Women’s Words
Female Unreliable Narrators in McEwan’s Atonement, Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin and Flynn’s Gone Girl
Merel de Vries - S2528481
Master’s Dissertation Literary Studies. Programme Writing, Editing and Mediating. Department of English Language and Culture, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen.
Table of Contents
Table of Contents ... 0
Introduction ... 2
I. Unreliable Narrators: Theories ... 11
The Unreliable Narrative ... 11
Determining Narrational Unreliability ... 16
II. The Female (Unreliable) Narrator ... 20
III. The Sister ... 26
IV. The Wife ... 32
V. The Mother ... 38
Conclusion ... 43
Introduction
First emerging in Ancient Greek plays such as Plautus' Miles Gloriosus and Aristophanes’
The Frogs, the literary device of the unreliable narrator has a long and diverse history. Classic
works featuring early examples of narrators with questionable reliability include Arabian
Nights and Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, both of which root from the folk tales of their
respective times and societies. The birth and rise of first-person narration in fiction brought with it more modern instances of unreliability, deeply embedded the unreliable narrator into literary theory. Short stories such as Edgar Allen Poe’s "The Tell-Tale Heart" introduced mad narrators at arms with their own consciences, paving the way for thrillers and detective stories to use unreliable narrators as a means of setting up major plot twists. Books featuring young narrators, whose lack of knowledge and experience hinder their truthfulness, have long been popular, as demonstrated by classics such as Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry
Finn and J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye as well as more modern works such as Yann
Martel’s The Life of Pi.
The term ‘unreliable narrator’ was first coined by Wayne C. Booth in The Rhetoric of
Fiction, which is still used as one of the main sources when it comes to unreliable narrators,
memory and assessment, [and] may easily have missed, forgotten, or misconstrued certain incidents, words, or motives” (Riggan 20). Literary forms such as fictional autobiographies, diaries and epistolary novels, in which the narrator “recounts his own life, or a portion thereof, in his own voice and in a conscious act of writing” (Riggan 15), present the narrator above all as a human being, instead of a mere voice telling a story. Being able to identify the narrator as a real person influences their level of unreliability, as Booth explains:
No narrator or central intelligence or observer is simply convincing: he is convincingly decent or mean, brilliant or stupid, informed, ignorant, or muddled. Since there are few such qualities that even the most tolerant of us can observe in full neutrality, we usually find our emotional and intellectual reactions to him as a character affecting our reactions to the events he relates. (Booth 273)
choice to write down their own stories, trying to create a version of the story of their lives that fits their respective purpose.
Ian McEwan’s Atonement was first published in 2001 and shortlisted for that year’s Booker Prize for fiction. Taking place over the course of sixty years, the novel details the story of young, upper class Briony Tallis, whose false accusations ruin the lives of her sister Cecilia and her sister’s lover Robbie. It is not until the end of the novel that it is revealed that Briony herself wrote the novel in her old age to atone for what she had done, showing herself to be an unreliable narrator who made up a story of redemption for both herself and the people she had wronged as a child. The events told in the novel are different from the events Briony herself lived through as a character, with the most important difference being that both Cecilia and Robbie died before they could be reunited. Despite being a third-person narrative, there are hints throughout the story that the recollections of young Briony do not quite match with what truly happened. Atonement is widely regarded as McEwan’s best work, yet five other books of his were nominated for the Man Booker Prize. Only for Amsterdam in 1998 has he actually won the price. In 2008, The Times names him as one of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945", among the likes of Roald Dahl, J. R. R. Tolkien and Salman Rushdie (Hosking).
never wanted nor loved. Seemingly overshadowed by Kevin’s atrocities and the social commentary they embody, the novel features a narrator who goes against what Western society has come to expect of a mother. Eva’s failure to comply with the one gender expectation that is so intrinsically linked to womanhood, namely being a good and loving mother, and her worry that because of this there is “something wrong with [her], something missing” (Shriver 31), is what lies at the heart of this novel: the unsuccessful attempts of a woman to fulfil the expectations that come with her being a woman. Reluctant to become a mother in the first place, she fails to give her son even the slightest of chances; imposing her prejudices and fears on him from the moment she lays eyes on him. She sees his refusal to drink from her breast as a conscious rejection and, despite him being only a newborn, continues to paint a picture of a baby that is more devil than child. It is as Eva herself says: “Expectations are dangerous when they are both too high and unformed” (Shriver 95). The book was Shriver’s seventh novel and the first to gain any traction. With a background in journalism, she struggled to find her audience after her first six novels failed to attract much attention or readership (Shute). To this day, We Need to Talk About Kevin is Shriver’s only truly successful book.
Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl was first published in 2012 and became an instant bestseller. It was the first out of Flynn’s three thrillers to truly become successful, as predecessors Sharp
Objects and Dark Places both failed to attract much attention. Starting out as a journalist, she
husband for failing to live up to the expectations she holds of marriage. Alternating between the narratives of two rather horrible people, the book is a social commentary on gender roles and brings forth one of the most unapologetically evil female narrators ever found in literature.
Whereas both Atonement and We Need to Talk About Kevin were well received, neither enjoyed the success Gone Girl did. The book spent eight weeks on the #1 spot of the
New York Times Hardcover Fiction Bestseller list, selling 2 million copies within its first year
as a wife (as illustrated by the infamous Cool Girl speech discussed in Chapter Three of this dissertation) seem to have opened the eyes of at least a portion of the public, for better and for worse. Flynn voices a desire that has resonated with the many fans of the book by saying:
Isn’t it time to acknowledge the ugly side? I’ve grown quite weary of the spunky heroines, brave rape victims, soul-searching fashionistas that stock so many books. I particularly mourn the lack of female villains --- good, potent female villains. Not ill-tempered women who scheme about landing good men and better shoes (as if we had nothing more interesting to war over), not chilly WASP mothers (emotionally distant isn’t necessarily evil), not soapy vixens (merely bitchy doesn’t qualify either). I’m talking violent, wicked women. Scary women. Don’t tell me you don’t know some. The point is, women have spent so many years girl-powering ourselves --- to the point of almost parodic encouragement --- we’ve left no room to acknowledge our dark side. Dark sides are important (Flynn, "I Was Not")
The recent success of Gone Girl seems to have instigated a craze similar to the dystopian young adult hype sparked by novels such as The Hunger Games and Divergent, resulting in novels with female unreliable narrators being on the rise. The emergence and popularity of books such as Paula Hawkins’ The Girl on the Train and Lynn Weingarten’s Suicide Notes
from Beautiful Girls, which both feature twisted female unreliable narrators, shows a new
taste for unapologetically evil women, who are allowed to go against the grain and rebel against the expectations of their gender, being more than the mere stereotypes they might seem to be at first glance.
Nünning (introduced in Chapter One of this dissertation), Riggan’s categorizing approach has potential for a differentiation between male and female unreliable narrators. As explained by Carolyn M. Byerly in the first chapter of The Handbook of Gender, Sex, and Media, “[f]eminist theory has typically been built in one of two ways: by adapting existing general theories (most developed by male scholars) to build in a gender dimension or by posing a new theory to specifically explain an existing or new woman-related problem” (Byerly, “The Geography of Women” 15). This dissertation sets out to do the former, adding a female dimension to the existing theories on unreliability and its causes. In doing so, I add on to these theories, studying the self-awareness of these female narrators and the way their identity often depends on their relationships to others. I examine the stereotypes that come with these identities as mothers, sisters and wives, and whether these female identities change the way a female narrator’s unreliability manifests itself. The question is whether and how gender expectations play a role in the (perceived) unreliability of a female unreliable character. Are the narrators aware of the expectations the intended audience might have and do they use these expectations to influence them?
every one of these theories, they are still an important part of the thesis as they provide me with the necessary vocabulary and information to analyse the three novels in the final chapters. Their inclusion also underlines the focus on male narrators in the current body of research. The theoretical framework of this dissertation is built around Riggan’s categorization, which identifies certain stereotyping characteristics of the different unreliable narrators present in both classic and modern literature. While these categories can be applied to the female narrators I analysed in this dissertation, they are too constricting for women and simplify what these narrators set out to do in their discourses. While analysing three consciously written autobiographies, in the form of a fictional novel, a collection of diary entries and an epistolary, I noticed the necessity of a second level of categorization that names the gender roles and expectations the female narrators are linked to. Riggan’s categories have proven too narrow to be applied to the self-aware female unreliable narrators, as their sense of identity is derived from their relationships to others as much as it is from them being women.
Whereas the first chapter focuses on the theory on unreliable narrators, the second chapter explores feminist notions of gender roles and expectations that surround womanhood and female narrators in general. I discuss feminist scholars such as Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler, both widely regarded as authorities on gender and gender performativity, to form the basic understanding of gender expectations upon which the next three chapters are built. Analysis of the three novels shows that all three narrators are aware of certain expectations and stereotypes, actively assuming certain gender roles and using them in their discourses as well as commenting on them within their narratives. This chapter serves to give an understanding of existing gender stereotypes in literature as well as in media and in real life. It is these gender roles and consequent gender expectations that are examined in the chapters analysing Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Lionel Shriver’s
I. Unreliable Narrators: Theories
The Unreliable Narrative
unreliability as a breech between the norms of the author and the narrator. His examples of unreliability include characters that are simply mistaken or who have a different idea about themselves as their author does. The little variety between his examples shows Booth datedness: he published his theory before modern authors truly started to experiment with unreliable narrators who purposefully mess with the audience. There is little to no room for consciously unreliable narrators, who chose to change their story to mess with the reader.
determine the narrative audience, Rabinowitz poses the question of “What sort of person would I have to pretend to be—what would I have to know and believe—if I wanted to take this work of fiction as real?” (128). This does as far as abandoning one’s beliefs and adapting new ones which one knows to be untruthful in the world of the reader, just so one is able to read certain science-fiction or fantasy books. This is where the fourth part of the models comes into play: the “ideal narrative audience”. This narrative audience accepts what the narrator is saying, allowing them to actively join the narrative. The deeper meaning, which can only be interpreted by the actual audience, lies somewhere in the gap between actual audience and narrative audience, and in the way the author has managed to bridge this gap.
