‘NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST’ (NOVEL) AND VIOLENT WOMEN: REPRESENTATIONS OF FEMALE VIOLENCE IN MURIEL SPARK’S ‘THE DRIVER’S SEAT’, VIRGINIE DESPENTES’S ‘BAISE-MOI’, GILLIAN FLYNN’S ‘GONE GIRL’, AND C.S. BARNES’S ‘NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST’ by CHARLOTTE SOPHIE BARNES A thesis submitted to the University of Birmingham for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Department of Film and Creative Writing School of English, Drama and American & Canadian Studies College of Arts and Law University of Birmingham September 2017 University of Birmingham Research Archive e-theses repository This unpublished thesis/dissertation is copyright of the author and/or third parties. The intellectual property rights of the author or third parties in respect of this work are as defined by The Copyright Designs and Patents Act 1988 or as modified by any successor legislation. Any use made of information contained in this thesis/dissertation must be in accordance with that legislation and must be properly acknowledged. Further distribution or reproduction in any format is prohibited without the permission of the copyright holder. ABSTRACT Never Forget Your First presents the story of Gillian – a young woman who, from a young age, expresses an attraction to violence. Following an encounter with her father – in the course of which he suffers a fatal injury – Gillian begins her journey towards her first murder. Never Forget Your First aims to illustrate how contemporary authors can deviate from narrative norms in regard to representing female violence. Complementary to this, the critical portion of this thesis, Violent Women: Representations of Female Violence in Muriel Spark’s ‘The Driver’s Seat’, Virginie Despentes’s ‘Baise-Moi’, Gillian Flynn’s ‘Gone Girl’, and C.S. Barnes’s ‘Never Forget Your First’, discusses how depictions of female violence in fiction remain heavily gendered. Through an analysis of three novels – Muriel Spark’s The Driver’s Seat (1970), Virginie Despentes’s Baise-Moi, trans. by Bruce Benderson (1993), and Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012) – this essay aims to highlight that even innovative narratives of female violence remain, to some extent, governed by gendered expectations. This analysis also draws on feminist theory, above all on Betty Friedan’s and Judith Butler’s work. The critical essay highlights problems with the gendered representation of violence in fiction and calls for a revision of literary tropes governing the representation of violence. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS There are so many people who I owe thanks to for the parts they have played in this project. It has been a long three years and there have been many times when I thought I would not make it to this point – to the people who have pulled me through, even when I was at my most reluctant, I owe you more than I will ever be able to repay. But hopefully an acknowledgement will be a decent enough start. First and foremost, I have to thank my supervisors: Dan Vyleta and Ruth Gilligan. Ruth, your page-by-page edits were terrifying, but they shaped my novel into something that I am genuinely proud to have written. Thank you, so much, for honest feedback when I needed it most. Dan, who will I send my panicked emails to now this is over? You have guided, questioned, thrashed out ideas more times than I can even remember. During one of our earliest supervision meetings you asked me: what’s at stake – why are you writing this? These days those two questions are two of the earliest riddles that I give to my own students. Above and beyond supervising this PhD, you have taught me more than you know – and I cannot thank you enough for it all. To the Creative Writing and Film Department as a whole: you’ve been wonderful! The Creative Writing cohort has introduced me to a unique and quirky as hell collective of amazing writers, and not only am I glad to know you all but I am desperate to see what you do and write next. To the ladies in the office (this will always be my name for you, I’m sorry): thank you for asking how things are going, and for reminding me how worth it will be when I am finally at the end (I made it here, and you were right). To my wonderful readers: Tom, you read the very first draft of Never Forget Your First and your early suggestions resulted in some of the biggest changes, so thank you – and thank you for then reading the whole thing again! To JD, Katie, Caroline, Polly, Brenda, and Maggie: you were the first people outside of university to read my Gillian. I was terrified of introducing you to her, but you – you lovely bunch – were constructive and kind and, I think, you (mostly) enjoyed reading her. You reassured me that there is a space out there for this book – and that reassurance has pulled me through this final stretch. I can never thank you enough. To my patient