precisely because of them that the female

revengers in these plays can employ revenge as a rhetoric to assert their identities and

violently mutable emotions” (15). Stanavage finds that female revengers are the more

successful because they are women. Tamora may have been received as appropriating

masculinity and sexlessness because of her relation to the occult, but it is specifically

her womanhood and her ability to control her femininity that allows her success in

destroying the Andronici one-by-one. Tamora does enact early modern gender

performativity, but she exhibits excess femininity, as Stanavage notes that

critics such as Alison Findlay have noted the feminine and “effeminizing”

nature of revenge in classical texts that suggest that pursuing revenge

emasculates the revenger… if revenge is “effeminizing,” then it would make

women more female, thus ironically empowering them in enabling them to

avoid the fragmented identities of their male counterparts. (80-81)

Tamora’s actions are all inherent problems found in early modern women: Her

motherhood, her duplicity, her proposed infanticide, her overt sexuality.

Alternatively, witchcraft is considered sexless—Banquo jests that the Weird

Sisters in Macbeth “should be women,/And yet your beards forbid me to

interpret/That you are so” (1.3.45-47). If Tamora is linked to the occult, she might

exhibit some form of sexlessness. Alison Findlay sees Tamora’s use of rape towards

Lavinia as a tool of patriarchal control. If rape is “the gatekeeper for the gender
 24

hierarchy” (Howard and Rackin qtd. in Simkin 91), then Tamora is not excessively

feminine so much as she appropriates masculine tools in order to upset the gender

binary. True, rape is a tool of the oppressive male, but Tamora is a sum of all parts

rather than definitively understood by this one moment. Tamora’s hysteric

association, though diagnosed by patriarchy as a means of explaining deviant female

behavior, is still indicative of early modern femininity. Witchcraft and demonic

possession are inherently female problems; indeed the very passivity Tamora exhibits

in matters of revenge—only personally participating in an active position in Act 5

when she attempts to beguile Titus—indicates the passive role women were expected

to inhabit in early modern hierarchies. Exhibiting these behaviors, Tamora is not

expressing the opposite of femininity (masculinity); she instead fully embodies

cultural stereotypes of femininity as deviant and uncontrollable. Tamora is

excessively feminine rather than feminizing masculinity, adopting behaviors of the

deviant female in order to gain control.

From a proto-feminist view, as there were pockets of early modern women devoted to

elevating the status of women, that Tamora is more capable of enacting revenge than

classic male revengers makes sense because early modern proto-feminists were

operating under theories of hierarchical binaries. Entrenched binaric logic held “that

all relationships, including those between men and women, could only be

hierarchical… proto-feminists had to choose either to invert the ranking of the sexes

and to consider women as the superior sex or to argue for equality and mutuality”

(Harvey 39). Because systems of hierarchies prohibited equal binaries in any system,
 25

early modern proto-feminists tend to find women superior to men (47). Tamora is

fearsome precisely because she takes models of early modern femininity and molds

them into tools that appear masculine in their aggressiveness, but are inherently

feminine tactics based on reigning cultural attitudes towards witchcraft, infanticide,

and deviant femininity. By prefiguring herself as intrinsically linked to feminine

seduction and motherhood, Tamora is a construction of excess femininity that must

be destroyed in order to contain a woman who destroys gender ideals. Tamora is

allowed to succeed in her vengeful endeavors only so far before she is destroyed as a

means of affirming patriarchal control. There is no early modern reality where

Tamora is not dangerous and disruptive to the natural social order of male/female

dichotomy, and she is ultimately destroyed for daring to transcend her role as

feminine Other. Tamora’s success would probably hinge on her completely

dominating patriarchal figures like Titus and Saturninus and creating a matriarchy, as

a matriarchal upset is the only possible way of completely destroying a patriarchal

hierarchy within the cultural binary. In Gone Girl, Amy fulfills Tamora’s desire to

destroy the Andronici, stand-in members of patriarchal dominance, by destroying and

reforging her husband. Amy exerts matriarchal control over Nick and is able to

transcend deviant femininity through the various feminist movements that led to her

ability to exert subjectivity.

 CHAPTER III

“I’M IT, BABY”; AMY AS A PRODUCT OF MAINSTREAM FEMINISM

Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl is entirely a product of third wave, mainstream

feminist ideology and indicates the infighting and lack of theoretical base that defines

twenty-first century feminist politics. Amy defies common feminist ideals by

ridiculing and perpetuating stereotypes of women as well as adhering to what Nick

refers to as “stand by your man” (393) solutions. Critics suggest that Amy spends too

much energy and too much of herself on Nick, an unworthy partner,5 rather than on a

fruitful endeavor to maintain her marriage, which for Amy is the only successful

outcome of Nick’s adulterous liaison. These issues complicate how Amy is

contextualized in feminist history—how can feminists claim her if she eschews

standard feminist behavior? Part of understanding how Amy fits into the annals of

feminist anti-heroes is identifying her indicates third wave inconsistencies and as a

character that is only possible through the cultural paradigm shifts brought on by

feminist movements. Third wave feminists often struggle to justify women’s behavior

that is incongruous with loosely defined feminist ideals. Segmented factions of

feminists disagree over praxis. Someone like Amy who does not necessarily feel

kinship with every woman solely because they are women, who does not have

maternal or familial instincts, and who, of course, has sociopathic tendencies and a

5
See p. 74 for continued discussion of criticism on Gone Girl. This particular issue arises
from the “Woman Scorned” trope, referenced by critic Emma Teitel.

26
 27

tenuous grasp of morality is not an ideal woman for any version of feminism, save

perhaps power feminism.

Most third wave feminists tend to agree that DIY Feminism, or Do-It-

Yourself,6 is the most appropriate feminist lifestyle as it suggests that any woman’s

choices and lifestyle are compatible with feminism. Instead of behaving according to

strict doctrines or even guidelines, DIY Feminism theorizes that the best way to be

feminist is to be yourself; DIY Feminism typically purports an image of women that

is indefinable—an un-ideal. By campaigning for varied depictions of different types

of women in media, however, DIY Feminism demands a character like Amy. There is

a never-ending list of male villains in media that are simultaneously admired and

reviled, and DIY Feminism would suggest that similar film and television roles be

created for women. Russ decries female characters that are one-dimensional, that “do

not really exist at all—at their best they are depictions of the social roles women are

supposed to play and often do play, but they are the public roles and not the private

women; at their worst they are gorgeous, cloud-cuckooland fantasies about what

women want, or hate, or fear” (81). Amy represents what feminists purportedly want

in media representation, but she is not without problems. Gone Girl has, of course,

received rave reviews both for the novel and David Fincher’s 2014 film of the same

name, but there are feminist groups who find fault with Amy and disavow Gone Girl

as a triumph of female representation in media. In exploring third wave feminist

ideology and its various splits and tentative theoretical work, it is clear that Amy can

6
DIY Feminism appears to be the type of feminist praxis that has survived in the current
cultural milieu.
 28

only exist because of feminist movements; that is, Amy embodies third wave

feminism and the fledgling fourth wave in all its contradictions.

The most fruitful way of discussing third wave feminism is to examine it as a

fractured community. Several different kinds or brands of feminism arose out of the

1980s, and oftentimes different factions not only disagree with one another, but reject

their second wave predecessors and are in direct opposition with other factions. Susan

Archer Mann describes the issue:

Having come to feminism in this conservative political climate [80s], third

wavers have described themselves as members of a generation that “have no

utopias” and who live in the midst of “backlash” and the “media demonization

of ‘sisterhood.’” Given this absence of “utopias” it is, perhaps, not surprising

that there are few statements of the collective aims or goals of the third

wave… the absence of a collective voice and a more individualistic approach

to feminism appears to be the modus operandi of most third wavers… (Mann

260)

Without a collective aim, third wave feminism began to branch off into dissenting

factions in the 1980s. Some groups stressed sexual liberation while others decried

patriarchal forms of sex, and argued over “pornography, sexwork, censorship,

sadomasochism, and other erotic practices in terms of what constituted nonpatriarchal

forms of sex or whether there should even be such a notion” (Mann 98). As scholars

attempt to define a newly emerging fourth wave of feminism, feminist theorists still

argue over the remnants of the 80s sex wars. The character of Amy was created in a
 29

pivotal moment for feminism and exemplifies the contradictions with which the

movement continues to struggle.

Feminist scholars cannot agree on the best way to discuss sex and seemingly

aberrant sexual practices in relation to women. There are those who differentiate

between sexual practices of men and women, creating a new binary with the intent of

demonizing male sexual practices. Robin Morgan says that “the emphasis on genital

sexuality, objectification, promiscuity, emotional non-involvement, and, of course,

invulnerability was the male style, and that we, as women, placed greater trust in

love, sensuality, humor, tenderness, commitment” (qtd. in Mann 100). Similarly,

theorists found this differentiation important in defining violent sexual practices, as

“second wave radical feminists who undertook to delineate what types of sex were

violent and/or patriarchal were motivated by their desire to end unequal power

relations and violence against women” (99). On the other hand, “the pro-sex side of

this debate rejected any form of censorship or restrictions on sexual practices in the

interests of more openness and freedom” (98). The sex wars of the second wave of

feminism sought to define a feminine sexuality while keeping that sexuality safe from

male violence. Unfortunately, a feminine sexuality is inherently defined by male

violence—the vast numbers of female sexual assault survivors is reason enough to

raise young women to be fearful rather than expressive. This attitude is appropriate,

to be sure, as long as male-dominated rape culture exists, but is incredibly limiting. It

propagates the virgin/whore dichotomy, still present today in the way rape culture is

addressed in criminal court cases of rapists and the court of public opinion.
 30

The unnamed victim of a Stanford student’s rape in 2015 wrote an infamous

open letter to her abuser and the court, where she described the defense as bringing

undue attention to her behavior, asking her: “Did you drink in college? You said you

were a party animal? How many times did you black out? Are you serious with your

boyfriend? Are you sexually active with him? Would you ever cheat?” (qtd. in

Bever). The questions were meant to lay blame on her behavior rather than the

perpetrator of the assault. The man’s 6-month sentence was a shock and outrage to

many within feminist communities as well as to the general population, signifying a

shift in popular opinion, but one that has yet to reach legal courts. Emma Watson’s

2017 semi-nude Vanity Fair photoshoot caused an outrage as well, as women and

men alike find her incapable of speaking for the United Nations as an advocate for

feminism if she dares to pose topless in a magazine. Watson was prompted to defend

the photos, arguing that “feminism is not a stick with which to beat other women

with. It’s about freedom, it’s about liberation, it’s about equality. I really don’t know

what my tits have to do with it. It’s very confusing” (qtd. in Reuters 2017).7 The

controversy over Watson’s persona as spokesperson for feminism and her ability to

participate in typical fashion shoots indicates the divisive stance feminism takes on

sexual politics. While feminism decries sexual assault court cases in which the

defense mentions the victim’s sexuality or sexual appeal, there is hypocrisy in their

approach to feminist role models.

