On Sentimental Sisterly Bonds and Poisonous Motherly Care: Negotiations of Southern White Female Victimhood in Sharp Objects (2018)

Abstract

This essay explores the ways in which Jean-Marc Vallée’s Sharp Objects (2018) can be understood as part of a sentimental Southern Gothic visual culture and how this enables a profound analytical entry point for the critical study of the ideologies attached to imaginings of white Southern femininity. Thus, it examines the employment of ‘strategic white womanhood’ and the weaponization of ‘white innocence’ in the context of white Southern women through a distinct Southern Gothic lens that subverts established archetypes of the Southern belle and the Southern lady alongside sentimental tropes of motherhood. In this way, this paper also proposes how, through the overt sentimentalization of sisterly bonds, the miniseries invests in maintaining an imaginary in which white Southern women and girls can nevertheless be conceived as victimized and pitiable.