and kind mother: I know that I have bored you to near-death on more than one occasion over the last three years. I know that Gillian and I have been monumental pains in the backside on occasion. And I also know that neither Gillian, nor I, would be here if you weren’t always cheering me on from the sidelines. Thank you for listening, even when you had no clue what I was jabbering on about, and thank you for trying to read the novel – I’m sorry again about the bits with the animals in... To my big sister and fur-sister: H, you have helped more than I think you realise. Thank you for talking through Gillian troubles whenever she had upset me, and thank you for making so many cakes (you can keep doing the second one). Em, you are a terrible assistant but you have been with me through this whole process – I simply cannot write without you, fluff. Finally, to my other half: I don’t imagine that you knew you were getting two for the price of one in the beginning; thank you for putting up with the Gillian part of my brain for the last eighteen months. I wish I could tell you it was over now, but we both know it’s just a matter of time before a replacement appears. You have been kind and calming when I needed it most. Thank you – for that, and everything else. TABLE OF CONTENTS NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST (NOVEL).............................................................................1 VIOLENCE AND GENDER: A THESIS OVERVIEW........................................................244 VIOLENCE AND GENDER: AN INTRODUCTION..........................................................246 VIOLENCE AND GENDER IN MURIEL SPARK’S ‘THE DRIVER’S SEAT’.................258 VIOLENCE AND GENDER IN VIRGINIE DESPENTES’S ‘BASIE-MOI’......................270 VIOLENCE AND GENDER IN GILLIAN FLYNN’S ‘GONE GIRL’................................284 VIOLENCE AND GENDER IN ‘NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST’..................................297 VIOLENCE AND GENDER: A CONCLUSION.................................................................307 BIBLIOGRAPHY..................................................................................................................310 BIBLIOGRAPHY (2): RESEARCH UNDERTAKEN TOWARDS ‘NEVER FORGET YOUR FIRST’.......................................................................................318 Never Forget Your First 1 A Note from the Narrator When I was eight years and six months old I squeezed the life out of our family cat. My mother told me that it wasn’t my fault. Poppy was old, and it certainly wasn’t anything that I had done. I don’t think she understood what I was trying to tell her. To begin with it was a passing thought, a curiosity I only pursued due to the absence of company. By ten years and two months of age, my father had become so preoccupied with beating my mother – and my mother so preoccupied with covering her bruises with make-up – that they barely noticed what their little girl was occupying herself with. In fact, the behaviour went so unnoticed that I managed to convince myself that it was quite normal; that working out the amount of weed-killer required to annihilate a catalogue of household animals was a perfectly acceptable pastime for any above-average-intelligence pre-adolescent. Regrettably, despite my desire to normalise it, my growing intelligence hindered my adoption of that belief with any real conviction. The first time my mother picked a pungent carcass – it was a swallow, or some other bird of a similar size – from my windowsill and deposited it in the outside rubbish bin, I knew that I was crossing some lines. ‘I just found it,’ I had told her. ‘I wondered how long it would take to change.’ Decompose, I meant, and I think she knew. But nothing more was ever said on the matter. That was my first real mistake. Although, the fish in the freezer incident was a childish error on my part, too, but we’ll come to that later. When fully-fledged adolescence arrived, the household in which I lived had transformed into your average miserable family. Miserable because alcohol is a depressant, 2 not a mood-lifter – a reality that my father insisted on testing and verifying for himself on a daily basis. Everyone in our local Accident and Emergency Department was on a first name basis with my mother by the time I was eleven years and eight months old. Through my ritualistic attendance of the hospital’s Visiting Hour to see her, they soon came to be on a first name basis with me too. For a while it was convenient to believe that my mother was just clumsy; that doors, floors, and other miscellaneous items around the house were somehow conspiring against her. However, when a boy at my secondary school asked an allegedly innocent question about my father’s behaviour towards my mother – ‘Like, does your dad do it a lot or…?’ – I discovered that not everyone was capable of ignoring it as well as me.