7
It is necessary to incorporate popular culture controversies to examine rape culture in 2017.
As fourth wave feminism is newly emerging, it has not yet received much academic attention.
Brock Turner’s rape trial and Emma Watson’s dual roles as feminist and film actor accurately
express the current cultural attitude towards rape and sexuality.
 31

Third wave feminism still disagrees as to the best way to represent oneself as

a woman—whether a woman can expect to be believed if she is sexually assaulted

depends on whether the woman takes the necessary precautions in all areas of her life

not to be raped—victim-blaming rather than assigning blame to the perpetrator. All

this is to say that “victim feminism” (Mann 98), as the stress on violent male

sexuality is often called, is justified if not the best way to approach violence against

women. Part of the issue people have with Amy’s sexual behavior in Gone Girl, then,

stems from these issues. If sex-theorists of the past see male sexuality as aggressive,

dominating, and violent, Amy is uses patriarchal forms of sex to serve her own

interests. Amy poses a challenge to feminist groups seeking to define women as softer

in their sexual practices. Is it appropriate for her to be a sexual aggressor? Amy uses

sex as a means of inhabiting a new identity, but also as a weapon, as seen in the

murder of Desi and her past false rape accusation against former boyfriend Tommy.

There are countless articles, opinion pieces, and social media comments attempting to

decode, translate, figure out, or apologize for how rape culture is used and reinforced

in Gone Girl.8 It is important to address that people are uncomfortable with Amy in

part because she occupies a space that is often attributed to men—she is the sexual

aggressor, she is a femme fatale who uses sex to get what she wants. She literally

murders a man in flagrante delicto, a scene made infinitely memorable by David

Fincher’s 2014 film accompaniment. Amy calmly washes the blood off of her body in

the aftermath of the murder, betraying nary an emotion. Nor does she express

8
See p. 62, 71.
 32

emotion when she violently penetrates herself with a wine bottle to simulate injuries

that correspond to rape. Her aggressive sexuality manifests in disturbing ways and is

irreconcilable with current contradictory models of femininity. The different ways

this behavior is examined in Amy is entirely a product of and indicates the

contradiction among feminist theorists in both the second and third waves. Without a

definitive way of classifying female sexuality—whether there should be no

restrictions on sexual practice or whether there should be restrictions based on the

frequency with which women are assaulted or subjected to violent forms of sexual

behavior—it is difficult to figure Amy out. It appears that critics and laymen alike

either love her or hate her instead of finding some sort of middle ground, an area

where many use the term “problematic fave” (User “Merger” 2015) in order to

describe favorite characters or people while acknowledging their faults.

Using false rape accusations while inhabiting the role of sexual aggressor

seems to be the crux of arguments against Amy as worthy of feminist revenger status.

Part of the effort to dismantle rape culture is to expose as injurious falsehood the

widely held belief that many or most rape accusations are false, that women will

change their minds about a consensual sexual partner and later accuse him of rape, or

that women use rape accusations specifically as a tool of revenge against men.

Evidence shows that roughly 2-8% of all sexual assault allegations that are reported

are deemed false (Lisak 1318). Amy’s false accusations are then exceedingly

problematic because she engages in consensual sex only to afterwards call it rape as a

tool of revenge. She certainly helps to reaffirm this common belief, one that
 33

undermines the effort to end rape culture.9 It is a serious accusation and one that

should not be taken lightly or excused. Alternatively, it is important to ask what tools

female villains or revengers can use. Amy can be understood as a woman operating

within the bounds of patriarchy and thus capitulating to patriarchal fears of women, or

as someone who, like anyone in Western culture, is unable to act outside the world of

patriarchy because that is the world she lives in. What better way of exacting revenge

than by appropriating sexual violence as a means of destroying those who wrong her?

Third wave power feminism advocates appropriating tools of oppression used against

women into tools that empower women:

Power feminists within the third wave explicitly support wielding the weapons

previously used against women—especially their sexual power—to enhance

women’s roles as active, powerful subjects. Take, for example, Elizabeth

Wurtzel, who argues… “these days putting out one’s pretty power, one’s

pussy power, one’s sexual energy for popular consumption no longer makes

you a bimbo. It makes you smart.” (Mann 265)

It is difficult to say whether Amy appropriates rape, a violent act typically perpetrated

on women, in order to resist oppressive forces, or whether her use of false rape

accusations is uncalled for, harmful toward innocent people, and detrimental to fourth

wave feminism’s emphasis on deconstructing rape culture. Problematic, sure, but as

we have seen with Tamora, it seems that rape and sexual assault are a common tool

9
Rape culture refers to the pervasive culture that women experience rape or sexual assault in
all aspects of their lives; from cat-calling on the street, undue attention to sexual appeal, to
literal rape. Furthermore, the onus of rape culture is often attributed to women’s behavior.
 34

for female revengers because they are unable to create tools outside of patriarchal

tools of oppression. Tommy and Desi are technically innocent in their relationships to

Amy, but Amy’s subjective experience is that she is slighted by Tommy and held

hostage by Desi. Her personhood is at stake in these relationships much like Tamora’s

identity when she is Titus’ prisoner. In feminizing revenge, real or feigned sexual

assault is a tool reappropriated against patriarchal forces rather than a tool propagated

by patriarchy.

There are several passages in Gone Girl that are definitively feminist

positions, social issues that fall under feminism and that Amy seems to understand as

feminist endeavors. One of the more famous passages from both the film and novel is

the Cool Girl speech. In the text, Amy spends several pages discussing the illusion of

the Cool Girl, a version of the stock film character called the “Manic Pixie Dream

Girl.” The term was coined by Nathan Rabin as “that bubbly, shallow cinematic

creature that exists solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to

teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and

adventures” (2007). In Flynn’s text, Amy puts the impetus on Nick for assuming that

she would always play this part, and she

waited patiently—years—for the pendulum to swing the other way, for men to

start reading Jane Austen, learn how to knit, pretend to love cosmos, organize

scrapbook parties, and make out with each other while we leer. And then we’d

say, Yeah, he’s a Cool Guy. But it never happened. Instead, women across the

nation colluded in our degradation! Pretty soon Cool Girl became the standard
 35

girl. Men believed she existed—she wasn’t just a dreamgirl one in a million.

Every girl was supposed to be this girl, and if you weren’t, then there was

something wrong with you. (233)

In David Fincher’s 2014 film of the same title, Amy is shown driving away from

Carthage and from her illusory marriage. Amy eats a burger, throws things out of the

window, seeming to transform on screen into a woman with zero cares other than

executing her master plan and enjoying herself. The film uses text from the novel to

make the Cool Girl speech more succinct, more film-appropriate:

Men always use that as the defining compliment, right? She’s a Cool Girl.

Being Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores

football, poker and dirty jokes, who plays videogames and chugs beer—loves

threesomes and anal sex and jams chilidogs into my mouth like I’m hosting

the world's biggest culinary gang-bang—while remaining a size 2, because

cool girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool girls never get angry

at their men, they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner. Go ahead! Shit on

me, I don't mind, I'm the Cool Girl. (Fincher 2014)

Amy’s concern for what women represent to men is informed by media

representations of women as singularly created for male-fantasy consumption. Laura

Mulvey famously addresses media representation of femininity, arguing that

women then stands in patriarchal culture as a signifier for the male other,

bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his fantasies and
 36

obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image

of woman still tied to her place as bearer, not maker, of meaning. (433)

Women are represented as agents for male consumption because media is still

dominated by male directors and writers. By deconstructing a typical character trope

as a shallow way of representing an ideal woman, Amy overwrites dominant male

subjectivity.

By exposing and deconstructing the Cool Girl, Amy is then able to assert

female subjectivity. Amy attempts to destroy the representation of woman as

signifier, speaking for herself and identifying the proclivity for men to assign

personality and meaning to a woman without understanding female subjectivity—

assuming that their interiority is subject to change or devoid of meaning without man

as signifier. The moments where Amy deconstructs this fantasy are the more

definitively feminist moments in the novel and film. One of the more distinct goals or

concerns for third and fledgling fourth wave feminism is media representation,

especially where violence against women is concerned. Media images tend to shape

social understanding of everything from gender, sexuality, to race. Amy’s concern

with the performance of the Cool Girl and how that affects real women is a salient

feminist issue. Media images of women both indicate and reinscribe gender roles—

they reflect current social attitudes, but they also legitimize those attitudes when

characters or narratives are not created thoughtfully.

