Happy House Wife Analysis

The “happy house wife” is a fantasy as outlined in The Promise of Happiness by Sara Ahmed. According to Ahmed the “happy house wife” is an illusion that “erases signs of labor under signs of happiness” to reinforce the gendered stereotypes that women “enjoyed” working in the home and would not want to be anywhere else (Ahmed). Amy fully embodies this stereotype in her journal entries as Diary Amy states that she “positively hums around him, fussing and fixing” she has become a “wife” and a bore and gladly “forfeited” her “Independent Young Feminist Card” and cares only to please him whether it be to “balance his checkbook” or “trim his hair” (Flynn 18). This is the Amy that the reader wants to like, someone who fully embodies the woman every

These first images of Amy then become so terrifying to the audience when Amy breaks them because Amy knowingly uses the stereotypes created by men against them. Specifically, her husband who embodies the average everyman character, no matter how unlikable and unbelievable Nick Dunne is, Amy Dunne is ten times worse in her deception. This fact is so terrifying because Amy is the exact opposite of the caring wife she showed in her journal entries as the “happy housewife” stereotype. However, what makes Amy so interesting to follow is that the reader might see their own “obsessions” and “fears” within Amy, specifically women who feel trapped within the stereotypes created for them (Troy). Women who desire a form of escapism that the character of Amy provides, as she herself escapes from the person she had to be, before she made herself disappear and was able to create a new story for herself separate from being married to Nick and being Amazing Amy even if it meant killing and lying to get there she in a way becomes

My rope-wreathed wrists, my damaged vagina, my bruises—the body I present them is textbook” (Flynn 500). The fact that Amy could do this to herself is already terrifying enough, but even more so is the way describes the way in which she mutilated herself as being “textbook” as if she knows exactly how a rape victim would “look” or summer, at least enough to trick a medical examiner and that is the most despicable act of all. As Robert Palmer says in his critique of Amy in his essay “Gone Girl and The Specter of Feminism” Amy’s actions are seen as to lessen the plight of real-life rape and kidnap victims