Keeping in mind this model of different audiences, Rabinowitz has added a dimension to the debate about unreliable narrators. Unlike in Booth’s theory, a distinction between real and fictional has to be made, as “an unreliable narrator […] is not simply a narrator who 'does not tell the truth'” (Rabinowitz 133). He defines an unreliable narrator as someone “who tells lies, conceals information, misjudges with respect to the narrative audience – that is, one whose statements are untrue not by the standards of the real world or of the authorial audience but by the standards of his own narrative audience” (Rabinowitz 133). There are no “real” narrators, as they all exist within a fictional world, but he does recognize a distinction between fictional narrators who lie and fictional narrators who tell the truth within their narratives.
Focussing mainly on individual personalities, William Riggan set apart four different types of unreliable narrators in his 1981 study Picaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns: The
Unreliable First-Person Narrator. Like the studies of Booth, Rabinowitz and Phelan, his
exaggeration and bragging and it is from this that his unreliability stems. His discourse diverges from the story through embellishments and lies that are meant to make him look better, with the truth taking a backseat. This type of character is seen in Daniel Defoe’s 1722 novel Moll Flanders, in which the eponymous Moll is less than trustworthy in her recalling of her life, choosing to embellish her already tumultuous and wicked story when she recounts it to her husband at the close of her life (Riggan 62).
The second type Riggan recognizes is that of the madman, which is one of the most common types of unreliable narrators. As the name suggests, madman characters find their trustworthiness lacking because of a mental affliction, albeit a mental defence mechanism after a trauma or a mental illness. While the madman might not set out to be unreliable, it is possible that they are not aware of their unreliability themselves. In Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight
Club, the narrator turns out to be a separate personality of one of the characters, created to
escape his increasingly chaotic life. The merging of narrator and unstable Tyler fills the gaps in the earlier narrative, showing it was mental illness that caused the unreliability. While more ambivalent, Yann Martel’s Life of Pi shows a similarly disturbed narrator, who relays his story in a certain way to escape a great trauma.
differences between discourse and story as well as to actually distinguish the story within the narrative. It is fairly easy to identify naïfs such as Forrest Gump in Winston Groom’s novel by the same name, as their values can differ greatly from those of the intended or actual reader.
The clown is probably the most deliberate out of all of Riggan’s types, setting out to mess with the implied audiences and not caring about the integrity of his narrative. He plays games with the reader, enjoying the confusion and the irregularities. Its origin can be traced back to the courtly fools of Ancient Greece, who had to earn their keep by amusing the masters of the house. Their stories were often embellished, either to make them more interesting or to poke fun of one of the guests present (Riggan 79). This eventually evolved into the subtler clowns found in literature, most notably Tristram Shandy in Laurence Sterne’s
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, published between 1759 and 1767
(Riggan 84). Part of the selling point of the novels is the fact that Tristram is not able to stop straying from his own narrative, adding context to everything he says (Riggan 86). He has no intentions to be untruthful, apart from embellishing his tale for the amusement of the people reading his tale.
Determining Narrational Unreliability
Most literary theorists recognize two different approaches to determining and explaining narrational unreliability, namely the rhetorical approach and the constructivist/cognivist approach. Most research falls within the former category, which follows Booths’ original framework that defines unreliability as a rhetorical device. This field of study relies heavily on the idea of the implied author, a term coined by Booth to refer to the virtual author of a text, upon whom the reader might project certain characteristics and values during and after the reading of a text (Booth 71). The gap between implied author and extradiegetic narrator is usually fairly limited, but most of the research concerning unreliable narrators is done on stories with homodiegetic first-person narrators, for which it is up to the reader to decide whether or not their norms match up with those of the implied author. The unreliable nature of the narrator is encoded in the text by the implied author for the implied reader to decode, thus creating a narrative distance between narrator and implied author (Booth 300-9). Seymour Chatman focuses on the distinction between story and discourse as the main indicator of unreliability, as he argues that the problematic personality types as described by Riggan are just one of multiple possible causes for unreliability. This approach does focus mainly on the narrator’s false reporting of the story, which is picked up on by the implied reader through inference (Chatman 233). A certain amount of knowledge is necessary for the reader to be able to pick up on the distinction between story and discourse and on the way the story undermines the discourse. Once the reader has recognized this, “the implied author has established a secret communication with the implied reader” (Chatman 233).