Amy addresses and attempts to deconstruct typical media representations of

women, using male anxiety to subvert patriarchal authority and exert her subjectivity.
 37

In self-fashioning in such an extreme way—faking her own murder, pinning it on her

husband, only to murder her old high school boyfriend and return to Nick—Amy calls

attention to the extreme lengths women must go in order to earn some measure of

control over dominant patriarchal forces. Tamora never stood a chance in the face of

Titus’ male authority. It has taken 400 years for Amy to expand and champion the

seeds of female revenge in Tamora. The narrative structures of Titus Andronicus and

Gone Girl are linked by several elements that illuminate how Amy was able to take

Titus Andronicus and turn it into a twenty-first century success narrative for feminist

advancement.
 CHAPTER IV

“BE WON AT LAST”; TAMORA’S LEGACY IN AMY

Titus Andronicus was written by a male author over 400 years ago when

constructions of gender, sexuality, class, subjectivity, and society were based on

religion and strict hierarchies. Any conception of womanhood in William

Shakespeare’s time is almost inaccessible in its entirety for a twenty-first century

critic. Examining how women (and men) are portrayed in literature and theater

provides cultural context as popular literature tends to reflect the current social

attitudes. Early modern women were the inferior of the two available genders and

were treated as such through Biblical precedent as well as the necessary Other in

dominant male self-fashioning. There are still echoes of acceptable societal behavior

born out of religious belief in the twenty-first century, but Western cultures typically

do not see the same level of female subjugation based entirely on religious belief.

Understanding where Amy comes from, how she was created, how she was able to be

created, and how she operates under patriarchal constraints stems from the

representational seeds of early modern patriarchal hierarchical understanding. In turn,

early modern constructions of gender as they relate to Tamora and Amy are necessary

for understanding the complicated conception of gender in the female revenger in

Titus Andronicus and Gone Girl.

Titus is typically mined as precedent for other Shakespeare works as it is his

earliest attempt at the tragic form. Titus is obsessed with honor and tradition to the

38
 39

point of hubris; older, war-wizened, and proud of but destructive toward his family,

he is precedent for King Lear. Aaron the Moor’s famous line in Act 4 Scene 2—“Is

black so base a hue?” (4.2.71)—reveals an interiority that will serve Shakespeare in

his conception of race in Othello. Interestingly, Aaron is also precedent for Iago, as

his atheistic motivations for villainy are never explained satisfactorily beyond his

claiming, “I curse the day… /Wherein I did not some notorious ill” (5.1.125, 127).

Tamora is often relegated to a one-dimensional prototype for that famous

Shakespearean Female Villain, Lady Macbeth. Lady Macbeth does not seek revenge

as Tamora does, although Lady Macbeth, like Tamora, underwhelmingly disappears

by Act 5. What makes these characters so rich in value is that they rely on character

tropes that Shakespeare would continue to use throughout his oeuvre. Titus

Andronicus also relies on narrative structure that Shakespeare would continue to use.

There are revenge and hamartia, two of the basic elements of revenger tragedies long

before Shakespeare employed them, as well as the five-act tragic structure. Titus

Andronicus and King Lear feature titular character missteps in Act 1 and catastrophe

by Act 5. There is an intense loyalty to family seen in both Tamora, Aaron, and Titus

(though Tamora and Titus’ family loyalty is somewhat questionable), which is used

in King Lear. The unsettling and deeply searching speeches of Aaron are the

beginning of Hamlet’s lauded interiority. As the play is important in setting precedent

for Shakespeare’s work, it is also important in setting a precedent for the female

revenger trope in Gone Girl.

 40

Gone Girl shares other similarities with Titus Andronicus, but they are more

closely linked through the female revenger. Nick Dunne is more loyal to Margot, his

blood-sister, than to his wife, and ultimately stays with the murderous and calculating

Amy out of loyalty to his own son. Nick and Margot are twins, even, which

Shakespeare would have appreciated.10 There is revenge, obviously, as Amy’s actions

hinge on her need for vengeance on her adulterous husband. Amy is the female

revenger of the twenty-first century, manipulating the media and using her immense

intellect and resources to best an entire country as well as her husband. Titus

Andronicus and Gone Girl may be separated by four centuries, but much as Titus is

mined for precedent in Shakespeare’s own work, it is also partly responsible for a

character trope that gave rise to Amy. Both narrative points and character elements

are similar between the two works, but Shakespeare, as a product of his time, had to

make do with limited early modern constructions of gender. Tamora is not able to

gloat over her machinations, nor is she able to take credit for them or to even outlive

the structure of the play. The differences in how Flynn approaches Amy’s character

development could not be conceptualized without feminist movements that lead to

Amy’s ability to operate as revenger and get away with it.

Tamora passionately begs Titus to forgo tradition and spare her first-born son

after leading the Goth army into war with the Romans. Having failed, she takes Titus’

actions as a personal slight against her ability to plea for compassion, her identity as a

mother, and her humanity. Tamora has cause to pursue revenge against Titus, which

10
The Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night, and Shakespeare’s own twin children, Judith and
Hamnet.
 41

is further exacerbated by her quick ascension to Queen consort to Roman ruler

Saturninus. Titus’ devolution begins before Tamora ever dreams of gaining power

through Saturninus. Carolyn Asp observes the “excessive rigidity of Titus’s

adherence to ancient family customs, i.e., human sacrifice to the dead. Any religious

ritual which demands the brutal human sacrifice of Alarbus is bound to be perceived

as mindless adherence to an outmoded code” (335). It is Titus’ own strict adherence

to outdated tradition that is his downfall rather than Tamora’s behavior. He begins to

unravel for the very act of having defied Tamora’s pleas to forgo a rigid and

unnecessary tradition. Furthermore, he agrees to allow Saturninus to marry his only

daughter, Lavinia, knowing that she is contracted to Saturninus’ brother, Bassianus.

Titus’ sons defy him in order to uphold the relationship between Lavinia and

Bassianus, and Titus kills one of his own sons in the ensuing scuffle. All this leads to

Saturninus humiliating Titus by naming Tamora, slave of Titus given as gift to

Saturninus, as his betrothed. The family that Titus seeks to honor and defend

throughout the play is secondary to his loyalty to outdated Roman custom. Had Titus

not rigidly defended tradition, the events of the first act might not have transpired,

and Tamora might not have been Saturninus’ choice of Queen—although there would

be no play without Titus’ hamartia, and it is Tamora who sets the wheel in motion for

the rest of the play’s action. Tamora and Titus are bound by his refusal to allow

Tamora personhood. In order to transcend the moment when they set themselves at

odds with one another, they both embark on a journey of self-fashioning—centering

themselves based on the other’s alien-ness. Titus does not identify Tamora as worthy
 42

of compassion or reprieve in the face of tradition and so finds himself at the mercy of

her vengeance. Titus’ ceremoniously disemboweling her first-born is a war tradition

beyond Titus’ personal interests and anachronistic even at the opening of the play.

Titus justifies the impetus if not the mechanisms of Tamora’s revenge.

Interestingly, the justification for revenge in Tamora and Amy is one of the

only elements of both texts that suggests a step backward in terms of feminist

representation. Both are intrinsically bound to male counterparts, but Tamora’s need

for revenge stems from the murder of her son, while Amy’s vengeance is directed at

an adulterous husband. Nick Dunne expects perfection of Amy in an indirect and

perhaps unconscious way—he is slovenly and unappreciative, diminishes her

feelings, and has an affair with a younger woman. The construction of narrative in

Gone Girl is such that the reader is beholden to the whims of the narrators, who are

alternatively Nick Dunne and Amy Dunne. Nick presents a vision of himself that is

less than honest. Nick perceives their marriage in a completely different way from

how Amy perceives it:

Over just a few years, the old Amy, the girl of the big laugh and the easy

ways, literally shed herself, a pile of skin and soul on the floor, and out

stepped this new, brittle, bitter Amy… She’d sigh and turn to her secret

mental notebook on which she tallied all my deficiencies, forever noting

disappointments, frailties, shortcomings. (49)

We are not privy to Amy’s version of events until just before midway through the

novel, when she explains that

 43

if you can’t take care of me while I’m alive, you have made me dead anyway.

Just like Nick, who destroyed and rejected the real me a piece at a time… He

took away chunks of me with blasé swipes: my independence, my pride, my

esteem. I gave, and he took and took. ...He killed my soul, which should be a

crime. Actually, it is a crime. According to me, at least. (238)

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle, in which case Amy’s perception of

their relationship still justifies her actions for her, a crucial distinction. Amy’s

subjectivity is now, in the twenty-first century, able to contend with Nick’s

subjectivity. Amy and Nick describe each other in similar terms, Nick feeling that

Amy mentally lists his shortcomings, and Amy feeling that Nick denies her

personhood. When she describes Nick’s actions as a literal crime against her—

“according to me” (238)—she begins to assert her own subjectivity as a means of

justifying her revenge. It is not a proportional reaction to frame your husband for your

own murder because of his adultery and his inability to accept you as a person, but

Amy feels similarly to how Tamora must have felt. Having bared her soul to Titus in

an impassioned speech for Alarbus’ life and for mercy on her as a person and mother,

Titus rejects Tamora and denies her selfhood. That rejection of identity is crucial.

Nick is perhaps justified in rejecting Amy’s sociopathic personality, but Amy,

too, feels justified in her actions. Her subjective experience of their relationship is the

narrative that ultimately prevails. Nick rejects Amy’s identity when he discovers that

she is not the Cool Girl he fell in love with. Nick’s acceptance of Amy does not

extend beyond their courtship, after which Nick begins to understand and reject the
 44

complicated nature of another human being’s personality. Amy recognizes that

“framing your husband for murder is beyond the pale of what an average woman

might do” (235), but righteously if not misguidedly believes that

Nick must be taught a lesson. He’s never been taught a lesson! He glides

through life with that charming-Nicky grin, his beloved-child entitlement, his

fibs and shirkings, his short-comings and selfishness, and no one calls him out

on anything. I think this experience will make him a better person. Or at least

a sorrier one. (235)

Nick morally wrongs Amy by having an extramarital relationship, but Amy points to

Nick’s general behavior as further justification for her actions. The adultery is just the

physical manifestation of the way Nick has treated Amy throughout their relationship.

