Gillian Flynn has become a household name in crime fiction since her breakout novel Gone Girl in 2012. The novel, as well as its 2014 film adaptation directed by David Fincher, now serve as cornerstones of the domestic noir in literature and film, a subgenre derived from visual and character elements of classical film noir in 1940s film, the neo-noirs of the 1980s and 1990s, and from subversions of familiar conventions historically seen in crime narratives since the genre’s inception. In attempting to describe this anomalous mode, style, and genre, writer Julia Crouch and her publicist Sam Eades are often cited for coining the term “domestic noir” in 2013 in a blog entry titled “Genre Bender.” For Crouch, the domestic noir “is based around relationships and takes as its base a broadly feminist view that the domestic sphere is a challenging and sometimes dangerous prospect for its inhabitants.” Such relationships in the domestic noir often position women as criminals or investigators in subversive roles which challenge conventional criminology and detection. However, even as previously male-oriented roles are occupied by women in crime narratives, the legacy of the femme fatale is key to the domestic noir. For Yvonne Tasker, the femme fatale archetype and the role of women in classical noir has long been a site of overdetermination. While the classical femme fatale is understood to represent a sense of unease for mid-century patriarchal culture due to the entrance of women to the workforce during and after World War II, the slow social acceptance of single womanhood, and the deference of expected motherhood, the “tendency to read all women with agency in film noir as femme fatales” is indeed problematic (357). In comparison, the women of the domestic noir even as they are deemed femme fatales or subversions thereof, are inversely deprived of this tendency to agency. While Tasker argues for critical specificity in discussing the archetype, her assertation points toward the broadest thematic underpinnings of the domestic noir. The feminist dimension of the domestic noir comes from explicit resistance to the patriarchal culture in which classical noir first upsets, but the success of this resistance remains nebulous across the genre’s body of works. Indeed, the relationship between Amy and Nick Dunne arguably revitalized and popularized the fragility and vulnerability of such domestic spaces in the genre—through the breakdown of their marriage and the criminalization of Amy as a manipulative sociopathic woman—and is done so by defying both social and patriarchal expectations and hierarchies. The intimacy of domestic spaces alongside the intimacy of interpersonal and familial relationships are sites for subversion in Flynn’s work. Further important to both third wave and radical feminism are Flynn’s challenges to the gendered boundaries of criminality and violence through Amy Dunne, a figure which breaks open the classical femme fatale and has been subverted in various ways through the domestic noir. Gone Girl collectively challenges conceptions of feminine criminality seen in classical noir and subverts conventions of the noir mode and its popular genres as exemplars of the domestic noir.

While the success and impact of Gone Girl has cemented Flynn’s significance as a founding author of the domestic noir, her conception of the genre does not begin here. To rectify the eclipsing nature of Gone Girl’s success upon her earlier works, this article aims to explore Flynn’s lesser treated Sharp Objects, as well as its 2018 HBO limited series adaptation. Through a close reading of the narrative presented in both the novel and series, I contend that Flynn’s conception of the domestic noir specifically incorporates themes of generational trauma, which invades the domestic sphere of the home by intertwining aspects of gender performativity, conceptions of femininity, sexual desire, and the effects of patriarchal order alongside resistance and revision to that very order. Considering the genealogy of the noir mode, as it is formed into the domestic noir today, is fitting for the idea of generational trauma; through history, the genre has continuously reflected changes in domestic order, the breakdown of the nuclear family, and social anxieties about femininity, criminality, and sexuality. Indeed, these reactions to social change, as they arise from classical noir in the postwar period to the establishment of the neo-noir genre, build upon each other to crystalize into the domestic noir subgenre. Importantly, the domestic noir subgenre further represents recent shifts in the postmodern archetypes seen in women’s roles in conventional Hollywood genres since the 1990s, like the femme fatale, where a blending of gendered signifiers reconfigures the classical female character. Sharp Objects, as an example of the domestic noir, subverting conventions of classical and neo-noir, comes to ultimately represent a new shift in the position and role of women in recent works of crime fiction.