unreliability, divided over two main categories. According to him, unreliability can be cause by misreporting, misinterpreting or misevaluating, as well as by underreporting, underinterpreting and underevaluating. The main distinction between the mis- and under- categories is the narrator either being wrong or insufficiently knowledgeable (Phelan 49-53). It is possible for a narrator not to have any evil intentions, with his unreliability stemming from a lack of knowledge or experience. Phelan’s categories are fluid: some narrators are reliable in one way and unreliable in others, as they can report the story correctly but completely misinterpret it. Intent is not important for this classification, though Greta Olson does distinguish between fallible and untrustworthy narrators. In her research, fallible narrators are made unreliable by external circumstances, while others are unreliable by disposition. She recognizes a less black-and-white distinction between reliable and unreliable, explaining that “[a]t one end of the spectrum, untrustworthy narrators contradict themselves immediately or announce outright that they are insane. At the other end, readers are required to do more "detective" work to determine whether a narrator is trustworthy or not” (Olson 104), leaving the reader to decide. This changes the reader’s perception of these narrators: Olsen claims that characters that are purposefully unreliable are met with scepticism, while narrators who simply fail to mention all information are thought of with more sympathy (Olson 104-5). It should be noted that Booth uses the words ‘unreliable’, ‘fallible’ and ‘untrustworthy’ interchangeably and that most theorists follow his framework rather than Olson’s distinction.
the implied reader will not share his values and ethics, and thus tries to close the gap between narrator and reader. In doing so, his ethics clash with those of the implied author, who is presumed not to be a predatory paedophile.
As opposed to Phelan’s subtypes of unreliability, Per Krogh Hansen recognizes four different types that are not limited to the level of the narrator within the story. First of all, he defines intranarrational unreliability as unreliability within a single discourse. In this case, the narrator suggests unreliability by contradicting himself as well as contradicting the implied authors. With internarrational unreliability, contrasts between multiple narratives can prove a narrator unreliable, as there are different versions of a story. This, however, does not prove which narrator is unreliable. Intertextual unreliability takes it to a textual level, comparing the features of a text to other texts as well as looking at certain conventions such as the character types mentioned by Riggan. Certain knowledge of the world is necessary to recognize this unreliability. Finally, extratextual unreliability depends almost fully on the reader and the knowledge they bring to the text as they interpret it. As opposed to the other types, there is a shift in focus from text to reader, allowing for multiple interpretations as people have different sets of norms and values (Hansen 241–44). Rimmon-Kenan adds onto this, giving clashes between narrators and characters, contradictions between narrator’s views and facts, gaps between outcomes and false earlier reports and internal contradictions as extra signs of unreliability (Rimmon-Kenan 7-8).
genre that deviate from reality, as opposed to existential, which are incongruities rooted within the canon of the fictional world. Functional incongruities serve a creative end and are necessary for the story, while perspectival incongruities are the product of a narrator’s unreliable observations (Yacobi 119). Yacobi’s organising mechanism seems to encompass the whole rhetorical approach in one single element, but her mechanisms are all alternatives instead of complementing. They are more general ways of dealing with oddities in a text and when there is an obvious unreliable narrator in a text, most constructivists use the rhetorical approach for further research.
II. The Female (Unreliable) Narrator
In her 1949 book The Second Sex, Simone de Beauvoir said: "One is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (320). The Second Sex, which is a staple of feminist theory to this day, sheds light on the treatment of women throughout history, commenting on the expectations and limitations that come with being female. De Beauvoir’s notion that feminine identity is not a natural fact but a learned behaviour is supported by Judith Butler, who lay down the foundation for gender performativity in her book Gender Trouble. Butler explains how De Beauvoir “clearly underscores the distinction between sex, as biological facticity, and gender, as the cultural interpretation or signification of that facticity” (Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” 522). Recognizing the difference between biological sex and gender, Butler defines gender as “embodying certain cultural and historical possibilities” (Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” 521), meaning that the gender roles that come with womanhood are man-made, forced upon women by their society. Gender is “instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self” (Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” 521). She even goes as far as comparing the performative nature of gender to that of the theatre, insinuating that certain acts associated with womanhood such as bearing and caring for a child are merely compliance to gender roles, instead of being something inherently human. Distinctive genders “are part of what 'humanizes' individuals within contemporary culture; indeed, those who fail to do their gender right are regularly punished” (Butler, “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” 522).
