race & revenge fantasy in gone girl
Over ten years since its release and nearly ten years since its film adaptation, Gone Girl continues to capture the imaginations of a generation of women who revere Amy Dunne and a generation of men who cannot tell the difference between the character’s intricate scheme to frame an innocent man and any real woman who publicly speaks about abuse (see “who’s afraid of amber heard?” by Rayne Fisher Quann).
But on this, the day of Amy Dunne’s disappearance, I actually want to talk about what really interested me as a simultaneous English and Sociology major: the hidden centrality of white femininity in the novel.
In truth, race is only mentioned explicitly in Gillian Flynn’s novel on a few occasions. But its implicit presence is what caught me. For anyone who may have missed the initial cultural obsession and the following discourse years later when it was re-discovered by young girls and women in the throes of Tumblr and TikTok, Gone Girl is about the unexpected disappearance of Amy Dunne. More precisely who is responsible for it. At first, it seems like nothing more than a cliché murder mystery. Alternating between Amy’s diary entries leading up to her disappearance and her husband Nick’s perspective as he struggles to deal with its aftermath, it seems increasingly clear that this is just another tragic case of domestic homicide. Then suddenly in the second act, Flynn reveals that the whole mystery was an elaborate ruse staged by Amy to get revenge on her husband. Her perspective during this part of the book, as she simultaneously narrates her plan while watching it unfold, is where the role race plays in Amy’s plan is most obvious.
One of the first things Amy shares after the shocking twist is how she faked the crime scene and set up her red herrings. She starts of with the diary entries from the first part of the book. Along with hinting at her husband’s guilt, her goal with the diary was to create “an affable if somewhat naive persona”. Not only was Amy aiming to incriminate her husband, but she also sought to invent an entirely new personality to advantage her story over the reality. “Dairy Amy”, she says, “is designed to appeal to the cops, to appeal to the public”. In reality, the character is dangerously clever, a type-A personality who considers every angle to guarantee her revenge. She wants her Missouri town to admire her and treat her like a victim to rally behind. She needs the right people to care about her story and knows that diary entries about wifely devotion, domestic disputes, growing fear, and a surprise pregnancy make her a likable victim to those people.
Whereas Amy explains in detail how she earned their sympathy, she never once admits that her race might be a determining factor. Her town and its law enforcement are—in her words—“so white”, and in general, the public and police are more than willing to see white women as innocent victims. Yet, despite the racial assumptions of both her town and victimhood, the woman who considers everything hardly seems to consider this.
Still, Amy’s deception is genius. Along with convincing the people of her town, she also convinced many of us. This authorial motive is most evident when Amy gloats about how her diary persona is “meant to be likable. Meant for someone like you [emphasis added] to like her”. The real Amy comes across as clever, haughty, almost sarcastic, but more importantly, she is speaking directly to the reader here. Flynn’s choice of second person shows that the diary was written to appeal to the book’s audience as well. After readers are fooled into taking her side to make the twist that much more dramatic, this confession is a “gotcha” moment that reveals to them how they were manipulated. Of course, the average American audience is probably a bit more likely to sympathize with white characters. However, while she details how exactly she gains the audience’s trust, she never credits her race. The real Amy shows herself to be clever and sarcastic, but she does not so much as make a snarky remark about how much sympathy there is for white girls in danger. Whiteness is central to both aspects of the book; Amy’s plan to punish her husband requires that she is cared enough about to be found and the twist requires that readers believe her from the start. Yet, mentions of race are completely absent from Amy’s self-congratulations.
After these initial explanations of her plan, Amy moves onto a new fixation: Ellen Abbott. She knows that, if this national criminal news show covers her story, it will turn the larger public against her husband and increase pressure for his arrest. While hiding in a motel and hoping that Ellen Abbott chose the case, Amy says that she “has to, I can’t see how she could resist, I am pretty, Nick is pretty”. This again illustrates Amy’s meticulousness; she had already identified, before her disappearance, which TV personality would publicize the case, condemn Nick, and keep her updated after the fact. Moreover, this allows readers to see that she considers how her appearance benefits her. This may make her seem shallow to some, but it also shows a level of self and social awareness. Amy understands that people care more about pretty people, and she does not shy away from using that to her advantage. In fact, she says that at one point before her disappearance, she “dolled [herself] up … so [she’d] be remembered” by a potential witness.
Amy would have the reader believe that she knows how the world works. She knows that her prettiness is another tool she can fall back on. However, even as it relates to pervasive Western conceptions of beauty, Amy never boasts about exploiting her whiteness or even considers how it may help her at all. The same is true of the conventionally ugly look she takes on to avoid being noticed or found. She cuts her hair and dyes it from blonde to brown, eats without restriction to gain weight, and accepts future wrinkles by allowing herself to tan. Amy is seemingly critical of how her appearance as a woman is treated, but she again uses this to her advantage. It becomes her disguise. And more, she says that “it’s a relief to walk … without … some muttered bit of misogyny” from men around her. Thus, letting go of her carefully maintained appearance is a sort of freedom. She can move through the world without being noticed, both by people who could recognize her and by misogynistic men.