As with Tamora, one may not agree with Amy’s vengeance, but there is plenty of

justification for her perception of events as soul-killing, meriting extreme action on

her part.

The first 219 pages of Gone Girl are written from Nick’s point-of-view,

interspersed with Amy’s falsified diary entries from the previous five years. The diary

entries are written by Amy, but are a fabrication of events that ultimately leads

readers of the fake diary to suspect Nick’s involvement in her disappearance and

probable death. The second half of the novel is written from the Real Amy’s point-of-

view, replete with scathing observations on the plight of women in marriage and a

serious remove from feeling and empathy. All three narrators—Nick, Diary Amy, and

Amy, are unreliable, and any claim to definitive understanding of the events that
 45

transpire in the novel is tenuous at best as a result. The power of Amy’s subjectivity

is such that, flawed perception and all, her narrative prevails. Amy is thus lauded for

her rhetorical abilities—the diary she produces to mislead readers is an exercise in

patience as she straddles a fine line between preposterous and probable. Amy

describes her intention by breaking the postmodern fourth wall within the novel, an

homage to the early modern soliloquy:

I hope you liked Diary Amy. She was meant to be likable. Meant for someone

like you to like her… I thought the entries turned out nicely, and it wasn’t

simple. I had to maintain an affable if somewhat naïve persona, a woman who

loved her husband and could see some of his flaws (otherwise she’d be too

much of a sap) but was sincerely devoted to him—all the while leading the

reader (in this case, the cops, I am so eager for them to find it) toward the

conclusion that Nick was indeed planning to kill me. (237)

Both Nick and Amy are New York writers, writers for magazines in various

capacities, and the loss of their jobs during a recession (following the actual 2008

U.S. financial crisis) is an important point made in the novel. Amy’s parents, too,

wrote a children’s book series based on Amy’s life. In the series, “Amazing Amy,” as

the character was called, never failed at anything the Real Amy might have. Amy

credits her parents’ cashing in on her life rights to write children’s books based on her

as part of why she feels the need to fabricate a persona, to craft her life as if it is a

novel itself: ”once again they are squatting on my psyche, earning money for

themselves” (399). Rhetorical ability, the ability to narrate a particular instance and
 46

its context, in this case Amy’s disappearance, is an important facet of Gone Girl and

an essential aspect of self-fashioning. Stephen Greenblatt includes rhetoric or

language in his list of essential components of self-fashioning, as “self-fashioning is

always, though not exclusively, in language” (9). Rhetorical ability is essential in

creating selfhood, and it is essential in the characterization of both Amy and Tamora.

Tamora’s introduction is all rhetoric, an attempt to beg mercy of Titus in order

to save her son. Tamora’s character relies on her ability to persuade others to carry

out the action of her revenge. After her failed attempt at swaying Titus against

tradition, she continues to exercise her rhetorical prowess on Saturninus. Tamora is

able to quench Saturninus’ rage against Bassianus, Lavinia, and the Andronici after

Bassianus has taken Lavinia from him, and she leads him in action against the

Andronici. Tamora deftly persuades Saturninus to relent, asking him “sweet emperor,

we must all be friends./The tribune and his nephews kneel for grace;/I will not be

denied; sweet heart, look back (1.1.479-81). Tamora’s success hinges on her control

over Saturninus, which will further her agenda. She is also able to craft alternative

narratives to objective truth. When Lavinia and Bassianus happen upon Tamora and

Aaron in Act 2, Lavinia and Bassianus taunt Tamora for her adulterous relationship to

Aaron and threaten to tell Saturninus. Chiron and Demetrius enter the scene in the

middle of this encounter, and Tamora claims that Bassianus and Lavinia threaten her

life in one of Tamora’s best speeches:

These two have 'ticed me hither to this place:

A barren detested vale, you see it is;

 47

...

They told me here at dead time of the night

A thousand fiends, a thousand hissing snakes,

Ten thousand swelling toads, as many urchins,

Would make such fearful and confusèd cries

As any mortal body hearing it

Should straight fall mad, or else die suddenly.

No sooner had they told this hellish tale

But straight they told me they would bind me here

...

And leave me to this miserable death.

And then they called me foul adulteress,

Lascivious Goth, and all the bitterest terms

That ever ear did hear to such effect.

...

Revenge it, as you love your mother's life,

Or be ye not henceforth called my children. (2.2.92-115)

She references demonic creatures as an attempt to link Bassianus and Lavinia with

the occult, and leads Chiron and Demetrius to believe that she herself has been lead to

a secret place for evil deeds. Tamora also accuses Lavinia and Bassianus of accusing

her of adultery. Their fictional actions towards her are a means of heightening Chiron

and Demetrius’ anger and sense of protection. Tamora’s speech indicates her great
 48

command of language and persuasion, placing her in the realm of Shakespeare’s most

rhetorically gifted characters. Tamora only fails as a means of containing the female

Other. When crafting a tale intended to beguile the seeming mad Titus, Tamora’s

story of Revenge, Murder, and Rapine as spectral agents intent on supporting Titus is

unconvincing. First she assumes that Titus is mad. Whether he is or not, Tamora’s

story creation is not powerful enough to convince Titus of its probability. Tamora’s

conjuring of personified Revenge, Murder, and Rapine is presumptuous. Her hubris

and lapse in rhetorical ability spells out the end of her covert reign of Andronici

terror. Tamora forgoes her typical rhetorical strength for a literal disguise and fails.

By the time Amy returns to Nick towards the end of the novel, only Nick,

Margot, and police officer Rhonda are unconvinced by her stories: the hastily

cleaned-up blood, the burned diary, the credit card debt, Desi’s central role. Having

murdered Desi Collings, Amy’s innocence hinges on her ability to explain her

disappearance and the subsequent events without error, simultaneously producing

physical evidence to corroborate. Nick, Margot, and Rhonda never do believe her, but

the rest of the police department of Carthage and national media outlets hardly

question her story. Desi’s mother attempts to produce evidence of her son’s

innocence to no avail. Amy literally writes the best-selling book on what happened to

her after the fact. Part of Amy’s success is that a shift towards feminine subjectivity

and self-fashioning is available through several different channels—social media, a

diary, physical evidence, speech—all of which Amy manipulates in order to

contribute to a sound argument in favor of her subjective reality as objective truth.

 49

Tamora’s final display of rhetoric is an utter failure and is frankly odd and out of

place even in the context of the play. Her ability to persuade others is flawed and

limited to her speech as she is unable to manipulate the narrative that her visage

presents. Amy’s ability to persuade others, however, is ingenious.

The conventions of a revenge tragedy are such that Tamora and Aaron are

never meant to succeed in their endeavors, but part of Tamora’s failure is rectification

for what Carolyn Asp describes as a break in a Symbolic Order. Tamora loses force

and ability to control others through rhetoric because “she rules in the gap of a

strange fracture in this Order…. it cannot tolerate her and must eventually cast her

out. As Cynthia Marshall states: ‘women are violently punished whether they are

dependent or powerful’” (208). Characters like Amy are allowed to hold onto what

makes them a terrifying Other because of an increase in female agency and

subjectivity after several feminist movements. Unlike Shakespeare, Flynn does not

feel pressure to soften Amy as the novel moves forward in order to make her

character more palatable. If anything, Amy becomes more and more frightening as

each chapter passes. Amy and Tamora’s abilities to craft stories and persuade others

to trust in them, to believe in them, to act for them, are an important part of their

character development that is fully realized in Amy. Even Lady Macbeth must be

subsumed by guilt, a more powerful force than her desire for power. Katharina in The

Taming of the Shrew could never have done anything but come when called. Such is

the fate of early modern female characters on the stage.

 50

Titus Andronicus and Gone Girl are more strongly linked through character

elements than through form, literary movement, or genre. The texts share almost

nothing in common in this respect, but there is a link between them in terms of

publicity. Titus Andronicus is inherently public because it is a play, and was probably

created for performance rather than publication. Tamora’s revenge happens on stage

accordingly, publicizing her private griefs and involving an audience in her

machinations. When she or Aaron soliloquize their inner thoughts and ruminate over

future plans, the audience becomes complicit in the violence enacted on the

Andronici. Elizabethan theaters were constructed to be large enough for thousands of

spectators, but arranged in such a way that lent themselves to intimacy. Theater blurs

the lines between reality and stage, life and art. The very first scene of the play invites

the audience into the action, as Saturninus address “Noble patricians, patrons of my

right/...countrymen…” (1.1.1, 3) in his pleas for the emperorship. Titus Andronicus

does not go out of its way to incorporate publicity, but the very nature of theater is

public, and the first lines address that public audience.

Gone Girl is not theater, but Amy consciously and carefully constructs her life

as a production. She considers how a media audience will react to elements of the

story she crafts surrounding her disappearance, noting that the media will make much

of Nick’s disaffected attitude, her pregnancy, and the fabricated details in her diary.