thinking about stories” (Campbell 145). These myths were already deemed more important and more interesting than the stories of the women, illustrated by the fact that fairy tales—or old wives tales—are traditionally meant for children. This is further emphasized when listing
a corresponding set of essentially feminine problems: resolving the "Electra" problem; establishing feminine identity (among other things, coming to understand and accept the fluctuations of the menstrual cycle and resolving conflicts of power with the mother); entering into an appropriate marriage; acting as a mother (this entails resolving one's own desire for oral gratification, resolving fears concerning child birth, accepting the responsibilities of rearing a child? Or redefining the role so that the task of rearing will be shared by others? Or even choosing not to undertake the task of mothering); accepting the private sphere as the appropriate one (or redefining woman's role so that an accommodation can be made between public and private); and dealing with loss of beauty and with menopause. (Griffin Wolf 206)
The majority of these problems deal with women in relation to others, with these others being husbands, children, society as a whole and other women. The concept of motherhood itself erases every notion of self from a woman, turning her into something to serve her child (De Beauvoir 340). These feminine problems have a principal function to aide the male narrative, with little room for more extensive characterizations. Traditionally, these problems and their definitions were created by men. In a world where men dominate both the literary and the scholarly world, their influence is felt all throughout the creation, consummation and study of literature, thus making it so that
is carefully chosen so that certain types of masculine behavior (toward women and toward the world in general) might be justified. The stereotypes of women vary, but they vary in response to different masculine needs. The flattering frequency with which women appear in literature is ultimately deluding: they appear not as they are, certainly not as they would define themselves, but as conveniences to the resolution of masculine dilemmas. (Griffin Wolf 207) The majority of literature current and past concerning unreliable narratives focuses primarily on male narrators, mainly because these narrators are allowed to transcend the label of ‘man’. They are not limited by their maleness, nor are they limited because of their maleness. A common element in most studies on unreliable narrators seems to be the need to classify, to group and to name, with clear definitions to support their explained framework. Building on top of this, it comes natural to me to classify the female narrators in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl, Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk about Kevin into their respective gender roles, namely those of the mother, the wife and the child or the sister. It is these gender roles society places upon them at the moment of their birth and it is these gender roles that will constrict them until they die (De Beauvoir 340). Whereas Riggan uses a rather restrictive classification to set out the different types of what are mostly male narrators, I have found his pigeonholing to be too confining yet too simple when applied to women. Riggan’s distinction is added on top of a single defining term: ‘man’. This term brings with it the freedom to be whoever these narrators want to be. Women, and thus female narrators, are victim to a much more constraining set of expectations and gender roles that first manifest themselves when they are but little girls. As explained by Butler, “to be a woman is to have
become a woman, to compel the body to conform to an historical idea of 'woman,' to induce
“Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” 522). Both society and literature have a way of relating women to others: they are daughters, sisters, wives and mothers before they are anything else. Simone de Beauvoir even goes as far as to claim that to some people, a woman is merely “a womb, an ovary; she is a female: this word is enough to define her” (De Beauvoir 41). The female narrators discussed in this thesis all transcend this bleak definition, yet their femininity lies at the heart of their narratives as they utilize the existing gender roles to their advantages. With these labels come restrictions as well as expectations: Eva, the narrator in We Need to Talk about Kevin, makes sure to let her audience know “[she has] no end of failings as a mother, but [she has] always followed the rules” (Shriver 46). The audience, whether actual or narrative, has certain expectations of the narrator, which are shared by the characters within the narrative.
III. The Sister
The narrative of Briony Tallis in Ian McEwan’s Atonement might seem as the odd one out in this analysis. As opposed to Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk
about Kevin, the novel is told from a third-person limited point of view, meaning that the
most far-reaching. Her incentive was to give her sister and Robbie the happiness they deserved, but also to finally make right her lies and bring justice to Paul and Lola Marshall – even if only in death, as she has made a deal with her publishers not to publish the novel until all the characters are dead.
equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding, above all, it was the failure to grasp the simple truth that other people are as real as you” (McEwan 40).
about Robbie’s innocence. Was Marshall the rapist, or did she make up the incriminating scenes later to make sure there was no doubt about it this time? The fact that Briony was but an unknowing child when these events happened, shows that she took creative license in many of the scenes concerning her childhood.