Originally published in 2006 and predating Crouch’s coining of the “domestic noir,” Sharp Objects was adapted into an HBO limited series and released in 2018 by Marti Noxon in collaboration with director Jean-Marc Vallée and Flynn. Amy Adams stars as the novel’s original protagonist Camille Preaker, a haunted crime journalist sent to investigate a series of child murders in her hometown. While following the tradition of American noirs of the 1940s with respect to flashbacks and lighting, the film and television adaptations of Flynn’s novels also take into consideration their unorthodox narrative structures, weaving together Amy’s and Nick’s dizzying timelines, and Camille’s present case with her mysterious upbringing in Wind Gap. Both Gone Girl and Sharp Objects establish the common setting of a town somewhere between the run-down Midwest and the rural South in Flynn’s work, not withholding the misogynist and racist remnants of historical Confederate sympathies and pre-Civil Rights sentiments. To the same degree as David Fincher’s adaptation of Gone Girl, the series adaptation of Sharp Objects exhibits a strong loyalty to the original novel and maintains an acute awareness of post-recession America as a country still brimming with conflict across lines of race and class. Furthermore, where sociopolitical and cultural contexts are arguably more subtle in her novels, the inclusion of deeper commentaries on race, class, and poverty is revisited and amplified by Flynn’s direct involvement with both adaptations in producer and screenwriting roles and bolstered by their visual mediums. What Flynn has before called a “moral hollowness” (qtd. In Rousseau) in her characters reflects the nihilism of the working-class. This hollowness is not only rooted in the 2008 recession, but also in complex discourses surrounding poverty, sexuality, and race relations, particularly in the echoes of the history of the South present in Sharp Objects. As such, as a working-class reporter, Camille quickly clashes with her mother’s outdated and ornate way of life. These elements are further key to Flynn’s domestic noir as the institution of the home as the most significantly impacted space at the height of the recession, either from foreclosures and homelessness, or familial stress and strained relationships.

A significant but slight deviation from the novel in the series includes an alteration to setting which bolsters the Southern influence of the series. Wherein the novel Camille travels from Chicago, Illinois to Wind Gap, Missouri, in the series she remains in the state of Missouri for the entire duration, only traveling from St. Louis to Wind Gap. This small detail influences the sense of displacement experienced by Camille in the novel against the series, and contextually strengthens the sense of estrangement she experiences in Wind Gap in the novel as she crosses state lines from metropolitan Chicago to rural America. While the urban-rural divide contradicts the urbanity inherent of classical noir as well as the populous and anonymity-granting city centers which breed most crime narratives, this small-town homecoming pretext bolsters Sharp Objects as a domestic noir. The expansion of Adora’s party into a fully-fledged Calhoun Day in episode 5, “Closer”—a celebration of the founder of the fictional town and featuring a festival commemorating Millie Calhoun’s defense of Wind Gap from Union invasion during the Civil War in the series—ominously reminiscences upon Southern Confederate memorial celebrations as much as it situates Camille’s familial history (see Figure 1). As the story goes, Millie Calhoun “saves” the town by giving herself up to Union soldiers, who proceed to rape her. The festival celebrates this as an act of resistance; Camille’s own sexual assault as an adolescent, revealed in flashbacks throughout the series, is thus woven into the Confederate historical subtext as it motions toward the paradoxical attribution of both resistance and deviance to feminine sexuality. Clinging to a romanticized past of the American South, and its associated racial and patriarchal order, evolves from a subtext in the novel to an influential aspect of the adapted series, contributing further to the threatening tension emblematic of the domestic noir. This overbearing notion of history, from the level of community to the family unit, bleeds into the Preaker family home. The generational trauma suggested by Adora’s own abuse by the hand of her mother, through to her treatment of Camille and Amma, runs parallel to the reverberating traumas of violence in the South. Indeed, the series adaptation emphasizes the danger of domestic spaces seen later in Gone Girl; these are spaces underpinned by generational trauma and dark histories.

For Emma V. Miller, Gone Girl represents “the active turn” in crime fiction in laying the blueprint for Crouch’s conception of the domestic noir (90). Miller sees new female protagonists such as Amy as transcending the male roles of traditional crime fiction. No longer is the woman’s “inert body to be looked at, dissected and penetrated both criminally and then in the pursuit of justice; nor is her only participatory role as part of an established patriarchal culture” (90). The woman is now an active participant in the narrative, “an individual, in her own space” (90). The tendency for crime fiction to objectify women through victimization and criminal acts, “the body to be looked at,”—while prominent in police procedurals and other crime narratives—negates the disruptions of gender and patriarchal order seen in classical noir, especially with the femme fatale. This is not to say that women in the genre have always had some semblance of agency or a freedom to disrupt, but rather to emphasize that active participation for women in the genre has manifested in a variety of ways in direct resistance to established patriarchal culture. However, the transgression, historically, is always punished, and this punishment for the active woman is perhaps less overt for Amy Dunne. Indeed, as Julie Grossman notes, “film noir has always shown the destructive nature of these boundaries by demonstrating what happens when women cross these lines: they become a severe threat to dominant male culture” (28). Inversely, Camille’s experience in Wind Gap, as child and adult, asserts a destructive nature inherent of patriarchal culture; it is then repackaged to focalize on the woman as paradoxically active, yet in either resistance or submission—predominantly the former for Amma, who rebels against her mother across lines of acceptable femininity, and the latter for Camille, who frequently yields to her mother’s wishes in a retrograding performance that recalls her own adolescence even as she occupies the male-dominated investigator role.

