#EmpowerHer: The ‘Unlikable’ Women of Gillian Flynn

BLOOD on a woman’s hand is always met with disbelief. 

A mother, a wife, a daughter—women are expected to nurture, not destroy. 

In societies shaped by Christianity, there is even an ingrained tendency, whether conscious or not, to associate women with the image of the Virgin Mary. 

They are expected to embody her virtues: nurturing, inherently good, and selfless. She is always the lamb, never the slaughterer. Always the saint, rarely the sinner. 

Society seldom associates the image of violence to women. Wars are for the fathers, not the mothers. Battle scars are of the sons, never the daughters. 

Some might think that the view of women through the rose-colored glasses is flattering. Many might even mistake this glorification and idealization of women as a form of feminism. 

But the notion that “women can do no wrong” simply because they are marginalized ultimately strips them of their humanity. It contradicts the core principle of feminism—the fight for women to be seen as equals to men, with all the complexities that come with it.

To place women on the pedestal is to deny them this very complexity. It is to insist that they must always be nurturing, always selfless, always good. 

But true equality does not come from idealization. It comes from the recognition that women, like men, are capable of both tenderness and cruelty, of creation and destruction. 

Gillian Flynn, the American novelist and screenwriter, understands this. Remember Amy Dunne of Gone Girl? How about Libby Day of Dark Places?

Her works present female characters as messy, vicious, deeply flawed, and human. Not in spite of her feminism, but because of it.

Gillian Flynn and the Feminist Backlash

Literary circles are divided on their opinions of Gillian Flynn. On one hand, there are those who think her works reflect the author’s feminism. On the other, there are those who believe that Flynn’s works are anti-feminist, anti-women, and misogynistic. 

The latter ones’ claim stem from Flynn’s portrayal of women and their darkness. To quote Vulpes Libris’ take on their blog ‘Who is Gillian Flynn and why does she hate women so much?’:

“Flynn hates women… Gillian Flynn the writer has an unnerving talent for putting female behaviour under a microscope and watching it wriggle. These women are straight out of a Jackie Collins potboiler – the kind of puddle-deep harpies whose mercenary view of male-female relationships would cause a medieval marriage-fixer to blush – but entertaining as they are, the tone is disturbing. Women stab each other in the back, reads the subtext. They use sex as currency. They compete with other women for male attention and resort to slut shaming if they lose.”

Vulpes Libris (Who is Gillian Flynn and why does she hate women so much?)

The author’s assumption that Flynn hates women as an author is not a hard claim to make. After all, it really does seem that Flynn likes to portray her female characters in a bad light— not just the villain ones like Amy Dunne, but also, in this case, her protagonists as well. Flynn women are manipulative, selfish, even violent. To some, this reads as misogyny. 

But if we take a step back, don’t women like this exist? A quick scroll through the comments on a female celebrity’s Facebook post reveals it—among those criticizing her appearance, outfit, or perceived promiscuity are women themselves. The words whore and slut don’t just come from men; they’re also hurled by other women, reinforcing the very misogyny they, too, are subjected to.

To borrow from Paulo Freire’s The Pedagogy of the Oppressed, those who exist within an unjust social structure that dehumanizes and exploits them can, in turn, become sub-oppressors when given limited power. Instead of dismantling the system, they internalize the oppressor’s mindset and enforce the same harmful rules onto others.

Isn’t this what Flynn is portraying instead? Not women who are vilified for the sake of it, but women who have been shaped by their circumstances—both victims and enforcers of the very oppression they suffer from.

Exhibit A: Amy Dunne in ‘Gone Girl’

Amy Dunne (played by Rosamund Pike) | Photo Courtesy: Gone Girl (2014)

Who doesn’t know Amy Dunne?

Unless you’ve been completely offline, you’ve likely come across the iconic Cool Girl monologue from David Fincher’s Gone Girl (2014). But did you know it originated from Gillian Flynn’s novel of the same name? Flynn not only wrote the book—she also penned the film’s screenplay.

Amy Dunne is just one of many femme fatales shaped by the media, yet she stands apart. What makes her so unforgettable? Why does she continue to dominate pop culture, resurfacing through memes, parodies, and endless debate?

It’s because Amy’s character forces us to confront an unsettling reality in our worlds. Her complexity offers a hard question that forces us to look beyond our black-and-white morality: what happens when a woman uses the system’s expectations to her advantage?

The Cool Girl act doesn’t exist solely to be recited by the edgy girls. It was there as an acknowledgement of Amy’s recognition that society rewards women if they conform to its standards. If they play along with the male fantasy. It serves as a deconstruction of gender performance and male entitlement. 

And Amy’s ultimate power move was to use this against his husband, Nick Dunne, and the patriarchal system that favors him. 

She does not reject expectations. She exploits them. She fakes her own rape, taking advantage of how society readily believes women in distress if they are white and if they conform to their ideals of what a woman should be. She utilizes how the media likes to frame women as fragile, and she faked her pregnancy because she knew that society idealizes motherhood. 

Exhibit B: The Female Characters of ‘Sharp Objects’

Adora Crellin (Patricia Clarkson) | Photo Courtesy: HBO’s Sharp Object (2018)

Speaking of motherhood, in Sharp Objects, Flynn uses it as a powerful lens to explore the darkness within her female characters.

Adora, the protagonist’s mother, appears on the surface to be the epitome of a loving and nurturing caregiver—the picture-perfect Madonna figure in a quiet rural town. She embodies the traditional ideals of femininity: graceful, poised, and devoted to her children. But beneath this carefully crafted facade lies something far more sinister.