It is established early on in the novel that Briony is not quite the innocent child the characters within the narrative believe her to be. The fact that she is a writer is an important part of this: she has shaped the story in a way that both tells the truth and gives some sort of afterlife. Already as a child she had the idea of having three different perspectives on the same event, which is exactly what she ended up writing in this novel. The story has a certain unnatural symmetry to it: it starts and ends with the first play she had ever written, though it is only performed in the final chapter. It is exactly this kind of symmetry that Briony admired in the work of Virginia Woolf in the novel. Atonement starts with Briony not quite realising that other people are as real as she is, and it seems that she still has not grasped this as an old lady. Her unreliability goes beyond simply being a naïf child: it roots in her identity as a writer, who tries to shape the story in such a way that she is forgiven for all the wrong she has done. Her final wish, “a final act of kindness, a stand against oblivion and despair” (McEwan 371) appears to be something intrinsically innocent and female, which according to De Beauvoir is a learned behaviour she has picked up over the course of her life.
being left to her own devices too much. Set just before the First World War, the novel features social norms for women that are a lot more restricting than they are now. Women are taught to be docile and well mannered, ultimately aspiring to marry well and become a mother (De Beauvoir 343). Emily Tallis, Briony’s mother, is aware of these gender norms, yet her debilitating migraines stop her from actually enforcing them when it comes to her daughters. Briony’s sister Cecilia has just come back from Cambridge, where she was not allowed to receive a proper degree on account of her gender, with “no job or skill and still […] a husband to find and motherhood to confront” (McEwan 65). As argued by Simone de Beauvoir, “[o]ne is not born, but rather becomes, woman” (De Beauvoir 320), meaning that the gender expectations and gender behaviours defined as ‘gender performativity’ by Judith Butler are a learned thing. Teachers and society impose femininity and young Briony has not yet learned how to be the woman she is expected to be. She eventually is given a true example of grown-up femininity in the form of her cousin Lola, who has mastered the art of being a woman, but this results in resistance instead of admiration, Indeed, Lola has already assumed the role of mother to her two little brothers, but the other adults still see her as the sister of the twins and the daughter of Briony’s aunt. Lola does fit the expectations that come with her gender, consequently strengthening Briony’s claim against Robbie and underlining the importance of gender roles in reliability.
her into the opposite of a docile little girl, yet in her old age, it is this relative innocence that Briony tries to emphasise. Trying to take away some of the blame, she twists the story into something believable even if she has been proven to be a liar. Society dictates that the innocence of little girls makes them trustworthy, even if the little girl in question is an aspiring novelist with a vivid imagination.
IV. The Wife
There is no doubt possible about the unreliability of Gone Girl’s protagonist and narrator Amy Dunne, who, halfway through the book, admits to having fabricated her diary to fool her audience into thinking her husband killed her. The story is told through alternating perspectives: the first half of the novel alternates Amy’s diary entries with the first-person point of view of her husband Nick. Once it is revealed that Amy has faked her own disappearance and murder, her story continues in a similar first-person point of view, though it is no longer a diary. The comparison between writer Amy and writer Briony is a straightforward one: both women use their imagination to twist their pasts into something beneficial to them. Amy’s intentions and truthfulness, however, are much easier to determine than Briony’s. Whereas Briony hid behind the naive misinterpretations and gender expectations linked to her young age and relative innocence at the time, Gone Girl is one long example of how a woman can use the stereotypes and gender expectations placed upon her both by society and her fellow characters to twist and deceive, skilfully creating her own discourse. Briony’s story had the sole intention of righting past wrongs and absolving herself from blame, but Amy adds another dimension to her narrative: that of placing the blame elsewhere by manipulating her audience.
audience. She is very much aware of the stereotypes that come with being a woman, realizing that her identity is created by her relationships to others. The fact that she is married makes people see her as a wife instead of her own person. As explained by Simone de Beauvoir, “[m]arriage is the reference by which the single woman is defined, whether she is frustrated by, disgusted at, or even indifferent to this institution” (502). She shows a very thorough understanding of the gender roles women are expected to adhere to and the expectations and prejudices that accompany them. As illustrated by her illustrious Cool Girl speech—the single most quoted part of both novel and subsequent film adaptation—she is aware of the performance needed for women to fit into the mould American society dictates. It is as she explains:
Men always say that as the defining compliment, don’t they? She’s a cool girl. Being the Cool Girl means I am a hot, brilliant, funny woman who adores football, poker, dirty jokes, and burping, who plays video games, drinks cheap beer, loves threesomes and anal sex, and jams hot dogs and hamburgers into her mouth like she’s hosting the world’s biggest culinary gang bang while somehow maintaining a size 2, because Cool Girls are above all hot. Hot and understanding. Cool Girls never get angry; they only smile in a chagrined, loving manner and let their men do whatever they want. Go ahead, shit on me,
I don’t mind, I’m the Cool Girl. (Flynn, Gone Girl 299-300)
spends half a novel creating a complete and total lie, she becomes what seems almost painfully honest in the latter half. There is no more room for doubt concerning her unreliability: she has presented herself as a girl whose identity is based on her reproductive, domestic and matrimonial roles (De Beauvoir 503), confirming to what she believes is how society expects her to behave. As Nick’s wife, she “takes his name; […] integrates into his class, his world; she belongs to his family, she become his other “half” […] she is annexed to her husband’s universe; she gives him her person” (De Beauvoir 506). While it is later revealed that she does none of these things willingly, internally refusing to submit to Nick, she pretends to comply with what is expected of her a woman. She creates her own identity in relation to her husband and her parents, utilizing the expectations that come with this identity. Her diary entries tell a story meant to incriminate her husband, turning her into some sort of saint in the progress. Amy uses the stereotypes and expectations that come with her gender and her position as a wife to craft her own story, successfully fooling most of the characters in the book.