Flynn documents the typical media outrage over missing women so carefully that it is

overtly familiar. The national media response to the disappearance of pregnant

California resident Laci Peterson in 2002 parallels the fictional media response to
 51

Amy’s disappearance.11 Laci’s husband, Scott, was eviscerated by the media for his

lack of passionate response. News outlets picked up on details such as his asking for

burgers during a police questioning procedure, a fishing trip he took on the day of

Laci’s disappearance, which happened to be Christmas Eve, and his lack of visible

emotion. Scott was eventually convicted of Laci’s murder, but some believe that he

was not given a fair trial because of the media attention (Wakeman 2017). The dawn

of mass media and its effects on criminal cases opened a dialogue during the highly

publicized trial of O. J. Simpson and featured widely in public opinion in the outcome

of Scott Peterson’s trial. Juror panels are no longer a fair system of judgment as

media affects the public mindset before perpetrators are even brought to trial.

The novel reflects the twenty-first century reality that media has become a

means of manipulation, requiring players to act their roles instead of report. Nick

Dunne has to practice answering interview questions about Amy’s disappearance

because his organic responses lack the kind of emotion that an audience would

expect, much like Scott Peterson’s attitude after Laci Peterson’s disappearance.

Nick’s lawyer, Tanner Bolt, reminds Nick that “the media has turned on you, the

public has turned on you” (209) and that they have “got to fix [his] image, because

should this go to trial, it will influence your juror pool. Change of venue doesn’t

mean anything anymore—twenty-four-hour cable, Internet, the whole world is your

11
Laci Peterson’s story is eerily similar to Amy Dunne’s narrative concoction. Laci was near
her due-date at the time of her disappearance; Scott’s subsequent demeanor, and his infidelity
and plans to leave Laci for a long-time girlfriend are evident in Gone Girl. Amy fabricates a
pregnancy, and Nick’s earlier narratives center around his inability to act according to what
others expected of him as well as his efforts to hide an extramarital relationship with another
woman. The world of Gone Girl is one in which Amy clearly did her homework on
disappeared and murdered women.
 52

venue” (210). Flynn’s novel acknowledges the 24-hour news cycle and its treatment

of missing women, as well as the nuances of identity-construction on social media

outlets. The inherent publicity of Titus Andronicus on stage and the media awareness

of Gone Girl make audience an integral element of the play-going or reading

experience. Tamora, like Amy, knows the importance of maintaining a carefully

constructed public persona. To Saturninus she is devoted wife and empress, director

of revenge against Titus. To Aaron she is the lusty and violent Queen of Goths. To

her sons, a leader and mother. The scene in Act 1 where Titus sues for forgiveness

from Saturninus best showcases her ability to manipulate her audience, capitulating to

Titus and welcoming him back into the emperor's good graces, while slyly signifying

her continued search for revenge in an aside to Saturninus. Tamora presents herself as

merciful in order to lull Titus into a sense of security before she sets in motion her

meticulous machinations. Amy, too, changes according to her audience. To Nick she

is perhaps her most true self. For Desi she is doting lover, to her parents she is

Amazing Amy—affable, charming, intelligent—in the Ozarks she’s an entirely new

person, pulling from elements of Southern culture. Amy is a media darling.

Motherhood is an important aspect of womanhood in its preeminence in a

woman’s life as well as its ability to both create and hinder social roles of women.

Pregnancy is often seen as either the ultimate goal of every woman, the base

argument for why women are naturally more sensitive or nurturing, or a means of

keeping women contained to the domestic sphere. Tamora and Amy subvert this

stereotype by using motherhood as a weapon. Tamora’s role is intrinsically bound to

 53

her role as mother as it is her plea for Alarbus’ life that is the catalyst for the play’s

action. Furthermore, she speaks to Saturninus in explicit statements of mothering and

relies on her two remaining sons to take active roles in her revenge plots. There is no

Tamora without her motherhood. Her violent nature and lack of regard for human

life, including her son by Aaron, force viewers or readers to link violence with

motherhood. She takes a comforting role and turns it into something barbarous by

refusing to act the nurturing mother, instead weaponizing the role by playing on

others’ expectations of her motherliness.

Amy weaponizes motherhood as well. She shows no strong attachment to the

idea of children or pregnancy; she says “it baffles me that these self-righteous, self-

enthralled waddlers get such special treatment. As if it’s so hard to spread your legs

and let a man ejaculate between them” (258). Amy instead uses her ability to have

children as a means of controlling those around her. She understands that leaving a

pregnancy trail in the wake of her disappearance will not only implicate Nick further,

but cause an exacerbated media storm of affection for her. Faking a pregnancy helps

the police to cement a motive for Nick. Nick having a long-term affair with a young

woman for whom he intends to leave Amy, only to find out that Amy is pregnant with

his child, suggests that Nick did not want an anchor, so to speak, to Amy. Amy also

manipulates the media after her disappearance, knowing that “the key to big-time

coverage, round-the-clock, frantic, bloodlust never-ending Ellen Abbott coverage,

would be the pregnancy. Amazing Amy is tempting as is. Amazing Amy knocked up

is irresistible” (258). Instead of motherhood as rite of passage as a woman, Amy uses

 54

her ability to have children as a means of control, again subverting what motherhood

tends to elicit as a stereotype. Nick notes her inherent ability to become pregnant with

some reverence (and dismay)—”I created a manuscript” he says, “and she created a

life” (411). After all that Amy puts Nick through, Nick is unable to leave Amy solely

because she uses his bank-stored sperm to become pregnant, Nick having believed the

store destroyed. Nick feels, “I was a prisoner after all. Amy had me forever, or as

long as she wanted, because I needed to save my son, to try to unhook, unlatch,

debarb, undo everything that Amy did” (411). It is primarily their child that keeps

Nick anchored to Amy.

Amy perhaps perverts motherhood more than Tamora, as Tamora seems to

have genuine affection for her children, excluding her child by Aaron. She stoops to

beg Titus for Alarbus’ life, an action that could not have been easy for a queen. Titus

knows, too, that the murder of Chiron and Demetrius is perhaps the worst punishment

he can serve Tamora, save his forcing Tamora to literally eat their flesh after death.

This action itself is a subversion of motherhood—Tamora makes motherhood

monstrous by her refusal to be nurturing or especially sensitive, ultimately consuming

that which she begat in a grand show of destructive motherhood. Alternatively, Amy

has no maternal instincts, no interest in motherhood or children, and uses motherhood

only as a shallow but effective means of eliciting sympathy and tying Nick to her.

One of the most overt differences in success between Tamora and Amy are

the different conclusions for their extramarital lovers. Tamora uses Aaron to help her

plot against Titus and the Andronici, and both characters seem to vie for power over
 55

the revenge plot in Titus Andronicus. Tamora has few lines in the last few scenes of

the play, and even Mutius assigns more conclusionary lines and blame to Aaron than

for Tamora. It is Tamora who seeks revenge against Titus, but Aaron who takes over

the revenge plot towards the end of the play. Aaron becomes a wild card as his

atheistic and misanthropic or antisocial behavior is the one driving force behind his

causing destruction. His actions take precedent over Tamora’s plots, and Aemilius

asks Lucius to “Give sentence on this execrable wretch,/That hath been breeder of

these dire events” (5.3.177-78), again attributing the deeds of the play to Aaron alone.

Aaron is given more lines in the last act of the play while Tamora’s one last hurrah is

her failed and clumsy attempt to confuse Titus with sons Chiron and Demetrius.

Shakespeare understandably assassinates Tamora’s character to make way for

Aaron’s potential as villain. Aaron’s dark skin makes him a more acceptable villain

than a female revenger and Tamora’s identity is overshadowed by his revelry.

Amy does not let an extramarital lover threaten her central role in the text.

Instead, she uses former boyfriend Desi Collings as a means of failing better. Desi is

wealthy and immediately saves Amy from destitution when he brings her to his

opulent lake house. Masquerading as her savior, Desi actually holds Amy hostage.

She is unable to leave the lake house; she has no keys to a car or access to money.

Amy feels that she is “literally a prisoner—the gate is fifteen feet high, and there are

no ladders in the house” (360). Desi controls the food she eats and the clothing she

wears; he asks her to use the lake house gym to lose weight she has gained and to dye

her hair back to blonde. Just at the moment when Amy seems to have failed—her
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money is stolen and her former boyfriend is controlling her every waking moment—

she uses her extramarital lover to fail better. Amy uses a wine bottle to penetrate

herself in order to mimic rape injuries; she utilizes the lake house’s extensive security

camera system to fake video evidence of sexual assault and injury. Instead of

allowing Desi’s subjectivity to overwhelm her own, Amy uses him to make her

narrative better. When she returns to Nick, she blames the entire disappearance on

Desi, thereby allowing her to avoid suspicion and return to a Nick who is now forced

to follow Amy’s demands for fear that he will be blamed for her disappearance.

Twenty-first century Amy is able to destroy Desi when he threatens to take over her

own narrative.

Both female revengers embody patriarchal fears over what women are capable

of. Tamora and Amy are womanhood in its worst-case scenario, enacting rhetorical

ability, motherhood, internalized misogyny towards other women, rape, and countless

other tools as means of dominating over men. Characters Lavinia and Andie of Titus

Andronicus and Gone Girl serve as the appropriate foils to Tamora and Amy. Where

the latter are womanhood perverted, Lavinia and Andie are traditionally ideal

femininity. Lavinia is a model daughter, capitulating to Titus despite his decision to

accept Saturninus’ undesirable marriage proposal. Saturninus expresses interest in a

sexual relationship with Tamora even as he proposes to marry Lavinia, to which

Lavinia must reply that she is not bothered; “Not I, my lord, sith true

nobility/Warrants these words in princely courtesy” (1.1.271-72). She pays Titus the

proper respect and is quietly pliant to the whims of the various men in her life—she
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moves from Titus’ daughter, to Bassianus’ fiance, Saturninus’ betrothed, to the stolen

property of Bassianus, to Bassianus’ wife, to rape victim of Chiron, Demetrius, and

Tamora, to mutilated daughter of Titus—all without her consent or complaint.