While the active turn described by Miller is more overtly recognized in Amy’s character in Gone Girl, Camille exhibits a degree of individualism and freedom not previously given to women in crime fiction. Gradually shifting between roles of detective, reporter, victim, and caretaker, Camille blends masculine signified positions with feminine ones dictated by traditional patriarchal norms.  However, her agency and social mobility is constantly hindered by mental illness, substance abuse, interpersonal conflict, and a variety of outside social pressures and generational contexts that are further blended with masculine and feminine signifiers. Her alcoholism and long stare reflect the hardboiled male detectives of classical noir, while her self-harming—wherein her “screaming” skin is carved with feminine words like cupcake, cute, and kitty—suggests a reaction to infantilizing femininity under the rule of her mother. These hindrances are all revealed to be influenced by the subverted sanctity of the domestic sphere in her childhood home, both as a child and as an adult. Both the novel and series incorporate flashback sequences; the former performs this by way of interior narration, and the latter through flashbacks conventional to film noir. In the novel, Camille slowly reveals childhood memories and traumas through dialogue with other characters and interior narration. Meanwhile in the series, Sophia Lillis stars as a younger Camille, and her movements through the house and around town are often spliced and matched to adult Camille as she returns to the same places. This evokes a sense of Deja-vu and the Freudian return of the repressed, revealing childhood traumas and secrets in the same spaces they originally occurred, through a deliberate collapsing of space and time. Such sequences frequently occur in Adora’s mansion, Camille’s childhood home. For example, episode 2, “Dirt,” sees Camille quite literally follow her past-self up the stairs in a sequence that implies a temporal collapse by only allowing one version of Camille to occupy the frame (see Figure 2). Prohibiting both past Camille and present Camille from sharing space in the frame of the camera assures the hallucinatory quality of these sequences throughout the series. This graphic matching technique, integrating the past into the fabric of the present, permeates the series and contributes to Flynn’s version of the domestic noir, injecting a Gothic influence that so often surfaces in crime fiction into the history of Camille’s childhood home and the town of Wind Gap. A similar technique is used in Fincher’s Gone Girl whereby an oscillating past and present work to contextualize the relationship between Amy, “Diary Amy,” and Nick, and after the famous twist, the dissonances that emerge between versions of Amy’s disappearance to illuminate her manipulative sociopathic personality. In Fincher’s film, this fleshes out the relationship between Nick’s narration and “Diary Amy” in the novel in a similar fashion to Sharp Objects and its weaving together of the past and present. These temporal matrices are further key to the generational trauma of Flynn’s domestic noir, where the living past is so often explicitly referenced as it remains in the domestic spaces where these crime narratives take place.

The temporal relationship between Camille’s past as an adult and child through the graphic matching technique in the editing of the series speaks to how trauma manifests at a generational level. Melinda K. Hackett cites the trauma theory of Cathy Caruth and Anne Whitehead to suggest that the violence of the domestic noir takes place in an “unarticulated past that informs both an individual trauma as well as a generational trauma” (81). Indeed, the violence and neglect that Camille experiences as child informs not only herself as an adult, but informs her sister Amma as well, who, like Camille as a child, is placed in a similar position with their shared birth mother Adora. Additionally, Camille’s late younger sister Marian, initially believed to have died from genuine illness but later revealed to be a victim of Adora’s Munchausen by Proxy disorder, shares a similar position once more to Amma, wherein Amma essentially takes the role that Marian held when Camille was Amma’s age. This motif of generational trauma can be traced to Adora’s confession to Camille about her own mother: “‘I think I finally realized why I don’t love you,’ she said … ‘You remind me of my mother. Joya. Cold and distant and so, so smug. My mother never loved me either. And if you girls won’t love me, I won’t love you’” (Flynn 148). As noted by Hackett, Adora’s behavior toward Camille in the novel “stems from her own trauma and maternal abuse she experienced as a young child” (82). In the midst of repeatedly poisoning Camille and Amma to satisfy her twisted desire to dote upon them and satisfy her own role as a caring mother, Adora describes how she was abandoned in the woods as a little girl: “When a child knows that young that her mother doesn’t care for her,” she says, “bad things happen;” Camille replies: “Believe me, I know what that feels like” (Flynn 237). This motif of neglect and expectations of feminine performance bears echoes in the refracting postmodern roles of women in recent crime fiction; but key to the domestic noir is the generational trauma of previous infractions against dominant patriarchal order that drive maternal disdain seen in Adora’s character. While Adora’s criminalization as a mother is a subversion of traditional crime narratives—in not merely fostering criminal actions later performed by their children, but also enacting them herself—her actions as a mother reveal a disconnect between maternal and feminine expectation.

