A Victim or a Femme Fatale? Playing with Ambiguity in Gillian Flynn's Gothic Novel Gone Girl

The aim of the thesis is to demonstrate that gothic tropes for female characters are not mutually exclusive but can exist simultaneously: a round female figure can be both a villain femme fatale and a victim just like the heroine of Gillian Flynn’s thriller Gone Girl that is going to be the primary object of investigation in my analysis. I wish to challenge the critique that has labelled Gillian Flynn’s work misogynistic by arguing for the feminist agenda permeating her books. I wish to prove that the association of female characters with cunning and mental games instead of physical beauty offers an empowering reading experience for female readers. I shall explore, in details, five contradictory aspects of Gone Girl which have caused controversies amongst critics and readers. I aim to analyse ambiguity appearing on the levels of genre (in general, focusing on generic confusion within the Gothic tradition, then more specifically, discussing women writers’ appropriation of masculine genres for feminist ends), characters (the femme fatale versus the victim figure), structure (violating the confines and the guarantee of truth-telling inherent to the diary genre) and theme (the criticism of patriarchal institutions of idealized marriages). By the end of the analysis, I wish to shed light on Gillian Flynn’s complex understanding of feminism and social issues arguing that women are not intrinsically good.