Murder becomes the latest fantasy
Canadian psychological thriller this summer’s blockbuster hit, CELIA WALDEN writes.
‘I’d poison him,” says my friend Amanda, helping herself to the last slice of cinnamon upside-down cake.
“Really?” frowns Dianne. “I wouldn’t. The dosage might not be high enough, and then what? You end up being his nursemaid for the rest of your life? That’s probably why you wanted to bump him off to begin with. No, I think I’d suffocate Chris. Less risky.”
Chris rubs her arm affectionately. “That’s sweet,” he says. “I always thought you were the baseball-bat-over-the-head type.”
Then he turns to me. “What about you, Celia — how would you kill your husband?”
A few months ago, this would have been a strange — if refreshingly un-L.A. — question to be asked at a Beverly Hills barbecue. That was before Canadian author A.S.A. Harrison’s The Silent Wife was published — before the psychological thriller about a meek-mannered, immaculate Chicago therapist who is a model wife to her husband and partner of 20 years (until she murders him) became this summer’s blockbuster novel.
Toronto-born Harrison — who died of cancer in April, just weeks before the book was published — has been praised for capturing the “frustrated marriage” zeitgeist (the latest trend in female literature), but this new female noir genre makes me feel slightly uneasy.
Last summer, Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl — which sold more than two million copies and is being made into a Hollywood movie — brought out unsettling streaks in some of my married girlfriends. With Flynn’s husband-hating heroine, Amy, as their role model, these women sat around planning the imaginary stitching-up and neutralization of their spouses over last orders and a dwindling bowl of edamame beans.
They hypothesized about their partners’ possible infidelities with a perverse enjoyment, and came out with oblique generalities (“nobody really knows the man they married”) in tones I’d never heard them use before. A year on, they’re actively planning their husbands’ murders.
I’d like to know where all this female rage is coming from. When was it that the Bridget Jones generation stopped daydreaming about marrying Mr Darcy and started imagining how good it would feel, 20 years on, to bludgeon the now balding, paunch-prone, crossword-addicted man they married to death? When did we move from chick-lit, sorcery, Gothic horror and 50 shades of heavy breathing to mariticide fantasy?
“It’s about men’s consistent failure to live up to our expectations,” insists Amanda later that afternoon, as we watch the subjugated L.A. husbands playing with the kids in the shallow end of the pool. Fictional husbands, she goes on, don’t get murdered for decrepitude or infidelity anymore — even if those things are factors. “They get murdered because they’ve become so ineffectual. And that’s something we can all relate to.”
It seems the wrong moment to point out that I feel neither disappointed in nor murderous toward my husband. Besides, I suspect the emergence of the mariticide fantasy genre is more about control. Once you’ve got your husband as well-trained and “handbagged” as your miniature Schnauzer, you move on to more ambitious plans — like taking men out of the picture completely.
It’s not as though they’re needed these days, is it?
Financial stability, status, sexual satisfaction and children: All of these things can be accomplished without the man whom you’ll describe as “a disappointment in a sweater vest” come his retirement years.
It might be taking it a little far to say that the Amazons — who killed the men they partnered with once they had conceived — got it right. And female fans of mariticidal fiction would no more consider exterminating their husbands in real life than they would embark on a torrid affair with a man who turns up to dinner — Christian Grey-style — with a roll of duct tape. But there’s no harm in a little idle fantasy, is there?