Of course, though Amy no longer has to worry about catcalling, she has never and will never have to worry about how her race might have disrupted her newfound freedom. That her whiteness allows her to move almost invisibly through the world is unspoken. To be fair, though, Amy does mention the color of her skin once. She says she was careful that Ellen Abbott’s audience “w[ould] know only pale, thin Amy” because that now gives her the ability to hide behind a deep tan. This small allusion, though, is meant only to explain her disguise. Ignoring how much more difficult it would be to hide if she was not only tan but actually a person of color, this also implies that her earlier paleness is solely useful because it later lets her become unrecognizable; she does not acknowledge that the racial assumption of her paleness (read: being white) is what allowed her to more easily fit society’s beauty standards and find her way onto Ellen Abbott in the first place. While Amy seems well-aware of the misogyny inherent in these expectations of beauty, she never thinks about how those same expectations are simultaneously connected to whiteness.
Beyond her appearance, Amy’s body is part of the plan in a greater way. In talking about how she guaranteed the news show’s attention, she says that she “knew the key to big-time coverage … would be the pregnancy” that she faked. This is apparently essential because, according to Amy, American audiences love pregnant women and would be much more likely to sympathize with her if they thought she was expecting. It seems to be another example of her never-ending calculations. Yet, the forethought she has to fake a surprise pregnancy so a TV personality would be more likely to take her case makes it even stranger that she leaves race unmentioned. Given the stark disparity in media coverage between missing persons who are white and black, her whiteness should be seen as a clear advantage in earning a spot on Ellen Abbott. Further, America has shown that it indeed does not love pregnant women when they are not white. Instead of garnering sympathy, pregnant women of color are often stereotyped as irresponsible. Still, any discussion of her race is missing. Amy is hyper-aware of how her body—from her beauty (or lack thereof) to her weight to her “pregnancy”—can be used to her advantage, but she seems oblivious to the role her whiteness plays in her successful disappearance.
Does it seem like a mistake that Amy, who considers everything and is ever so aware of the world, never explicitly mentions her race? She is implied to be a liberal (she shops at Costco, intentionally), feminist woman (like her mother) with an awareness of racism (once complaining about how white her town is). However, she never entertains this major factor in her extremely thorough plan.
The character’s obliviousness could be a reflection of the author’s. It is not entirely unreasonable to assume that Flynn never thought too deeply about race. Maybe ten years ago was just a different time in the literary world. But maybe its absence is more deliberate. She could have, writing for a decidedly white female audience, wanted to let her readers ignore how their own whiteness benefits them in favor of a thrilling story. Focusing on Amy’s gender lets the author emphasize how she has been victimized to make her revenge feel all the more gratifying.
It is also possible, though, that Flynn wrote the character’s one blindspot intentionally. She follows up Amy’s complaint about the town’s whiteness with her husband pointing out that she only ever had one black friend when they lived in New York. Nick had “accused her of craving ... minorities as backdrops”, but Amy did not want to hear it. This surprisingly race-conscious detail from Flynn is interesting. Either she used race only as a quip while neglecting it as a theme, or she had meant to expose the reality of white liberals who purport to care about race. In this light, Amy’s obliviousness is a conscious critique of the narrow lens of white women—even those who are liberal feminists and claim to support diversity. Amy renounces men’s treatment of women at multiple points in the book and yet depends on the benefits of her whiteness to shield her without even stopping to think about it. White femininity, then, can be read as a tool that white women like Amy use freely but dare not to name.
At this point, it’s clear that I have a lot of thoughts about the story’s themes and construction. Over the past few years, I have been bombarded with the online idolization of Amy Dunne by self-proclaimed femcels and misandrists. Search Gone Girl or Amy Dunne and you’ll find a million gifs and memes (like the one above) celebrating her character, nevermind that she was unsuccessful in what she wanted. Of course, she’s not the only one to receive this treatment (see Carrie, Midsommar, I Care a Lot, et cetera). And maybe I’m taking it more seriously than anyone else. But, in my eyes, she embodies an increasingly popular fantasy that will surely backfire onto the women wrapping it around themselves like a shield. Overlooking social realities like race—whether intentionally or not—only feeds into a white feminist ideology that never truly empowers women. Amy Dunne is not and never has been a girlboss or role model. She’s just a complex female character. Let’s try to keep it at that.
Post adapted from a close-reading essay written for ENG 2012