To turn back to the series, there are scenes in which a young woman appears in train cars or on the road as Camille drives around Wind Gap. These appearances serve as a motif and reminder to Camille of her roommate, Alice, at the psychiatric facility she stayed in briefly, due to her frequent acts of self-harm. Despite finding a friend in Camille, Alice is revealed to have committed suicide at the facility. This traumatic event leads to a relapse in Camille’s self-mutilation, which first manifests during her time with Adora as an adolescent. Reflecting the words she has cut into her body, business signs and other text around town change on a shot-to-shot basis, emphasising Camille’s submergence in both the past, but also in herself and the traumatic events she confronts during this drawn-out homecoming (see Figures 3 and 4). Camille also experiences visions of her dead sister Marian, but her appearances are more involved. At the end of episode 6, “Cherry,” Marian delivers an ominous warning to Camille that she is not safe in the house. Where the series grants a hallucinatory quality to this warning, its counterpart in the novel suggests this is a dream:

A dream. Marian, her white nightgown sticky with sweat, a blonde curl pasted across her cheek. She takes my hand and tries to pull me from bed. “It’s not safe here,” she whispers. “It’s not safe for you.” I tell her to leave me be. (188)

The return of repressed events only begins as Camille arrives in Wind Gap. These flashbacks in the series and novel further reflect the danger of the domestic space. With a gothic quality, Marian’s bedroom represents a part of Camille’s traumatic past, and provokes intrusive memories of Marian:

I could see her so easily here, sitting cross-legged on that bed, small and sweat dotted, her eyes ringed with purple. Shuffling cards or combing her doll’s hair or coloring angrily. I could hear that sound: a crayon running in hard lines across a paper. Dark scribbles with the crayon pushed so hard it ripped the paper. She looked up at me, breathing hard and shallow.

“I’m tired of dying.”

I skitted back to my room as if I were being chased. (167)

Camille’s sightings of Marian carve out areas of relative safety and danger for Camille, or more specifically, sites that reconfigure the past as dangerous in the form of Adora’s lethal mothering. Camille’s relationship to Marian also significantly reflects the development of her relationship to Amma, desiring her acceptance as a sister. This style of editing in the series visualizes the process of generational trauma by repeatedly moving back and forth through the eyes of Camille as child and adult, embedded further by Amma as child and Adora as mother in the present. Within this intricate framework, the outside factors of Camille’s present situation serve as foils that bolster the psychological interiority of the series and novel alike—an aspect that defines the domestic noir. Camille still holds the trauma of her childhood in the physical forms of her self-mutilation, specifically, words of significant femininized meaning cut into herself that literalize the reading of her mind and body (Redhead 126). Camille’s constant drinking, even as a visual motif of hardboiled detectives, can be extended to a form of self-poisoning not far off from the objectives of her cutting. When reflecting on her mother’s poisonings after Adora is arrested, Camille suggests that “a child weaned on poison considers harm a comfort” (Flynn 251). Indeed, Adora’s internalization of her mother’s neglect returns in her own wilful neglect of Camille, and later, Amma (Hackett 83). This comment on poison, despite referencing her mother’s poisonings specifically, speaks volumes to Camille’s self-destructive habits and further speaks to the generational trauma inflicted by and upon Adora as well.