Carolyn Asp finds that

instead of having power herself, Lavinia functions as an object to be used by

powerful males within the Symbolic Order to cement alliances and maintain a

surface order… Visually she enacts the fate of woman in the Symbolic Order:

she is a pawn in a power struggle between men, objectified as “Rome’s rich

ornament” to be seized by the strongest contestant. Of her own desires we

hear nothing. (336)

When Chiron and Demetrius mutilate Lavinia by removing her tongue and hands,

they remove her agency. These actions signify the preferred model of femininity. A

woman who cannot gesture or speak is essentially helpless and lacks personal

subjectivity. Lavinia is thus preferable to Tamora, who seeks autonomy and

subjectivity. Lavinia becomes a literal signpost as well as an example for how early

modern women should behave. All of her gestures and behaviors must be decoded

and analyzed by her male family members after her mutilation, highlighting her role

as model woman. Dorothea Kehler says that Tamora’s

vengeance is to turn Lavinia into a grotesque epitome of the paragon. For who

would be more chaste than a violated woman, haunted by remembrance of

having been, as Jane Marcus aptly puts it, “gang-raped” (80)? Who more

silent than a woman without a tongue? Who more obedient than a woman
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compelled to rely on men for her every need? By abetting Lavinia’s vicious

refashioning, Tamora mocks the complacent, self-serving expectations of her

male masters; here, she seems to say, is your ideal of womanhood in full

flower. (326)

Tamora’s role as embodiment of male anxiety and her subversion of womanhood as a

tool of domination must be contrasted by Lavinia’s silent existence. Lavinia’s

existence rests entirely in her relationship to male figures. In Blanche McIntyre’s

2017 Royal Shakespeare Company production, Lavinia nods in consent as Titus

silently signifies his intent to mercy-kill her. She gives her life to her father.

Andie serves a similar purpose in Gone Girl. There is a clearer contrast

between Amy and Andie, since Andie is Nick’s extramarital lover. Andie is young

and impressionable, paying Nick the kind of attention he misses from the early stages

of his relationship to Amy. Andie admires Nick and respects him, asks nothing of

him, is sexually available and easy-going. Nick thinks of Andie “as an escape, an

opportunity,” believing that “Andie was a nice, pretty, bosomy Irish girl from my

hometown, unassuming and jolly” (146, 147). Nick consistently describes Andie as

someone who is easy to be around in contrast to Amy’s complicated personality.

Andie is more willing to embody the Cool Girl persona that Amy eschews, providing

a model of femininity that is insupportable but nevertheless dominates media

representation of women. Andie is a necessary contrast to Amy.

One of Tamora’s most disturbing actions is when she not only allows but

encourages her two sons to brutally defile Lavinia instead of murdering her outright.
 59

Tamora encourages Chiron and Demetrius by making the action a test of their love;

”be ye not henceforth called my children” (2.3.115). Lavinia begs to be murdered

rather than subject to gang rape, but Tamora infamously refuses. In Julie Taymor’s

1999 film, Chiron and Demetrius rip open Lavinia’s clothing, after which Lavinia

escapes their clutches to beg Tamora for mercy on bended knee. Lavinia is wild-eyed

and there is a notable terror in her voice. Tamora’s refusal to allow Lavinia to die

unravished is brutal. Lange closes her eyes and takes a breath as if she is mustering

the courage to follow through with allowing her sons to rape and mutilate Lavinia,

but is ultimately unrelenting. The rape and mutilation happen offstage in the film, but

Lavinia reenters the screen in another powerful cinematic moment where she is

perched on a tree stump, hands cut off with branches shoved into her stumps, mouth

full of blood from her ripped-out tongue. In Blanche McIntyre’s 2017 Royal

Shakespeare Company adaptation, Chiron and Demetrius begin to sexually assault

Lavinia on stage. She is covered in blood when she reappears after the assault. In the

most disturbing image of the scene, her pants and underwear are pulled down, to be

adjusted by Marcus.

These two scenes are perhaps the most violent and disturbing of the entire

play—and it is Tamora and Lavinia, woman versus woman. What is so disturbing

about these images for a twenty-first century reader or viewer is Tamora’s absolute

refusal to have mercy on a fellow woman. Feminist critics often lament the vitriol

with which women treat one another and deem it especially damaging to the social

positions of women. Discussing male villains is rarely so complicated. Their hatred or

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violence toward other men is normalized within the context of bad versus good;

crimes against humanity rather than specifically gendered crimes. Tamora is more

misanthropic than misogynist, but the violence she sanctions against Lavinia through

Chiron and Demetrius is particularly jarring. It is a central issue in championing

Tamora as a character worth study in a feminist context. How does one justify the

importance of and respect for a female character who enacts by proxy a gang-rape on

a hapless female victim? The torture of Lavinia is almost gratuitous, too, as Tamora

admits that it is to injure Titus that she mutilates Lavinia; “Hadst thou in person ne’er

offended me,/Even for [Titus’s] sake am I pitiless” (2.3. 159-60). Tamora embodies

the concept of the problematic fave—a great character with irreconcilable flaws.

Early modern audiences might have been especially offended by Tamora’s

treatment of Lavinia. Kehler says that

Tamora’s rejection of a bond with women is another alien behavior.

Notwithstanding that Elizabethan men were wary of female friendships (who

knew what domestic insurrections women planned among their gossips?),

Tamora’s autonomy is yet more threatening. Denying mercy to Lavinia,

constructed as her opposite in the binarism of virgin widow/widowed whore,

Tamora unhesitatingly rejects a repressive gender role that enjoined women to

“be chaste, silent, obedient” (Hull 142), accordingly inhibiting sexuality,

assertiveness, and power. (326)

In order to upset the hierarchical nature of gender, Tamora must use typical

patriarchal tools in order to enter an arena dominated by masculinity. While she is

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still excessively feminine in her revenge, the rape of Lavinia is one moment of

patriarchal reappropriation that Tamora uses as it has been used against her. It is a

troubled reading of Tamora’s behavior, but one that can be understood in the context

of early modern gender hierarchy. To upset that binary, one might adopt some

elements of the dominant group.

In seeking to define a general trope for female revengers, sexual violence

seems to be an appropriate tool because it is an appropriation of the pervasive rape

culture that permeates basic social interactions and settings. According to feminist

theories, Tamora uses it incorrectly and in a decidedly unfeminist way because she

uses it as a tool against a patriarch, but destroys a fellow woman in the process. This

tends to be the most egregious wrong Tamora commits, although this action may be

no worse than Tamora’s other crimes. Indeed, it is the most fascinating and

complicated action. Early modern rape is defined as taking or stealing a person away

from their home or father, to whom a woman belongs. Saturninus refers to Bassianus’

taking of Lavinia as a rape (1.1.404). In these terms, Tamora has been raped by Titus

as she was taken prisoner after warring with Rome. Tamora is not merciful towards

Lavinia because she may feel that she herself was violated by Titus. Furthermore,

Tamora sees Lavinia as Titus’ property, as does Titus and every other male connected

to Lavinia. Lavinia is only ever positioned in relation to various male characters. She

is shifted around like chattel. Tamora is perceiving Lavinia only as male characters

have themselves envisioned her. Tamora is the chief instigator of the rape of Lavinia

as an attempt to injure Titus.

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Amy’s use of rape as a tool of revenge is directed at the most frequent

perpetrators of rape without destroying another woman in the process.

Amy confirms suspicions that women will falsely accuse men of rape as a revenge

tactic and that all rape accusations are suspect accordingly. Unfortunately, women

revengers tend to appropriate rape and sexual violence because it is so often used

against them to contain women and control their social behaviors with the mere threat

of rape. The difference of 400 years is that Tamora uses rape as a tool of patriarchal

subversion through another woman, and Amy appropriates rape against men and only

men, who are the most frequent perpetrators of rape. Amy feels vindicated in that

both former boyfriends whom she accuses of rape have slighted her in some way.

Tommy began seeing another woman, and Desi—perhaps more deserving than

Tommy—controlled Amy’s appearance and behavior to the point of chipping away at

Amy’s newfound sense of control over her selfhood. Eliana Dockterman writing for

Time notes that despite and perhaps because of the use of sexual violence and her

manipulation of men, Amy’s “vengeance is utterly feminine” (2017). Dockterman

does not further this analysis, but she is circling around an important truth—the

manipulation of Saturninus, Aaron, Nick, and Desi, the appropriation of sexual

violence as a weapon, as well as weaponizing motherhood are wholly feminized

machinations of Tamora and Amy.

Alison Findlay discusses the problem of Tamora’s appropriating rape as

appropriating masculinity. By urging the rape of Lavinia, Tamora uses rape as men

use rape; “Jean E. Howard and Phyllis Rackin describe rape as ‘the gatekeeper for the
 63

gender hierarchy’” (qtd. in Simkin 91). Findlay sees Tamora as not expressing an

excess of femininity so much as appropriating masculinity as a means of occupying

dominant male spaces; in “behaviour [that] is deeply disturbing, her vengeance

against Titus [allies] her more closely with the male rapists and their appetite for

erotic despoliation than with the female victim” (76). Alternatively, Tamora

consistently speaks in terms of motherliness, she expresses overt sexuality; she uses

her status as woman as a means of subverting Rome’s extreme patriarchal state

institutions. The threat of rape in the early modern era and now tends to exert control

over the behavior of women because rape is often discussed in terms of a preventable

crime, the onus being on women to stop the incitement of lust in men. Tamora, in

trying to exert agency and self-fashioning in a patriarchal system, must use the tools

with which she is familiar—the most disturbing of which is rape. If one agrees with

Findlay, however, that is just one of the ways that Gone Girl expands and improves

Titus Andronicus. Amy uses false rape accusations as a tool of containment.

