"Southern Living from a Bygone Time": Gothic Spatialization of History in Gillian Flynn's Sharp Objects

Abstract

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• “Southern Living from a Bygone Time”: Gothic Spatialization of History in Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects
• Mattias Pirholt

Unhomeliness in the Old South

Contemporary crime fiction, one could argue, has returned to its roots, that is, the gothic from which the genre evolved in the nineteenth century and with which it has remained intimately entangled ever since (Spooner; Hughes 83–84). If, however, as David Punter has argued, many detective stories lack the subversive qualities that characterize the gothic (167), today’s reformed crime fiction seems to embrace exactly these subversive traits. Thus, it should not come as a surprise that twentieth- and twenty-first-century crime novels adapt and incorporate various gothic conventions (MacArthur). Gillian Flynn’s stunning first novel, Sharp Objects (2006), has been called a psychological thriller, a murder mystery, and domestic noir, but more than anything else, it offers an updated version of the gothic tradition.¹ Against the backdrop of a series of murders in the fictional town of Wind Gap—the murders are being investigated by crime reporter Camille Preaker, a Wind Gap native who left the town long ago to live in Chicago—the novel draws on typically gothic motifs such as “the female (abject) body, the returning (and recurring) of repressed pasts, motherhood, and the monstrous-feminine” (Gardner 53). More specifically, [End Page 381] and with a distinctively contemporary atmosphere, the story depicts mental illness in the shape of Munchausen syndrome by proxy (today known as factitious disorder imposed on another), PTSD, and female self-mutilation as well as the abuse of opioids and other prescription drugs, in addition to and in combination with alcohol, meth, and marijuana.

Set in the southeastern parts of Missouri, close to the Missouri/Tennessee border, Sharp Objects might even be said to belong to, or at least geographically approach, the Southern Gothic tradition. This prolific tradition can be traced back to key writers of the American south such as William Faulkner, Carson McCullers, and Flannery O’Connor. Their novels and stories revel in the social claustrophobia of the small southern town; substance abuse; inexplicable and excessive use of violence; hereditary sins; generational, class, and gender conflicts; poverty; diseases; death; and feelings of existential despair— all of which are overshadowed by slavery and racism in their past and present manifestations. Although a sense of place is crucial to the gothic of the American south, the genre’s trademarks are less bound to a specific geography and more to what this geography implies. According to David Punter and Glennis Byron’s succinct definition, Southern Gothic investigates “madness, decay and despair, and the continuing pressures of the past upon the present, particularly with respect to the lost ideals of a dispossessed Southern aristocracy and to the continuance of racial hostilities” (116–17). Bridget M. Marshall, too, has emphasized the role of the south’s problematic racist history, which substitutes plantations and masters for castles and aristocrats. Gothic representations of rape, incest, and sexual violence are manifestations of the south’s so-called “peculiar institution,” as “the system of slavery in the American South encouraged masters to rape slaves, and the offspring of those slaves were often raped as well” (Marshall 9). In short, the horrors of slavery constitute the link between the south’s traumatic history and the gothic, and they function, according to Jason Haslam, as “the primal scene” of the American branch of the tradition: either slavery replaces “the foundational traumas of class violence and aristocratic abuses in the European tradition of the [End Page 382] gothic” or, conversely, the gothic is “the only discursive tradition capable of rendering the material horrors of slavery” (49).²

Following the success of the 2018 HBO adaptation of Flynn’s first novel for the small screen, critics hailed Sharp Objects as “Southern Gothic for the 21st century” (Gilbert) that “delivers a stunning Southern Gothic that gives this loving word [Mama] a much darker connotation” (Damas). Not only does the content of the adaptation—the southern landscape and southern small town, the Confederate monuments, Civil War costumes, and racialized servants—show reverence to the Southern Gothic tradition, but also the visual effects—the flashes back and forth...