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  • The Neoliberal Gothic:Gone Girl, Broken Harbor, and the Terror of Everyday Life
  • Emily Johansen (bio)

In a 1987 interview with Women’s Own magazine, shortly after winning her third term as prime minister, Margaret Thatcher famously stated: “[T]here is no such thing [as society]. There are individual men and women and there are families.” Posing as a semi-utopic assertion about the power of self-determination and the deleterious effects of those who “manipulat[e] the system” out of a sense of entitlement, Thatcher’s aphorism might be better understood through the lens of the gothic, with its bleak sense of failed, even destroyed, community. To live under neoliberalism as described by one of its most vocal champions is to live in gothic times. Yet if traditional gothic narratives worked to obscure and exorcise the cruelties of liberal capitalism, in neoliberal gothic narratives the cruelties are recognized as inevitable and inescapable. The neoliberal gothic doesn’t check the selfish excesses of the neoliberal individual by depicting them as monstrous or degenerate only when taken too far and thus ultimately redeemable (typically by containment in marriage, as a microcosm for civil society); it doesn’t reassure its readers that some sort of civil society is possible or recoverable. Here, there is no possible civil society, reformed or alternative, nor is there the possibility of other social groupings to replace the absence of civil society.

This essay examines two examples of the neoliberal gothic novel, both published in 2012, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl and Tana French’s [End Page 30] Broken Harbor. Both works feature many of the hallmarks of the gothic novel, updated to reflect a particular historical moment after the 2008 economic crash: subdivision homes are in ruins, almost immediately after being constructed, and quasi-supernatural threats—faceless unemployed men (Gone Girl) and a mysterious animal and the system of surveillance set up to trap it (Broken Harbor)—lurk. While we might expect the solution to these threats, as in the traditional gothic, to be a resigned return to the liberal individual or family, here, there is nothing to return to without a more radical overhaul of the structures of everyday life. The iterations of the gothic novel that emerge under neoliberal rationalities, what I’m calling the neoliberal gothic, suggest that everyday life under neoliberalism might itself properly be understood as gothic, that the extremes and exaggerations associated with the gothic are not the exception but the rule. Thus it is not the typically gothic tropes in these novels (the abandoned houses, the quasi-supernatural threats) that seem most grotesque, but the way the demands of neoliberal entrepreneurial subject-formation cannot help but create either monsters or a sense of entropic decline, despite a rhetoric of continuous evolutionary improvement.

The gothic, as Stephen Shapiro has noted in his periodization of the genre, emerges as particularly potent and popular at times of both crisis in and shifting intensifications of capital and power.1 Our current moment might be categorized as such; indeed, Gérard Duménil and Dominique Lévy claim that “neoliberalism should be understood as a new phase in the evolution of capitalism” (5):

[T]he crisis of neoliberalism is the fourth structural crisis in capitalism since the late nineteenth century. Each of these earthquakes introduced the establishment of a new social order and deeply altered international relations. The contemporary crisis marks the beginning of a similar process of transition.

(2)

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Likewise, Jeffrey T. Nealon has written of the “‘new economies’ . . . and their complex relations to cultural production in the present moment, where capitalism seems nowhere near the point of its exhaustion” (Post-Postmodernism 15). At a time when capitalism seems to be both in crisis and entrenching its normativity and inescapability, the unpredictabile affective responses of the contemporary “neurotic citizen” (Engin Isin’s term) are those which have long been associated with the gothic and point to discontinuities and fault lines within contemporary neoliberal hegemony.2 Positioned as it is “at the social interface between the bourgeoisie and its largely self-appointed enemies, . . . at the psychological interface between the well-ordered psyche and its rebel subjects,” in David Punter’s words...

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