Narratives have shifted enough by 2012 that Amy can subjugate men by accusing

them of rape instead of being the subjugated rape victim. Amy appropriates rape as a

tool of containment in reverse. Gone Girl suggests, then, that a matriarchal society

might use the very same tools that patriarchal societies use. Amy exerts control over

men through her ability to claim that she was raped, paralleling the threat of rape that

controls women’s behavior under patriarchal control. Whether that is preferable or

desirable is arguable. It is perhaps difficult still to imagine matriarchal Western

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societies without precedent, and so an imaginary matriarch might look like the still-

reigning patriarch: predicated on fear and subsequently aggressive.

Finally, the end of both narratives make it clear who is in control. Tamora all

but disappears in Act V of Titus Andronicus, supplanted by Aaron and Titus. Aaron’s

most notable speeches are reserved for Act V, characterizing him as the author of

every villainous deed enacted on the Andronici. Aaron is able to gloat over his

actions, too, a feeling Tamora is never afforded. Aaron revels in his villainy:

I have done a thousand dreadful things

As willingly as one would kill a fly,

And nothing grieves me heartily indeed,

But that I cannot do ten thousand more. (5.1.141-44)

Aaron may have come up with most of the (successful) revenge plots, but his villainy

is channeled through Tamora. Without Tamora, Aaron would have no reason for

murdering various Andronici. Lucius’ play-ending speech also asks that Tamora be

forgotten, while greater punishments are reserved for Aaron:

As for that ravenous tiger, Tamora,

No funeral rite, nor man in mourning weed,

No mournful bell shall ring her burial;

But throw her forth to beasts and birds to prey:

Her life was beastly and devoid of pity,

And being dead, let birds on her take pity. (5.3.194-99)

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Ravenous though she may be, Lucius damns her to nonexistence. No further attention

will be paid to Tamora. Instead, Lucius asks that audiences forget about Tamora and

focus righteous anger towards Aaron. It may be that an early modern audience would

be more inclined to understand and acknowledge violence when perpetrated by

people of color rather than a woman. Xenophobia in the Isles contributed to a

depiction of moors and Jewish people as incapable of mercy, atheistic, and inherently

violent.12 An early modern audience may have been reluctant to imagine a woman

capable of such violence and may have felt more comfortable shifting blame to Aaron

as a result. A twenty-first century audience is perhaps ready to handle vengeful

women.

Where Tamora disappears in her narrative, Amy looms large in hers. The end

of Gone Girl is somewhat ambiguous regarding whether Nick truly loves Amy, but it

does not matter to her. Nick is both afraid and in awe of Amy, and she uses his

feelings for her and his child to control him. Nick acts the perfect husband in public

and private. The novel ends with Amy announcing a novel she is writing based on her

disappearance, signalling her continued efforts to fashion her entire life as a narrative

subject to her own subjectivity. Unlike Tamora’s disappearance, Amy specifically

says that she “just wanted to make sure I had the last word. I think I’ve earned that”

(415). Todd VanDerWerff finds overt feminist film technique in David Fincher’s

2014 adaptation of Gone Girl as well. VanDerWerff found that

12
See Barabas of Christopher Marlowe’s The Jew of Malta, or Shylock of The Merchant of
Venice, or Othello himself. Although it can be argued that Barabas, Shylock, and Othello are
sympathetic, especially Othello, the characters represent typical early modern fears about
recognizably foreign groups of people.
 66

how Fincher uses centered compositions in Gone Girl is part of what makes

the film so feminist. The very first image in Gone Girl, before the opening

credits sequence, is Amy's head taking up the full center of the screen, before

her face snaps up to look at camera and occupies all of our attention. (2014)

The very first and last images of the film feature Amy Dunne’s face in extreme close-

up, filling the screen. This technique tells audiences on whom they should focus. The

first image of Amy’s face is in cool, winter tones. She wears a confused, scared

expression. In confirmation of Amy’s masterful identity-creation, the last image of

Amy’s face is nearly identical to the first, but the scene is in warm summer tones. Her

expression is that of a woman who has forged her personhood and is in complete

control of herself and others. Nick Dunne provides a voice over for these scenes, but

the voice-over is his questioning what is going on in Amy’s mind, what she is

thinking and feeling, and how they have destroyed one another—and how much

destruction may lie ahead. That the questioning of Amy’s personhood comes from

Nick’s voice-over suggests that patriarchal forces can never understand women’s

motivations without first considering feminine subjectivity. The focus is entirely on

decoding and seeing Amy—her visage and her subjectivity—from start to finish.
 CHAPTER V

“WE ARE ALL WORKING FROM THE SAME DOG-EARED SCRIPT”; GONE

GIRL PERCEPTION AND PROBLEMS

“...Feminism should not be comfortable, and it certainly shouldn’t be pretty.” -

Jessica Abrahams

Critics of both the novel and the film adaptation of Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl

tend to argue that it is emblematic of feminist ideals, but there are those who consider

Flynn’s work reductive at best, misogynist at worst. Some concede that the film

misses some of the detail that makes the Gone Girl novel powerfully feminist. Valid

criticisms revolve around Amy’s use of false rape accusations as a tool of power, and

her revenge plot that at its core is driven by and focused on a man who is not worthy

of Amy’s attention, let alone the kind of obsessive attention Amy gives to detail.

Perhaps even more insidious and often overlooked is Amy’s portrayal of other

women. These criticisms are not to be taken lightly and must be discussed in the

wider discourse of typifying female revengers and identifying the work left to be

done in textual or film representations of women.

Amy’s diatribe on the Cool Girl is powerful, but when directed at a living,

breathing woman, Amy’s criticisms become vicious. Amy temporarily occupies a

disturbing position in which she employs something like the male gaze, describing

Andie’s “cum-on-me tits” (Fincher 2014), vilifying her for being younger and more

willing to play the part of Cool Girl. Putting the onus of responsibility onto Andie and

describing her in oversexualized terms, as “fuckable” (Flynn 329), makes Amy a

67
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problematic character for third and fourth wave feminism, a precept of which is

asking that women support women wherever possible (Munro). One of the issues

feminism faces today is the way a woman might approach criticism of another

woman, and how to accurately and fairly depict the problems or issues in the behavior

of female figures without falling into misogynist rhetoric. Amy does not subscribe to

capital-F Feminism other than a general inclination to see and understand women’s

issues, but she is characteristically blind to her own misogynist behavior.

Furthermore, her criticisms of Nick stem from his misogyny toward her and other

women in his life, yet she contributes to negative gender stereotypes herself. By

oversexualizing Andie, Amy makes herself a hypocrite and upholds a social culture

for which she assigns blame to Nick and other men in her life.

Amy does not stop at criticizing Andie and other Cool Girls, however; she

also speaks disparagingly about Southern women she encounters in Missouri. Amy

and Nick tend to describe them as motherly (a quality Amy does not view positively),

simple in terms of lifestyle and intelligence, and not self-aware. The driving force

behind Amy’s need to point out the flaws in other women, be they Cool Girls like

Andie or Southern Mothers like Nick’s mother, is her need to compete with other

women. Nick understands this about Amy, noting that

here in Missouri, the women shop at Target, they make diligent, comforting

meals, they laugh about how little high school Spanish they remember.

Competition doesn’t interest them. Amy’s relentless achieving is greeted with

open-palmed acceptance and maybe a bit of pity. It was about the worst
 69

outcome possible for my competitive wife: a town of contented also-rans.

(Flynn 45)

Competition among women is a hallmark of third wave feminism, which seeks to

expose and eliminate a patriarchal insistence that women compete with one another

for social acceptance (i.e. male attention). Amy cannot exist outside of feminist

movements, and that is true for both her successes as a female revenger and general

complexity of character as well as for the criticisms of her character. The misogyny

she internalizes and employs towards other women is intrinsic to the general goals of

twenty-first century feminism. Amy’s use of negative stereotypes of a feminine ideal

and a feminine abject are the exact issues today’s feminist is concerned with. Naomi

Wolf, however, finds fault in contemporary feminism’s strict and unquestioning

adherence to female relationships, as she laments feminist praxis that

celebrated women’s focus on connectedness and consensus through always

listening and “talking things through.” For Wolf, this model that “intended to

hold women together with the honey of personal love” was “highly

‘feminine’” and “far too weak.” (qtd. in Mann 264)

Amy reflects feminist ideals in her complexity of character and championing over an

adulterous partner, but also embodies the problematic nature of women’s social roles

in her combative attitude toward other women. Her self-awareness and self-

fashioning come at the detriment of other women. As Greenblatt suggests that self-

fashioning must be formed in contrast to an Other, Amy eschews common feminist

understanding by pitting herself against other women.

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Misogyny deflected outward by the female revenger herself has somehow

become standard. Tamora and Aaron silence and rape Lavinia by proxy, deaf to

Lavinia’s pleas. Lavinia even uses their shared womanhood in begging Tamora to

murder her outright. The scene is intensely disturbing for Tamora’s betrayal of her

sex. This proposes yet another issue in that men rarely if ever have to consider how

they approach criticism or behavior towards other men, and men who murder or

torture other men do not face criticism for gender-based crimes. Furthermore, sexual

assault and harassment is often overlooked when perpetrated by men; Harvey

Weinstein has been accused of abusing women for decades and has only as of

October 2017 faced serious backlash (Puente and Mandell 2017).13 A male revenger’s

behavior is often overlooked,14 but a female revenger is subject to nit-picking over

her treatment towards other women. As male revengers or villains are able to stand in

for a general understanding of humanity as inherently corruptible, female characters

should not be excluded from a discussion of innate moral evil. It is important to note

the way discourse is shaped around female and male revengers. That there are

specific details in a female revenger trope or her character development that rely on

her gender is not necessarily a negative aspect of gendering the revenger, but

criticisms of a female revenger for these gender-based issues is problematic. At a

certain point a female revenger character, in becoming equitable in representation and

13
See: Woody Allen, Bill Cosby, Casey Affleck (who recently won an Oscar even after
allegations of sexual harassment), et cetera. Weinstein’s exposure triggered the rise of sexual
assault allegations in October 2017, resulting in severe punishment for male figures like Matt
Lauer and Kevin Spacey.
14
By a wider media culture, it is not necessarily overlooked by those who are aware of and
vocal about sexual assault accusations.
 71

public perception, must have some sort of universality that excludes her from

conversations of whether or not her specific behavior toward women is misogynist

and therefore unfeminist. There is not necessarily an answer to this issue. The

character of Amy has already been discussed in terms of her gendered problems, and

the issues critics bring up are exceptionally important to feminist discourse. There

must, however, be some sort of future when a female revenger either does not behave

according to internalized misogyny at all, or does provide sexist commentary but is

exempt from blame for the behavior based on a universality of experience. Violence

and disturbing behavior are no longer exclusive to masculinity.

