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.
Our staff and contributors share their cultural enthusiasms.
“Give Me Your Hand” is steeped in the feminine gothic. Kit has a “memory of an ancient nightmare, Diane under my bed, shaking it by the springs.” The book sends taproots into the “dark, messy stuff” that Abbott links to womanhood—but she is not prompting us, as in a Dead Girl story, to identify with the murder victim. This novel, instead, explores what characters who have been beaten down and confined by sexism might be capable of. Abbott tempts us to read her tale as a study in what happens when female revenge overflows its bounds, when female rage rises up like a ghost out of the earth. In a flashback, Kit sees Diane’s pale face and asks, “Did someone do something to you? . . . . Did someone hurt you?” But Diane corrects her: “I’m talking about something I did.”
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.
In an essay for Slate about revisiting Raymond Chandler in the age of #MeToo, Abbott explains that the archetype of the female slayer flourished in “an era when many white American men felt embattled. Their livelihoods had been taken away—first by the Depression, then by the war, and then by the women who replaced them while they were off fighting.” The stories that resulted, “tales of white, straight men . . . who feel deeply threatened by women, so threatened that they render them all-powerful,” bore the legacy of male anxiety. The femme fatale, like the Dead Girl, traditionally functioned as a cipher, a scrim for misogynist fantasies. Abbott’s fiction hungers for more complex versions of these old types. As Ruth Franklin observes, in a profile of the author in New York, “Give Me Your Hand” “plays with cultural constructions of female ‘blood rage,’ often in a self-consciously ironic way.” Recalling a conversation with Dr. Severin about P.M.D.D., Kit muses, “Don’t we all feel we have something banked down deep inside just waiting for its moment, the slow gathering of hot blood?” (Abbott loves the word “something,” and can work sinister wonders with its contradictory suggestions of evasiveness and presence. Kit reflects, too, on “the fear all men have that there’s something inside us that shifts, and turns.”) Even as “Give Me Your Hand” invokes the old trope of female hormonal madness, it resists it as the ultimate explanation for Diane’s behavior—when (spoiler) she submits herself to a hysterectomy, her murderous impulses remain.
At times, though, Abbott mistakes reproducing noir myths of femininity for subverting them. Whether the yonic horror of Diane’s actions finally derives from biology or culture, the novel’s pervasive visual grammar, its exhalations of gendered dread, hint at a connection between her and the other female characters, who in turn feel subtly driven by their experience as women. (Grazing her hand over a pile of P.M.D.D. literature, Kit remembers Diane’s words: “It’s you . . . It’s both of us.”) The murderesses in “Give Me Your Hand” remain victims, cracking under the strain of performing, charming, summoning up, and forcing down. (“Diane was so quiet, so private,” Kit says. “I couldn’t imagine [her] doing anything that wasn’t careful and correct.”) The same energies that slay some women, the novel seems to say, can twist other women into slayers. Kit and Diane do not counteract the Dead Girl so much as meet her gaze from the other side of the mirror.
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.
It is unfair to expect anything similar from the women in “Give Me Your Hand.” Villanelle springs from fantasy. She wields limitless wits and limitless wealth; she moves through the world seemingly unencumbered by constraints of any kind. While Abbott’s fiction (like noir historically) probes real societal anxieties—of family, work, illness—“Killing Eve” conjures a female future that has yet to dawn. But in imagining a character built so completely from male desires, and at the same time so unconcerned with them, “Killing Eve” constructs a bracing new model for feminist revenge. Patriarchy, though it abets Villanelle (no one thinks the assassin could be female), doesn’t define her. Her ardor is reserved for life, and for Eve, the detective whom she circles as fervently as Eve circles her, and as avidly as generations of detectives have circled Dead Girls and their dangerous, bewitching counterparts. This is its own sort of feminist breakthrough: she is Villanelle first, a woman second.
