Mad, bad and dangerous to know : a post-Jungian feminist analysis of domestic noir's antiheroine

This thesis employs contemporary psychoanalytic Jungian theory and postfeminist scholarship to examine the representation of complex female psychologies within the popular genre of domestic noir fiction. As a subgenre of psychological suspense and thriller fiction, domestic noir depicts the home and the workplace as dangerously challenging arenas, where intimate relationships rest on an essentially threatening unknowability, and female protagonists are portrayed as flawed antiheroines; typically unreliable, unlikable, and often traumatized. Thus, domestic noir offers a potentially ideal literary avenue for psychologically nuanced female characterization, as opposed to more established, traditional crime and thriller categories. However, a carefully selected literature review reveals that many of the genre’s creative works reveal a tendency for emotionally damaged and angry women to be deemed stereotypically ‘mad’, which, I argue, undermines narrative plausibility, while diminishing the imaginative scope, authenticity, and feminist potential of the fictional antiheroine.
Incorporating an exegetical exploration of the ways in which domestic noir frames the female psyche, and a creative work which consciously foregrounds two emotionally damaged women who are nevertheless not mentally unstable, the thesis is comprised of two parts, effectively in conversation with each other.
The exegesis integrates close readings and comparative critical analysis of bestselling domestic noir novels, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Sarah Vaughan’s Anatomy of a Scandal, with psychoanalyst Sue Austin’s concept of women’s aggressive energies, post-Jungian frameworks, and feminist cultural theory concerning the issue of female likeability. It posits that an absence of psychopathology enables domestic noir’s female protagonists to retain self-agency by experiencing and expressing negative thoughts and feelings without collapsing into criminal violence. In turn, this enables the antiheroine to thrive beyond the traditional female tropes of the thriller, which so often present women as confined and disempowered by their anger.
The creative component takes the form of a novel, Catherine Wheel, which investigates the character of the flawed antiheroine by exploring the complex psychological impact of narcissistic abuse on two very different women. Set in an English landscape animated by ancient legends of brutality, as well as sacred fertility rites, the story is driven by questions concerning the ongoing legacy of trauma, the threshold between emotional damage and mental instability, and the role of psychological projection within a psychological suspense narrative. Informed by psychoanalytic concepts and experiential understanding from my work as a psychotherapist, it aims to depict complex negative female psychology as distinct from psychopathology, and to consciously construct a progressive, intricate, and authentic narrative space for female interiority. In this way, the novel both inhabits and refuses established generic confines, demanding that new territory be opened up for the expression and exploration of what Austin calls ‘undiscussable’ female thoughts and feelings.