In Gone Girl, Amy Dunne challenges expectations of femininity and agency in noir and crime fiction, while in Sharp Objects, Amma challenges Camille’s relative lack of agency by abusing aspects of her own, becoming one of several touchstones for the creation of the danger inherent of the domestic noir. Amma’s relation to Camille as a present version of her past self, under the rule of the same mother figure, creates a doubling indicative of film noir and gothic narratives. Leigh Redhead reads Sharp Objects as critical of postfeminist movements advocating for “girl power” and asserts that the position of each woman in the novel speaks to the notion of “gender alienation” brought upon by neoconservative sentiments that such movements bring (123; 126). Alienation, as it appears in classic film noir, is traditionally reserved for men with femme fatales treated as objects lacking “narrative control” (Lota 151).  However, overlooking the breadth of scholarship asserting the narrative control of women in film noir, even if the outcome of, for example, the femme fatale’s intervention, is punishment or persecution, Kenneth Lota denies the presence of alienation across gendered lines before Gone Girl’s release. For Lota, Amy Dunne subverts this assignment by transcending both the femme fatale and good girl archetypes: “her intelligence and insight into the way contemporary American society constructs gender expectations allows Flynn to critique the system that produces those expectations, rather than simply present Amy as an essentialized vision of female evil. She is not a mysterious evil ‘other,’ but rather an unflattering mirror held up to millennial gender roles” (163). Citing the “Cool Girl” monologue from Gone Girl, Lota notes that Amy’s tendency for imposing capitalized labels upon herself and others she views in society (Dead Amy, Preppy ‘80s Girl, Boho Babe, Diary Amy) speak to “just how alienated [she] is from society that has prescribed such roles for her” (166). However, it is evident that Sharp Objects handles ideas of evil in a similar fashion, even if the “unflattering mirror” should be called into question. Flynn’s domestic noir resists essentializing evil femininity by placing such in close proximity to the fragility of the home, not in gesture toward realistic identification, but rather to emphasize a condition for womanhood long held captive by dominant patriarchal order. The gender roles that Lota identifies as mirroring a millennial context are not simply unflattering as a dire immoral center resulting from class conflict or social malaise; they evidence further a shift in crime fiction’s narrative gender roles, as the gendered signifiers of traditional male and female roles—detective and victim, investigator and criminal—are blended and brought closer together.

The breaking down of these narrative roles is evident in how Adora and Amma navigate prescriptions of performativity based on gendered and social expectations. For Redhead, in Sharp Objects, “Adora’s desire is to infantilise and control her daughters, and Amma’s desire is for power and control in a society which denies female autonomy” (123). Women in Flynn’s stories grapple with the patriarchal roles they are ascribed in individualized ways. At the heart of this struggle are notions of performative femininity, which is particularly significant to the power dynamic between Camille, Adora, and Amma (Redhead 123). With a manipulative Adora at the center of the trio, emanating expectations informed by Southern mannerisms and patriarchal society, both Camille and Amma must perform within the domestic space of the home for the sake of Adora’s and certainly their own relative wellbeing, which later becomes ironic when the poisonings begin. While it is easy to read Amma as a “negative embodiment” of “girl power” in the way she domineers her friends, looks down upon Camille, and of course, murders two young girls, Redhead makes a keen observation about Camille’s position in discussing contemporary feminist crime fiction: “Camille is not an ‘empowered’ career woman, and is traumatised as a result of growing up with an unloving mother … unlike [Amma], Camille cannot perform the role of the cool, self-possessed femme fatale” (126). Redhead’s observation asserts that successful feminist crime texts do not need to be, or eventually become, narratives of successful career women to break the patriarchal chain. This is seen in Gone Girl, wherethe declaration that women, too, can be evil, has procured several feminist readings. Rather, to go back to Redhead’s comment, genuine vulnerability, as seen in Camille, creates compelling female characters, and this vulnerability is more effective in subverting the expectations of conventional crime fiction narratives in each novel and adaptation. This thread of careers and vulnerability—shedding transgressive femininity for the former and traditional femininity in the latter—runs in tandem with the notion that these roles are fragmenting previously traditional gender roles in crime narratives; together, they embody figures of considerable difference, in drawing from both feminine and masculine signifiers.

