Monstrous Victims: Women, Trauma, and Gothic Violence in Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook and The Nightingale

Abstract

This chapter compares Jennifer Kent’s The Babadook (2014) and The Nightingale (2019) in terms of their explicit construction of violence conducted by and against women. Both films draw on the gothic trope of women suffering trauma and the more recent conversion of that suffering to the perpetuation of violent revenge. However, this chapter shows that rather than constituting a kind of bravery, or a subversion of that victimization along the lines of the figure of Carol Clover’s ‘Final Girl’, the acts of violence committed by the women in these films compound their traumatization by severing them both from others and from themselves.