Destabilising the Discourses of Psychopathy Through Contemporary Canadian and US Women’s Writing

In this thesis, I explore twelve contemporary novels by women from the US and Canada with the objective of analysing, exposing, and unsettling the varied and often harmful discourses of psychopathy. Through an examination of contemporary fiction, I demonstrate that archaic and dehumanising stereotypes are embedded in these discourses. The twelve novels I examine range from bestsellers to independent press releases that employ styles associated with psychological terror to speculative fiction, true crime, and the police procedural. I provide a broad picture of how contemporary Canadian and US women’s fiction deploys the popular and prevalent discourses of psychopathy in vastly differing ways. In doing so, I illustrate how women’s fiction employs psychopath imagery, motifs, and language to reinforce as well as to destabilise dominant formations of class, race, and gender and stereotypes about ‘bad’ mothers, ‘crazy’ women, monstrous serial killers and sex offenders, and people diagnosed as autistic.

Taking a comparative and thematic approach, I organise my analysis through four chapters structured by mode and theme. Chapter one, on serial killer fiction, interrogates the depiction of the serial murderer and murderous culture in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley Under Water (1991), Joyce Carol Oates’s Zombie (1995), and Lisa Moore’s Alligator (2006). Examining speculative fiction in chapter two, I unsettle the aligning of autism and psychopathy in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), Tricia Sullivan’s Maul (2003), and Elizabeth Moon’s Speed of Dark (2002). Analysing terror narratives in chapter three, I interrogate sexist stereotypes in portrayals of the ‘psychopathic woman’ in Lionel Shriver’s We Need to Talk About Kevin (2003), Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012), and Maureen Medved’s Black Star (2018). Chapter four turns to witness narratives on sexual violence to examine Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), Myriam Gurba’s Mean (2017), and Katherena Vermette’s The Break (2016). Cumulatively, my readings expose and unsettle the stigmatising, pathologising, and demonising aspects of psychopathy discourses.