Redhead considers Amma to be a reconfiguration of Samantha Lindop’s fille fatale, where rather than “seduce and manipulate older men,” she “directs her rage against other women and girls” (125). For Lindop, the fille fatale manifests in classical film noir with characters such as Veda in Mildred Pierce and neo-noirs like Poison Ivy, with Drew Barrymore’s titular character Ivy (98). In these films, these adolescent women enact seduction or violence towards a filling of a paternal void, described by Lindop as “misplaced Oedipal attachments” (98). The emotional absence of Amma’s father Alan suggests an inverse relationship, where rather than the missing biological father in conjunction with an emotionally or physically absent mother spurns the fille’s violence, the emotionally absent father instigates a power struggle between Amma and her mother for domestic leadership. Her violence against women manifests as a reaction to both her father’s powerlessness in his marriage and toward Adora’s controlling behaviour, and this violence is only neutralized by Adora’s poisonings. Indeed, as Lindop asserts, “overwhelmingly, non-traditional domestic arrangements are problematized by calling into question the woman’s ability to occupy the position of both mother and the head of household” (99). Reflecting anxieties born of the breakdown of the nuclear family, such domestic arrangements in Sharp Objects reverse the gendered roles of parental absence and inattentiveness in Lindop’s fille fatale by subverting motherly over-attentiveness through Munchausen by Proxy in Adora, and removing, perhaps castrating, power from Alan in an inversion of the Oedipal impulse between Amma and Adora.

In considering the patriarchal and misogynist reality of Wind Gap, social mobility for the women of the town depends on managing performances that Camille struggles with and Amma perfects. For Redhead, the novel and series make clear that “Amma, like Camille, has absorbed the town’s misogyny and become a logical extension of the society in which she lives. However, while Camille has internalised the misogyny and uses it to punish herself, Amma directs her hatred outwards” (125). Caroline Hamilton-McKenna, Elizabeth Marshall, and Theresea Rogers pinpoint Camille’s passivity, not as a result of expectations related to femininity, but rather to her emotionally and physically scarred status and her social alienation. “Camille operates along the margins of acceptable social and physical spaces,” they write, “often relegated to or deliberately burrowing herself in small, private recesses,” and only within spaces like her car or bedroom, “she can work escape, and secretly yearn for acceptance in Wind Gap’s tightly corralled spaces of female identity” (259). It is clear that Camille desires acceptance from those around her—in particular her mother, but also Amma, as mentioned previously—and Detective Willis, yet the microcosm of Wind Gap concentrates patriarchal expectations of femininity and gender roles in such a way that continues to alienate Camille from her hometown. Amma’s behaviour not only evidences the societal pressures placed upon young women and girls, but also further reflects the conditions of adolescent life in the American Midwest. Indeed, as Alyssa Miller notes, the narrative “exposes [a] complex rendering of femininity in relation to the social rules of Southern etiquette, a blurred lens through which public performance exists in a perpetual tension with private deviance” (495). Adora reminds Camille that she exhibited similar behaviour to Amma when she was her age, but flashbacks given in the series—namely the assault by the high school football players, her cheerleading career, and moments with Marian before her death—indicate that she was more passive than Amma in this respect. Lindop, citing Gaylyn Studlar’s study of child star Mary Pickford, suggests that the masquerade of childishness psychologically operates like the formation of femininity in that a maintained childishness, even in older age, attempts to ensure erotic incapability by way of innocence or purity. However, this notion is misguided as “Pickford’s portrayal may have provided an erotic object that was more acceptable to many men at the time than the overly sexualised flapper of the 1920s” (96). Amma, exhibiting performative childishness even as she declares her sexual maturity to Camille, is a reminder not only of an historical anxiety for female agency with respect to Pickford’s context, but also of the staying power of such anxieties across the generational gap between Adora, Camille, and Amma.

As a clear precursor to Amy Dunne’s seizure of feminine expectation and social assumptions and twisting them to her will, Amma’s control over both the children and adults of Wind Gap places her in a unique position that comments on systems of power that dictate the town. During their drug-fuelled run across town, Amma admits to Camille that she enjoys having sex after appeasing their mother:

“I don’t think you should let boys do things to you, Amma. Because that’s what it is. It’s not reciprocal at your age.”

“Sometimes if you let people do things to you, you’re really doing it to them,” Amma said, pulling another Blow Pop from her pocket. Cherry. “Know what I mean? If someone wants to do fucked-up things to you, and you let them, you’re making them more fucked up. Then you have the control. As long as you don’t go crazy.” (Flynn 182)