By the novel’s end, we learn that Adora poisons her daughters, suffering from Munchausen Syndrome by proxy—a psychological disorder in which a caregiver deliberately makes their child ill to exert control and maintain a sense of importance. Her affection is not selfless but possessive, her love a weapon disguised as care.

Adora embodies the horror of toxic maternal control, warping the very concept of motherhood into something suffocating and destructive. Through her, Flynn dismantles the notion that all mothers are inherently good, revealing how even the most sacred roles can be twisted into something monstrous.

But if you think it stops there—it doesn’t. Flynn goes even further, dismantling another deeply ingrained belief: that girlhood equates to innocence. Enter Amma, the protagonist’s younger teenage sister.

Amma Crellin (Eliza Scanlen) | Photo Courtesy: HBO’s Sharp Object (2018)

At the surface, Amma embodies the sweetness of youth. She is childish, girlish, almost Lolitaesque in her budding age. But just like Amy Dunne and her Mother Adora, Amma knew how the world perceived her— and she used it to her advantage. She is revealed to be cunning, manipulative, and as we learned later on, capable of extreme violence despite her age. 

One of the most chilling symbols of this deception is Amma’s dollhouse—a meticulously crafted miniature replica of their home. She plays with it obsessively, arranging every tiny detail to mirror reality. 

But in a shocking reveal at the end of the novel, the ivory floors of the dollhouse are discovered to be made from the teeth of her murdered victims. This grotesque detail serves as a haunting metaphor: the illusion of girlhood’s innocence blinded not only the police but even the protagonist herself to Amma’s capacity for brutality.

Where Adora wields power through smothering control and fabricated weakness, Amma exerts hers through deception and cruelty. She oscillates between innocence and savagery, proving that darkness doesn’t wait for adulthood.

Flynn forces us to confront an unsettling truth—sometimes, the most dangerous monsters are the ones we least suspect.

Exhibit C: Libby Day in ‘Dark Places’

Libby Day (Charlize Theron) | Photo Courtesy: Dark Places (2015)

Although Dark Places also presents us with a violent female antagonist in the character of Diondra, what caught my interest more was its depiction of the protagonist Libby Day. 

Libby Day is not the kind of victim we’re used to seeing in crime fiction. She’s not fragile in her trauma, nor graceful in handling it. She is messy, detached and, at times, even opportunistic. As the sole survivor that killed her sisters and mother, she lives off the notoriety of her past, accepting donations and cashing in on her trauma rather than seeking healing. 

From the beginning, Dark Places makes it clear that Libby is no heroine, nor does she try to be. She, herself, acknowledged the evil living inside of her:

“I have a meanness inside me, real as an organ. Slit me at my belly and it might slide out, meaty and dark, drop on the floor so you could stomp on it. It’s the Day blood. Something’s wrong with it. I was never a good little girl, and I got worse after the murders.”

Gillian Flynn, Dark Places (2009)

In crime fiction, women are always depicted to be a certain way. They must be resilient but not bitter, grateful for their second chance but not too independent. 

The ‘perfect victim’ archetype demands a level of grace under pressure that society rarely requires of male survivors. But Libby Day doesn’t fit this mold. 

She is cynical, selfish, and unwilling to perform the kind of suffering that makes people comfortable. She doesn’t seek justice for her family’s murder out of moral obligation—she does it for money. 

When a group of amateur sleuths offers her cash to reinvestigate her past, she takes it, not out of any noble pursuit for the truth, but because she is broke and desperate.

By giving us Libby Day in this manner, Flynn confronts our expectations of female survivors. Why do we expect them to be inherently good? Why must they be likeable? 

A male protagonist with the same traits— gritty, emotionally detached, driven by self-interest— would be considered complex or even admirable. But exchange her with a woman, and then suddenly, she’s insufferable. Ungrateful. Unlikeable. 

Her flaws become harder to digest when she is not seeking catharsis, nor does she attempt to win the audience’s sympathy. 

Libby is the rejection of the idea that a woman’s suffering will immediately make her virtuous. She might have survived, but the survival did not make her a saint. 

In Dark Places, Flynn shows that victims do not have to be likable to be real. Libby is not a symbol of resilience. She is a person, shaped by trauma but not defined by it. 

And that, perhaps, is why she feels more real than the ‘perfect’ female victims we are so used to seeing.

Is Gillian Flynn anti-feminist?

I have to side with the former half of literary circles and argue that much of the criticism labeling Gillian Flynn as anti-feminist or anti-women stems from a surface-level analysis of her characters. 

Critics often take her refusal to write “likeable” female characters as an attack on women rather than a challenge to the rigid conventions placed upon them. Flynn’s characters’ are not villains because they are women; they are villains who happen to be women. Flawed, messy, and complex in the same way male characters have been allowed for centuries. 

To dismiss Flynn’s works as misogynistic just because they tend to show female darkness is to overlook the very thing that makes it feminist— her refusal to confine women in narrow archetypes of virtue or victimhood. By giving us Amy Dunne, Adora and Amma Crellin, and an unlikeable survivor in Libby Day, she challenges the idea that women must always be likeable to be worthy of attention. 

Flynn does not write against women. She writes for them. For the women who are tired of being told they must be perfect to be respected. For the women who are allowed to be anything except complex. And for the women who, like her characters, refuse to apologize for being unapologetically themselves.