Dead Girls, Female Murderers, and Megan Abbott’s Novel “Give Me Your Hand”

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From The New Yorker:

In part thanks to “Dead Girls,” a provocative essay collection by Alice Bolin, but also thanks to the endless stream of entertainment focussed on dead girls, from “Law & Order: Special Victims Unit” to “Serial” to “The Night Of,” we find ourselves in the midst of a conversation about the Dead Girl. (She’s not just any dead girl. Usually, she is white, straight, and cisgender; young and beautiful; not poor.) This problematic and tantalizing figure has inspired two poles of reaction, outlined in an essay in the Paris Review Daily, by Emma Copley Eisenberg. On one side are writers like Bolin, who argue that murdered women tend to emerge as blank canvases for the psychologies of the men around them. Victims become passive sites of violence, haunting absences, brutalized and sexualized abstractions. In their voicelessness, their post-mortem reduction to their bodies, they serve as unsettling reminders of what certain ideals of femininity look like when carried to the extreme. On the other side of the argument are those who believe that Dead Girl stories might be necessary—that they shed light on deeply entrenched problems of misogyny and sexism.

The novelist Megan Abbott is among the genre’s conflicted champions. In an essay for the Los Angeles Times, she ascribes some of the power of Dead Girl narratives, and of crime tales in general, to “that intense identification between reader and victim.” Dead Girl stories, she suggests, are far from pulpy escapism; they have become “the place women can go to read about the dark, messy stuff of their lives that they’re not supposed to talk about—domestic abuse, serial predation, sexual assault, troubled family lives, conflicted feelings about motherhood, the weight of trauma, partner violence, and the myriad ways the justice system can fail, and silence, women.”

In her fiction, though, Abbott is often more interested in female murderers. Her newest book, “Give Me Your Hand,” traces the relationship between two talented chemists, Kit and Diane, who were close as teen-agers but stopped speaking after Diane entrusted Kit with a secret, a “vile, howling thing.” The women are reunited, a decade later, in the lab of the exacting, glamorous Dr. Lena Severin, a pioneer of research into premenstrual dysphoric disorder (P.M.D.D.), in which the symptoms of premenstrual syndrome are amplified to debilitating levels. The condition comes to symbolize a “dark continent” of femininity, a territory that Kit and Diane compete to survey.

. . . .

The novel inverts tropes of female victimhood with campy gusto. (In high school, Kit rejects Ophelia, the drowned maiden with flowers in her hair, as a role model. Too inert, she decides. Hamlet is a better fit.) A toxin slipped into prepared food, a contamination not only of the meal but of the romance of domestic care, serves as a murder weapon. So does glass cracked under pressure, something delicate and shining made lethal by intense stress. This dynamic is at play within Diane herself, who embodies feminine fragility and power at once. “It felt like you could hurt her just by looking at her,” Kit thinks, “or you could never hurt her at all.” As teen-agers, Kit and Diane ran cross-country; like the cheerleaders and gymnasts in previous Abbott mysteries, and like the workaholic scientists that they will become, they endured pain and deprivation in order to achieve. Just as success at élite levels is impossible without sacrifice, Abbott slyly hints, the sweetness, the impossible innocence, of femininity entails a dark seam.

. . . .

Take, by contrast, another recent pop-culture murderess, Villanelle, of the BBC’s “Killing Eve,” a series that attempts, like Abbott, to refract the thriller through a feminist lens. Villanelle is a female killer who shares almost nothing in common with the Dead Girl. The unquestioned star of her own story, she luxuriates in some facets of her femininity, while shrugging off the parts that don’t suit. She relishes clothes, has opinions about hair, flings her body around her enviably dilapidated French apartment, wolfs down bruschetta, crams her refrigerator with champagne. She commits murder via perfume, gun, knife, or whatever else she feels like. If someone, like an overconfident fellow-assassin or her affected new handler, bothers her, she shoots him. Her kills are expressions of style, whimsy, and uncomplicated power.

Link to the rest at The New Yorker

An undoubtedly smarty-pants question occurred to PG as he was reviewing the OP.

Is it useful to tie everything to feminism?