gender performativity is still present in modern day society. The novel plays strongly on the stereotypes and expectations so often seen in American media and entertainment, having Amy hide behind them to fool the intended audience. As explained in the novel, “Cool Girl [has become] the standard girl. Men [believe] she exist[s] – she [i]sn’t just a dreamgirl one in a million. Every girl [i]s supposed to this girl, and if you [a]ren’t, then there [i]s something wrong with you” (Flynn, Gone Girl 301). To prove her point, Amy has no problem throwing her friends under the bus, laughing at their nagging and their attempts to turn their husbands into the dancing monkeys Amy so desperately yet secretly wants Nick to be. She recognizes a communal shallowness to women, to the point where any complexity is seen as undesirable. Amy is aware of this, using it to her advantage to shape the entire narrative the way she wants it. She paints herself as the victim—and her audience believes her, as demonstrated by Nick’s struggle to clear his name and not get the death penalty for the apparent murder on his spouse. Amy pretends to be a fun, accommodating girl who is eventually forced into that other stereotype so often seen both in fiction and in real life: that of the battered wife.
whose knowledge of how to deal with being a person of interest in a murder investigation self-confessedly stems from TV dramas, the police are quick to believe the clichés. The fact that Nick is exactly a decent guy either does not help him, but only few people suspect the complexity of his dainty, pretty and blond wife. It is only Detective Boney—one of the only female characters aside from Amy—who bothers to look beyond the plausible web of lies Amy has spun.
V. The Mother
We Need to Talk About Kevin’s Eva Katchadurian’s unreliability is the least obvious out of all
three narrators discussed in this paper, as it merely suggested by small discrepancies and bigger assumptions about what it means to be a (good) mother. Her struggle is with the preconceived notions society has about motherhood as well as parental responsibility after a disastrous event caused by her own child. Eva’s unreliability is subtle, making it near impossible to classify her using something as restrictive as Riggan’s classification. Except for the revelation that her husband, to whom she has been addressing her letters, has been murdered by Kevin, there is no sudden realization or eye-opening moment where the reader is made aware of the lies in the narrative. Whereas both Briony and Amy comment on their varying levels of conscious deceitfulness, Eva clings to the story she is recounting to her audience till the end, dropping nothing but mere hints about her questionable credibility. To be able to fully determine her unreliability, it is necessary to look at her personal values and compare them to the values of the intended audience. There is a gap between Eva’s idea of motherhood and the values generally attributed to women, as noted by Simone de Beauvoir in
The Second Sex. Her struggle is with what is imposed onto her as being human nature, and the
way her society views motherhood. She tries to escape from the expectations that come with her gender, both as a character and as a narrator, being aware of the performativity that comes with her identity as a mother and as a woman.
With the occurrence of nineteen school shootings between Columbine and 2003 (Timeline of Worldwide School and Mass Shootings), when We Need to Talk About Kevin was first published, there is an extra layer of topicality that is added to Kevin as a character. With an abundance of sociopathic, antisocial loners making headlines, it takes no stretch of the imagination for both intended and actual audiences to recognize Kevin as such. Eva’s problem with the fact that she has a murderer for a son is part of the problem that lies at the heart of this novel: does a mother fail when she does not love her child? Her surroundings certainly think so: she is blamed for her son’s cruelty, regardless of whether it was her fault of not. In her 1893 essay “Good and Bad Mothers”, Amelia E. Barr illustrates the mentality of Eva’s environment, claiming that “[t]he difference between good and bad mothers is so vast and so far-reaching that it is no exaggeration to say that the good mothers of this generation are building the homes of the next generation, and that the bad mothers are building the prisons” (Barr 408). Eva’s identity as a narrator stems from her identity as a mother, having fulfilled the expectations that come with being a woman. Womanhood as a gender “is instituted through the stylization of the body and, hence, must be understood as the mundane way in which bodily gestures, movements and enactments of various kinds constitute the illusion of an abiding gendered self” (Butler, "Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” 519). This display of performative arts, as defined by Judith Butler in her book Gender
Trouble, is bound by society, which dictates certain acts as part of the gender expectations.
ineluctably to strangers’ strollers in parks” (Shriver 31). It is this honesty that first raises a spark of doubt, especially when those motherly feelings are painfully absent even when Kevin is born: “I had dismally failed us and our newborn baby. … I was, frankly, a freak" (Shriver 98). Despite her story being defined by her being a mother, it is also one of the things she fears most initially. Before Kevin is born, before there is even any talk of having a child, she expresses her fears of becoming what she expects a mother to be like.
