Girl meets Boy. Girl marries Boy. Boy meets Another Woman.

Girl goes out of her mind with rage. Big Time.

This familiar trope plays out in a complex web of nail-biting intrigue in Gillian Flynn's popular mystery novel and screenplay Gone Girl, but this theme of punishing a philandering spouse to the extreme has ancient roots. This month in the Reader's Den, we compare Gone Girl to Euripides's Medea, and look at other works that deal with this similar theme of femme fatales.

She is deliciously tall sort of a long girl
She is delightfully small sort of a song girl
She freely admits to the world that she was a wrong girl
That's nothing compare to the fact that she is a gone girl
Johnny Cash 'Gone Girl'

Nick Dunne and Amy Elliott met and courted as journalist/writers in NYC, but after losing their jobs, they move to a rented McMansion in Nick's hometown of North Carthage, Missouri to take care of his dying mother and play out their disintegrating marriage ritual in slow motion. Amy is an exacting perfectionist, and the subject of her parents' popular children's book series Amazing Amy. Nick buys a bar in North Carthage with his twin sister Go (Margo) using Amy's trust fund money. On the morning of Nick and Amy Dunne's fifth wedding anniversary, Amy Dunne disappears out of thin air. Nick and Amy take turns narrating chapters in a 'Dear Diary' fashion through the novel to articulate each character's mindset, or so it seems. In these 'diary entries' we learn of Amy's condescension towards her life in North Carthage, Nick's affair with a college student, and Amy's miscarriage. The book unravels as a great thriller as Nick perilously jumps through the many traps implicating him in Amy's murder, as she masterfully twists the media's eye to smear Nick's character as the principal suspect in her apparent disappearance/murder. Flynn crafts a razor-sharp psychotic mind residing within Amy Dunne, she acts only minimally rashly, until she realizes she still has strong feelings for Nick, and then becomes willing to do anything to gain back the love of her husband.

"Ah my sufferings, my wretched sufferings, they invite a world's tears! O cursed children of a hateful mother, I want you to die along with your father, and all the house to go to ruins!" (from Medea ). Euripides's play of the Medea story, first produced in 431 BC, takes place about two and a half millennia earlier than the Gone Girl travails, but contains many similar elements of matrimonial revenge. Medea and Amy Dunne both relocate and leave their family of origin for the sake of their spouses; Amy from New York to Missouri, while Medea leaves Colchis to follow Jason to Corinth, after she aided Jason in locating the Golden Fleece (in exchange for marrying her, by some accounts). Nick also takes advantage of Amy's trust fund in order to finance the bar he opens with his sister back in North Carthage. Amy disappears herself after learning of Nick's infidelity, while Medea is banished by Creon, King of Corinth, fearing the wrath of her revenge. Gone Girl's Amy Dunne and Medea both use children as a means of hurting and manipulating their spouses, Amy blackmails Nick into staying with her though a pregnancy, while Medea amps up her game to an unthinkable level by threatening to kill her children, Mermeros and Pheres. And stylistically speaking, the play Medea makes use of a Greek Chorus to add emotional charge and an external voice to the story, while the film version of Gone Girl features an ethereal and edgy soundtrack composed by Nine Inch Nails's Trent Reznor to heighten the emotions of the audience.

Euripides (480 - 406 B.C.) is one of Greece's greatest dramatic writers, and in many ways, revolutionized Western theatrical traditions that endure to this day. He often portrayed 'ordinary' characters under extraordinary pressures and circumstances; in order to distil the most emotional reactions that could come alive on stage. He stood apart from other writers of his age by giving voice and depth to all echelons of society, including female characters, such as Medea. Like Euripides, Gillian Flynn has said of her work that she wanted to write about female aggression in an honest way "...we still don't discuss our own violence. We devour the news about Susan Smith or Andrea Yates—women who drowned their children—but we demand these stories to be rendered palatable."

In our next installment of the Reader's Den, we will discuss other books, films and dramatic works similar to the femme fatale themes seen in Medea and Gone Girl.