The Ghost Dollhouse of Dixie

Dead Places, Hauntology and the Uncanny in Gillian Flynn’s “Sharp Objects”

Keywords: Gothic, Uncanny, Hauntology, Southern Literature, Sharp Objects

Abstract

This essay focuses on Gillian Flynn’s Sharp Objects (2006) and its 2018 TV adaptation created by Marti Noxon and directed by Jean-Marc Vallée. These works cover the dark parable of Camille Preaker, a Southern émigré who is forced to go back south to face the demons of her story—and of the vaster Southern history. The homecoming turns out to be characterized by a disturbing overlap of time gone and time present—or better, of a past corroding the present—which the series present in a more distinctively Southern gothic style when compared to the novel. Coherent relations between time and space are disjointed by Camille’s past traumas and memories, resulting in a painful existential dislocation and a dialectics of constraint that questions and dismantles the traditional white Southern sense of place, bringing to light the complex conflict between a Southern and a postsouthern reality that results in a renewed ensnarement. To map Camille’s hallucinating and painfully concrete descent into the South, the essay analyzes the interconnected roles of time, space, and how they reflect and are reflected by Southern society as portrayed in the novel and series, showing how they project a dead—and deathly—chronotope that encompasses the protagonist’s story, the region’s history, and its faux-historical resurgences.

Author Biography

Marco Petrelli, University of Pisa

Marco Petrelli is Assistant Professor of American literature at the University of Pisa. He authored Paradiso in nero: spazio e mito nella narrativa di Cormac McCarthy (Aracne 2020); Nick Cave. Preghiere di fuoco e ballate assassine (Castel Negrino 2021); and several essays dedicated to the literature and culture of the US South, American Gothic fiction, African American literature, geocriticism and graphic narratives. Among his latest publications are “A Theory of Southern Time and Space: Memory, Place and Identity in Natasha Trethewey’s
Native Guard” (in The Southern Quarterly vol. 58, no. 3), and “‘I need the story to go’: Sing, Unburied Sing, Afropessimism and Black Narratives of Redemption” (in Jesmyn Ward: New Critical Essays, Edinburgh University Press 2023). He is also a literary critic for the Italian newspaper il manifesto, and co-founder and co-editor-in-chief of JAm It!–Journal of American Studies in Italy. His current research project develops at the intersection of African American ghost stories and the Blues.

Published
2024-07-25