This perspective on manipulation walks a thin line between expected feminine submissiveness and a subversion of patriarchal control through expectations of femininity, something that Amy performs in Gone Girl as much as Amma describes here. This excerpt also speaks to the relationship between Adora and each daughter; while Camille is very clearly victimized by her mother’s neglect (and later traumatized by the fact that Adora indeed poisoned her little sister), Amma extracts power from this exact same dynamic, and uses it to challenge patriarchal expectations for women. Hamilton-McKenna, Marshall, and Rogers recognize the fluidity of Amma’s performances and how she seamlessly transitions into roles based on which group she interacts with: “By playing at ─ and being accepted as ─ the prototypical bad girl teen in public and, as she puts it, Adora’s ‘perfect little doll’ at home, Amma achieves a facelessness that enables her to manoeuvre across spaces as well as plot and murder without detection” (261). Again, like Amy’s intricate performance of gender, Amma bends the will of women with such performances, especially Camille and Adora, and with learned behaviours, Amma also manipulates, or at the very least holds control over, many of the men in Wind Gap; She fearlessly banters with Sheriff Vickery, accusing him of sexism; her father has little power over her, nor does he have much power over anyone else in their household; Detective Willis is subject to Amma’s mockery, and her invasive comments on his relationship with Camille; and finally, John Keene is subjected to her continuous ridicule and disguised sexual advances that aim to mock his character further, even as he is grieving the death of his sister. Amma also uses this approach to continuously blame John for the death of both little girls, calling him a “baby-killer” (Flynn 178) and mocking Camille for the time she spends with him, initially for the sake of her report but later developing a sexual relationship with him.

In comparison, recalling Camille’s past sexual assault and references to her masturbation as a child upon finding violent pornography in a shack outside of town, Redhead asserts that “desire for Camille is interwoven with sexual violence, misogyny and shame” (127). When she has sex with Detective Willis, she hides her body from him, demanding they do it her way (Flynn 172). When she has sex with John Keene, her shame melts away as she lets him “read” her scarred body. In episode 7 of the series, “Falling,” John’s girlfriend, Ashley, admits to Camille that John would not have sex with her. Only when Camille admits that she does not believe John would kill his own sister do they bond over the shared trauma of loss. John recognizes Camille’s difficulties with the complexity of grief and trauma; the way in which sexual desire becomes intertwined with harm, abuse, and loss is epitomized in their short-lived relationship. The dingy motel becomes a site of safety, but only briefly before Vickery and Willis track down John, who has an arrest warrant during their entire stay. Willis, very recently having sexual relations with Camille, enacts his own misogynist tirade in the series, a departure from his character in the novel. Upon discovering her with John as Vickery arrets him, Willis declares to Camille, “you’re just a drunk and a slut,” and aggressively pushes her away. Camille then, within her understanding of sex, desire, and acceptance, vainly attempts to undo his belt buckle. As Redhead notes, immediately Camille is “punished and shamed for her genuine desire” (129). Camille’s fraught relationship with sex and desire, as well as her restricted social mobility—in comparison with Amma’s manipulative personality and the relative ease at which she so often bends the will of others to get her way—speaks to the forces in Wind Gap that attempt to control women with varying degrees of success. Camille’s splintering desires and motivations epitomize the sexual dimension of the domestic noir; this dimension challenges not only gender roles, but also indicates the layered complexity of grief and trauma associated with sexual assault and surviving neglectful, abusive parents; even as Camille seeks to uncover the killer as a reporter, she struggles to appease her mother’s wishes; even as she is unable to occupy either traditional or subversive feminine roles, relating to interpersonal relationships or her career. These fragments come together to make up her significant character, refracting through her once again a dramatic shift in the protagonists of contemporary crime narratives.

The omission of Camille’s final unravelling from the series risks negating the bleakness

and seriousness of mental illness. Where the novel accepts that issues of self-harm and substance abuse are not easily done away with, the series seems to suggest that Camille is seemingly “fully healed” after leaving her hometown, as though it is only geography that makes the difference between wellness and mental instability. Cornelia Klecker also recognizes Camille’s implied return to normality in her analysis of television’s recent antisocial heroines, but the final credits of episode 8, “Milk,” which depict flashes of Amma’s brutal murders, beg to differ. “The societal norm seems to be restored” writes Klecker, yet only briefly, as the series leaves Amma in the responsibility of Camille before the credits and post-credit sequence (445). The inclusion of Amma murdering the young girls, presented in disorienting and quick flashes, may uphold the sentiment of instability from the novel’s conclusion, and is indeed thematic of the instability of the spaces in which the domestic noir takes place, but its location as a post-credit scene distances this sentiment from the core of the series and further complicates how viewers may interpret its ending (see Figure 5). Unlike the series, rather than abruptly ending with the revelation that Amma is the child-killer, the novel sees Camille relapse into self-mutilation, granting its conclusion a psychologically distressing effect that Camille’s custody of Amma does not wholly translate. Camille’s unravelling in the novel affirms the impact of generational trauma and its reverberating effects, and importantly, is positioned to look upon the domestic sphere, Adora’s home, as the inciting affliction that leads to Camille’s mental instability in the first place.