Perhaps the most serious issue with Gone Girl is its reliance on false rape

accusations as plot points or character development for Amy. Tamora uses rape as a

silencing technique when she urges her sons to rape and mutilate Lavinia, effectively

controlling her ability to communicate and staining the purity of femininity used to

juxtapose the oversexualization of Tamora. Amy’s use of false rape and false

domestic abuse accusations are one of the more complicated devices in Gone Girl.

Crime writer Joan Smith is involved in “monitoring violence against women and girls

in London,” and says that “every month the Metropolitan police answer more than

twice as many calls about domestic violence as domestic burglary, so turning

domestic abuse into a plot device seems cheap” (qtd. in “Gillian Flynn: Putting

Femme Fatale...” 2014). One of the metanarratives facing fourth wave feminism is

the perception that women frequently falsely accuse men of rape. The issue is a hot

topic as Education Secretary Betsy DeVos proposes Obama-Administration Title IX

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legislative protection changes that have been met with criticism. DeVos cites the

many instances of false accusations of sexual assault as of particular importance in

her decisions (Smith 2017). In False Allegations of Sexual Assault: An Analysis of

Ten Years of Reported Cases, David Lisak, Lori Gardinier, Sarah C. Nicksa, and

Ashley M. Cote found that roughly 2-8% of campus rape allegations are false. Lisak

et al. address the controversial nature of rape allegations, noting that “for centuries, it

has been asserted and assumed that women ‘cry rape,’ that a large proportion of rape

allegations are maliciously concocted for purposes of revenge or other motives”

(1318). For those falsely accused, this is a problem. For the roughly 70% (RAINN

2015) of women who do not report rape or sexual assault, this is an even bigger

problem. It is a delicate issue, but a prescient one. Amy represents all of the fear and

anxieties that men project onto women, but her reliance on false rape and domestic

violence allegations is troubling. Men already tend to fear the malicious woman who

accuses men of rape after consensual sex, and Amy feeds into that fear. Eliana

Dockterman addresses these issues, summarizing that

Amy fakes a sexual assault, even though overwhelming evidence indicates

that women don’t lie about being raped. She manipulates men to an

exaggerated and terrifying degree (like faking a pregnancy), saying reasonable

things despite being a murderous madwoman. Her vengeance is utterly

feminine. In short, it would be easy for someone to see the movie and reduce

its message to “bitches be crazy.” She’s a men’s rights advocate’s worst

nightmare. (2017)
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In this respect, Amy has not transcended the destruction that Tamora faces. Tamora

represents early modern fears about women; women as monstrous mothers, as overtly

sexual, unfaithful, conniving, cunning, uncontrollable, alien; Amy embodies these

same fears that persist to this day. Tamora’s use of rape and Amy’s use of rape and

domestic abuse allegations are nefarious in and of themselves, but what is truly

damning is that these fictional actions reinforce a dangerous metanarrative that

women are inherently emotional or insane and are not to be trusted with agency, let

alone equitable responsibility as social agents.

The casual viewer or reader might not notice these criticisms, but they are

worth discussing in academic circles as representations of women in media pervade

social stereotypes. Titus Andronicus was wildly popular in 1593 and is both a

representation and a product of early modern England’s view of women, people of

color, and otherwise othered members of a society. Its status as popular fiction tells us

how early modern people understood the world. Gone Girl, then, is wholly

representative of how we see the world, and that world is exciting but bleak. We have

gone beyond woman as destructive force in need of controlling, but we still

apparently use women as symbols of male anxiety. The tools Amy uses are an

appropriation of the world she knows, but it is not a world where women are social

equals. Flynn excuses the behavior because, she wonders, “is it really only girl power

and you-go-girl and empower yourself and be the best you can be? For me, it’s also

the ability to have women who are bad characters” (qtd. in “Gillian Flynn: Putting

Femme Fatale...” 2014). The short answer, then, is that it is complicated. Gone Girl is
 74

an accurate depiction of twenty-first century social roles, but it is an often troubling

depiction. It both represents and disavows feminist ideals.

That Amy spends so much energy, time, rage, and livelihood on controlling

her adulterous husband is another detraction from Amy as feminist character. One can

argue both that female revengers punishing male characters for their behavior is a

cause to champion and that a female revenger’s compulsory link to a male character

is passé. Russ decries this link as narratives for female characters are often about

“how she lost him, how she got him, how she kept him, how she died for/with him.

What else is there?” (85). For an early-modern proto-feminist, female domination

over men is the only shift in power that makes sense because of an adherence to

hierarchical social structures. Because revenge is typically a personal wrong for

which a revenger cannot seek justice, it is understandable that a female revenger both

in the early modern period and now would still be bound to vengeance for gender-

based traumas or injustices. Titus’ actions toward Tamora are not gender-based, but

that Tamora is bound to several male characters, is one of only three female

characters in the play, and uses gender-based characteristics and tropes to plot her

revenge marks her as woman and incapable of successful revenge. Her trying to

control a male-dominated world makes complete sense for the time period.

A twenty-first century Amy, too, is unable to right the social wrongs that

gender-based stereotyping and violence causes. The prevalence of domestic and

sexual abuse perpetrated on women is heinous and indicates a social ill that cannot be

legislated or magicked away. Amy’s obsession with doling out punishment to men
 75

who have wronged her is a classical interpretation of revenge as a necessary vehicle

for righting social ills. Gillian Flynn defends Amy’s actions and link to a male

character, asking “isn’t it time to acknowledge the ugly side? ...I’ve grown so weary

of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so

many books” (qtd. in Teitel 2014). Critics like Emma Teitel, though, bring up valid

disagreements. Teitel feels

weary of the woman scorned. A heroine willing to set the world on fire to

punish her inattentive, philandering husband is a cliche far greater and older

than Eat Pray Love. Gone Girl may begin a smart and promising mystery, but

it ends in a misogynistic wet dream. (2014)

Teitel is absolutely right. Amy fits into the mold of female revenger, but also inhabits

a more tried and tired trope of Woman Scorned. Rather than move on from an

injustice at the hands of man, Amy spends over a year meticulously plotting her

disappearance when most women would advise their friends and loved ones to move

on. Amy is characterized as wildly intelligent, and it is almost disappointing that she

stays in Missouri with Nick instead of forging an identity outside of her relationship

to Nick and others. Rather than leave Nick, which is clearly what he wants, Amy

successfully supplants Nick’s personal subjectivity with a narrative that he is bound

to carry out. What better way, Amy thinks, to control someone and right your

perceived injustices, than forcing them into a life of servitude? Amy “won’t divorce

him because that’s exactly what he’d like. And I won’t forgive him because I don’t

feel like turning the other cheek” (234) (original emphasis). Amy wants the version of
 76

Nick from the courtship stage of their relationship, and she stays with him to mold

him into that person. Rather than a misogynistic wet dream, Amy fulfills the wish of

many women—to revenge personal wrongs so utterly that they are the ultimate victor.

Gone Girl is not a perfect portrayal of a female revenger. A twenty-first

century feminist like Teitel and others have plenty of fodder for criticism when it

comes to deciding whether Gone Girl is feminist or not. Ultimately, the infighting of

the third wave of feminism haunts the novel. As Amy is a product of the changes

brought about by the third wave, she also embodies the issues the feminist movement

faced in the 1980s and 90s. The discourse around whether sex positivity is a universal

goal, if women feminists should embody femininity or eschew it altogether, whether

women should still be working outside the domestic sphere and saying “no” to

homemaking; all of the contradictions of the feminist movement converge around

Gone Girl and make it difficult to identify where it lands. There may not be a perfect

future where female characters are just characters, so to speak. There may never be a

time where there are not problematic characters that readers love to hate and hate to

love, but feel guilty for admiring just because they have a toe or two over some

theoretical line in the sand. Perhaps Amy still embodies male anxieties about women,

but her success and domination over Nick is both troubling and exciting. Both Nick

and Titus are flawed characters and it is difficult to root for Amy and Tamora, but

that it is now socially acceptable to root for a character like Amy is a milestone. Gone

Girl brings Tamora back to life in stunning detail, taking what Shakespeare started

and expanding it into the complicated Amy. Like David Fincher’s film adaptation, in
 77

the end the focus is on Amy. The implication of Amy’s success is that in the world of

female revengers, perhaps the outcome can only be a shift toward matriarchal control

rather than binaric equality. Just as early modern audiences could only conceive of a

proto-feminism that espoused matriarchy in place of patriarchy rather than equality,

Gone Girl seems to suggest that imaginary female equality is still conceived of as

domination rather than egalitarian. Having lived through patriarchal control for

centuries if not millennia, perhaps it is not only acceptable but entirely preferable to

imagine literary worlds where patriarchal forces shift towards matriarchal control.
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 79

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