The Ghost Dollhouse of Dixie

Dead Places, Hauntology and the Uncanny in Gillian Flynn’s “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.