Indeed, Crouch’s observation of the domestic noir as an emerging genre in film, television, and literature may not have explicitly named Flynn, yet its coining has split open a wide territory for further feminist readings of crime narratives that importantly include Flynn’s corpus of works. The final flashes of Amma murdering the young girls recalls Hackett’s notion that “whether through acts of self-inflicted cutting, through the murdering and mutilating of young girls, or through role-play these women create a visual rhetoric that disrupts idealized versions of femaleness while simultaneously challenging prescribed gender roles within the domestic sphere” (Hackett 81). Such disruptions, evidently, include Camille in her role as investigator and daughter, both subverting and adhering to idealizations of femininity. When Camille meets Jackie after discovering buried hospital records concerning Marian’s death and Adora’s Munchausen by Proxy disorder, Jackie reveals her trove of medicines and drugs. In a contrast to Adora forcing her daughters to take her poison, Jackie’s willfulness to self-medicate becomes framed as a submission to the current order. “Obedience is easier,” she tells Camille (Episode 7, “Falling”). Idealistic femininity, according to a patriarchal status quo, prefers passivity, subservience, and obedience; acceptance in Adora’s home demands a similar conception of obedience that Camille is never granted and that Amma manages to appease while maintaining her own agency. Notions of idealistic femininity are met in Sharp Objects with varying degrees of resistance, from Amma’s violent murders and Camille’s attempts to report on the case while protecting her sister from Adora in the throes of Munchausen by Proxy. Even as Adora and Amma are incarcerated for their crimes, like Gone Girl six years later, Sharp Objects assures that the domestic sphere still echoes with danger. The disruptions enacted by Camille, Amma, and Adora to the rhetoric noted by Hackett actively challenge, question, and subvert such expectations associated with the previously unchallenged order of the domestic realm. The horror of Adora’s disorder lies in her subversion of expectations about motherhood; Amma’s behaviour confronts neoconservative notions of an ideal version of feminism which is arguably ineffective and contradictory, as Redhead argues. Finally, Camille’s role challenges an idealized version of the career-driven woman that threatened post-war masculinity, not by merely having her rendered with real vulnerability, but by contextualizing such vulnerabilities in a matrix of generational trauma, familial influence, social expectations, sexuality, and the complexities of mental illness. In the novel’s epilogue, Camille does eventually learn how to be mothered by Curry and his wife, who take her in after she rids herself of the final untouched piece of skin on her back as she unravels completely. The ambiguity of her successful rehabilitation speaks to the severity of her final trauma in discovering the source of Amma’s beautiful “ivory” floor. She considers her role in relation to Amma, having found herself quickly transcend from sister to mother, and asks herself: “Was I good at caring for Amma because of kindness? Or did I like caring for Amma because I have Adora’s sickness?” (Flynn 252). Camille’s fear of becoming her own mother permeates the entire novel and series, certainly, yet it is here rendered as frighteningly palpable.

The impact of Camille’s experience in Wind Gap is postured to eventually roll over to Amma, assuring not only the danger of domestic spaces in which the domestic noir takes place, but further assures the fragmentary result of active resistance to traditional gender roles and performative femininity. This active resistance embodies the contemporary domestic noir, especially in recent Netflix series. The adaptation of Karin Slaughter’s Pieces of Her (2022), Tony Ayres and Christian White’s original series Clickbait (2021), and adaptations of Harlan Coben’s Stay Close (2021)and The Stranger (2020), and his series Safe (2018) all exhibit this active resistance. With significant variations on the roles of investigator, criminal, and victim across racial, gendered, and social lines, these narratives participate in a shift, along with Noxon’s and Vallée’s adaptation of Sharp Objects, which is seeing crystalized postmodern renditions of mixed masculine and feminine signifiers within these very roles. While the domestic noir shares with the broader crime genre these changes, it is a catalyst as an ascribed feminist subgenre, and important as a mode rooted in the generational trauma which informs domestic spaces. Flynn’s novels, along with the domestic noir, have unequivocally upheaved what has long been a traditionally male, white, and conservative genre. These narratives in film, television, and literature, continue to illuminate and expose disruptions to gender performativity, conceptions of femininity, sexual desire, and the patriarchal order—which renders any such challenges as subversive—as they emerge in the wake of Flynn’s 2006 novel.