PG is reminded, perhaps inaptly, of an earlier time when it seemed like everything, including popular books, was considered through a Freudian lens.

See, for example, a late example of this approach in a 2008 piece the Guardian:

Madness has always had a tug on artists: Shakespeare dramatised it; the romantic poets made a romance of it; the surrealists painted it and pursued it through the streets and in themselves. But even though Freud stated quite clearly that he had garnered his fundamental insights from literature, 20th-century novelists have fought jealously to keep his practice distinct from theirs. Freud’s theories may have infused the fiction of the last century, but the psychoanalyst as hero is a rare specimen. Shrinks in novels, if they appear at all, are largely devoid of that very inner life which is meant to be their trade; they often strut the fictional stage as grotesques.

But the publication of two new novels may signal a shift in the relationship between the writer and the psychoanalyst, and the latter’s role in fiction. What has been a century-long tug of war between the two over the terrain of the human psyche has perhaps given way to something more startling than a truce.

. . . .

For Jamal, Freud is a poet who has compelled him to notice the “depth of the everyday”, how much there is in “the most meaningless gesture”. And for Freud, as for any other poet, the words of patient and analyst are magic: they bring about change.

In a recent interview, Salley Vickers, once a practising therapist herself, noted that “being a psychoanalyst is another way of being a novelist: both are about story”. The psychoanalyst hero in her recent novel, The Other Side of You (Canongate), practises in an NHS hospital, but is opposed to drug therapies. More tellingly, what Vickers describes in a novel that focuses on analysis, where silences speak as loudly as words, is the way in which doctor and patient between them bring something new into being. A story, told, heard, attended to, carries with it the possibility of living. In this novel, the analyst is no penetrating authority, a figure imbued with near-magical knowledge by the fact of his profession. Indeed, both patient and analyst are haunted by past deaths and suffer from an abiding sense of loss. Putting words in the consulting room to absence and fear engenders not so much cure for the suicidal patient as life for them both.

Shrinks in fiction have customarily been far more likely to resemble Hannibal Lecter – who, having chewed over his patients’ psyches, proceeds to digest their bodies – than Kureishi’s and Vickers’ heroes. Mind doctors, even in their more literary guise, have spelled danger for novelists.

Virginia Woolf was ambivalent about the whole psychoanalytic enterprise. This was despite being married to Freud’s English publisher, Leonard Woolf, who wrote one of the first positive reviews of The Interpretation of Dreams; despite Bloomsbury remaining adamant in its support of a modernism that included Freud; and despite Woolf’s brother Adrian Stephen being one of Britain’s first psychoanalysts. In a 1920 review entitled “Freudian Fiction”, she scoffed at the reductionist simplicities of the new science:

A patient who has never heard a canary sing without falling down in a fit can now walk through an avenue of cages without a twinge of emotion since he has faced the fact that his mother kissed him in the cradle. The triumphs of science are beautifully positive.

The patient here is more than likely Woolf herself, and her irony points to the fact that no psychologist’s revelation has lessened the intensity of the singing birds for her. She will not be turned into a “case”. The inner life and the imagination rightly belong to novelists and artists and need protecting from the simplistic inanities of these psychological interlopers. Later, her own views of Freud changed with reading, as she began to recognise that the inner life was more darkly textured and marked by the irrational than she had imagined. In her notes on writing To The Lighthouse, she remarks:

I wrote my book very quickly; and when it was written, I ceased to be obsessed with my mother. I no longer heard her voice; I do not see her. I suppose I did for myself what psychoanalysts do for their patients. I expressed some very long felt and deeply felt emotion. And in expressing it I explained it and then laid it to rest …

Today (and for some years before today), it seems that a writer looking for a hook for an essay, story or book frequently turns to feminism. A search in Amazon Books for feminism reveals a wide range of titles, including:

  • Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black
  • Feminism Is for Everybody: Passionate Politics
  • Nasty Women: Feminism, Resistance, and Revolution in Trump’s America
  • Men Explain Things to Me
  • You Don’t Have to Like Me: Essays on Growing Up, Speaking Out, and Finding Feminism
  • Women of Resistance: Poems for a New Feminism

PG has no objection to marketing and promotion and perhaps a feminism angle sells books