Resumen de Emotional Scars and Embattled Relationships in Liane Moriarty’s Big Little Lies (2014)
In the 21st century, the presence of complex female characters in crime fiction seems to be stronger than ever. Although it has been traditionally regarded as a male-dominated genre, in the last decades, women have been crime fiction’s unquestionable protagonists. This, together with the existing tendency of the genre to put the focus on the psychology and mental life of the characters rather than on the crime itself, has caused the number of complex female characters within the genre to significantly increase over the years. These multi-layered characters frequently engage in equally intricate relationships with other of the same kind. In this paper, I propose psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin’s intersubjective theory to study this type of bond in Liane Moriarty’s novel Big Little Lies (2014), a novel which was adapted to the small screen in 2014 and which has become one of HBO’s greatest hits of the last years.