These expectations are similar to the ones defined by De Beauvoir, namely those of the mother who is merely part of her son’s narrative instead of being her own person, with her own problems and joys (De Beauvoir 597). It is as Eva explains:
So I wasn’t only afraid of becoming my mother, but a mother. I was afraid of being the steadfast, stationary anchor who provides a jumping off place for another young adventurer whose travels I might envy and whose future is still unmoored and unmapped. (Shriver 37)
nature, her husband embraces fatherhood with all the expectations that come with it. His compliance as a character to what is expected of him both by society and by the stereotypes of literature serves to contrast Eva, who is slightly annoyed with his all-American, boys-will-be-boys attitude. Franklin is the nurturing parent, yet he does not inhabit the typically female characteristics of a caregiver. His plans for Kevin include baseball games and museums, making him perform as American society has prescribed a father should perform with his son. He is deaf to his wife’s complaints and warnings, seemingly failing to see the signs Eva sees. This clash between husband and wife lies at the heart of the debate whether or not Eva is telling the truth. Her discourse, which goes on to emphasize Franklin’s carefreeness time after time, is full of stereotypes and expectations, yet it is unclear how big the gap between discourse and story truly is. Where Franklin confirms to what is expected of him as a father, Eva fails to meet these expectations and it makes her wonder over and over again whether she herself is to blame for this failure, or whether there truly is something very, very wrong with her son.
When dissecting We Need to Talk About Kevin from the perspective of the intended and actual audiences, the most important thing to note is Eva’s complete contempt for something society has come to believe as inherently female. Women are seen as primarily mothers, with motherhood being their “natural vocation” (De Beauvoir 597)—something Eva is painfully aware of. Her narrative is one that goes against nature itself, yet what she believes to be unnatural is overshadowed by the brutality and insanity of her son. It is with Kevin that the audience can truly find the hints of unreliability: Eva paints such a dark and twisted picture of him that one is left to wonder whether she is projecting her own sense of failure onto him, or whether she has truly spawned the devil himself. The deep hatred Eva appears to feel for her child feels unnatural to an audience that is used to hearing that motherly love is unconditional. In a day and age where America is plagued by kids shooting up schools, it would seem more likely for Kevin to be as troubled as he is than it would be for Eva to be covering up her own failures as a mother and a woman. It is too difficult to separate her from her role as a mother: had she been anyone else, there would have been significantly less doubt concerning her story.
Conclusion
Much has been written about unreliable narrators, for the most part defaulting to male ones. As argued by Simone de Beauvoir, it is men who dominate the world and thus most of literature (350), which explains why most of the theories pertain or deal with male unreliable narrators. Female unreliable narrators differ starkly from male ones, both in the way they are researched and in the way they are perceived in as well as out of their narratives. Whereas male narrators can be classified by a system based on individual characteristics created by Riggan in his book Pícaros, Madmen, Naïfs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-person
Narrator, female unreliable narrators are bound by an extra dimension of gender expectations
and stereotypes that come with their womanhood. While the theories of Booth, Rabinowitz, Nünning and Chatman serve as a good framework for understanding the unreliable narrator, they lack the gender dimension necessary to satisfactorily apply them to female narrators. Adding the feminist theories of Simone de Beauvoir and Judith Butler concerning gender roles, gender expectations and stereotypes allows for a more fitting categorization, shedding light onto the way these women embrace and use the expectations society has of them.
killed her, Briony changes history to atone for a mistake she made as a child and Eva tries to make sense of the massacre her son instigated as well as her own feelings of guilt and repulsion towards motherhood as a whole.
The most important thing these three narrators have in common was the fact that they had all wronged someone in varying degrees, breaking away from the historical image of the ‘ideal’ woman. Their narratives are part of their crime, whether in retrospect or as part of the plan to incriminate a cheating husband, and so the way they portray themselves within their narratives serves an ultimate goal. Briony sets out to atone for a lie she told as a child, while also giving the people she wronged a happy ending within her narrative. Eva tries to come to terms with her complete lack of maternal instincts and her consequent neglect of her murderous son, as well as trying to explain what went wrong to her husband. Amy writes her fabricated diary to fake her own disappearance, trying to set up her husband for a murder that never happened. To reach their respective goals, they all assume the gender roles society has placed upon them, either emphasizing them to hide behind, or forcefully rejecting to find absolution and get rid of a crippling guilt. Amy and Briony act in accordance with the way their surroundings see them, portraying themselves as the docile wife and innocent child, respectively, so they are able to hide their true natures and intentions. Eva rejects motherhood, placing the blame with something outside of her control instead of her own failure. They purposefully link their narratives to the people around them, gracefully accepting the gender roles so that no one will care to look beyond what is expected of them as women.
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