Eliza Clark’s second book Penance, which takes the form of a true crime novel, was published in summer 2023 to significant literary expectation. Following the fictional murder of 16-year-old Joan Wilson by three of her female classmates, in Penance Clark explores the nature and consequences of unmediated violence, small town depravity, national politics and parasocial relationships. Despite this, a contemporary review of Clark’s novel by The New York Times, summarised her book as an expression of the ‘dull and bottomless rage of being teenage girls whose lives have been shaped by the abuses of powerful men.’[1] Interestingly, reviewer Violet Kupersmith chooses to frame Penance through the lens of exploring a specifically female experience of adolescence, ‘shaped,’ narrated and retold by men. This essay will argue that through Clark’s use of a metanarrative, the ‘true’ story being told through outcast journalist Alec Carelli, as well as her pastiche of the true crime genre, Clark formulates a male-mediated narrative of female adolescence. Arguably this narrative is framed by psychoanalytic ideas of female development as Carelli takes on the role of a diagnostic psychotherapist intent on evaluating and explaining the girls’ emotions and behaviour. Furthermore, through Clark’s adoption of Carelli as a narrator, she contemplates the significance of ‘truth’ in true crime, satirising the genre and interrogating not only the cultural fascination with female violence but also ideas on ‘normal’ female development.
When considering adolescence as a period of development, psychoanalysts frame it as a volatile and liminal period of transition. Quoting from Anna Freud, Katherine Dalsimer asserts in her book Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature that ‘it is normal for an adolescent to behave for a considerable length of time in an inconsistent and unpredictable manner.’[2] As adolescence itself is as a period of transition, from childhood to adulthood, the characterisation of it as ‘inconsistent and unpredictable’ aligns with the transitory nature of the experience. However, this impermanence makes exploring adolescence as fixed or definable part of life almost paradoxical. This characterisation of adolescence, as simultaneously stable and yet flexible, is seen in Penance through Carelli’s inconsistent reference to the girls. Following a description of the crime at the end of the novel it is asserted that ‘the offense was considered serious enough that all three girls were tried in the Crown Court, rather than the juvenile court system,’ explaining how, despite the girls being of school age, the legal system regards them as adults who are capable of making an informed decision and facing the punishment for it.[3] Despite this, Carelli uses different language to describe the perpetrators of violence, referring to them as ‘children’ following a description of the blunt force trauma inflicted upon Joan.[4] The use of ‘children,’ particularly at this part of the novel, infantilises the girls and absolves them of some element of criminal responsibility. Importantly, it also puts Carelli in a position of authority, presenting himself as the older and more experienced adult who is reflecting on the actions of children. Furthermore, this paradox, of the girls being treated like adults but referred to as ‘children’ explores how adolescence can exist as a kind of liminal space.
Despite this, there is some suggestion in Penance that adolescence is a permanent state of being, despite its undefinable nature. This is supported by Jayde who says, according to Carelli’s account, ‘there’s a bit of you that’s always a teenager, isn’t there?’[5] Jayde’s question – on whether adolescence can be departed from or not – queries Anna Freud’s suggestion that the behaviour of adolescents would be ‘deemed highly abnormal at any other time of life.’[6] Arguably, this contemplation of how much of your identity is formulated by your teenage development is the question Clark’s narrator asks through his analysis of the girls and their behaviour.
Throughout Penance Clark’s narrator evaluates the girls and their behaviour in an attempt to explain their degeneration into violence. His writing is formulated on an unlived experience of female adolescence as Carelli takes on the role of a psychoanalyst therapist, eager to diagnose and appropriate their lived experience to fit a self-constructed narrative. One of the ways in which he does this is through a consideration of the schoolgirls’ female friendships. Quoting from a stolen copy of Violet’s personal writings, Carelli includes in ‘his’ book, Violet’s reflection on her friendship with Joan, ‘I think we were friends on a deeper level.’[7] Psychoanalysts such as Dalsimer would argue that this is an example of an ‘intense often erotically tinged relationship,’ in other words, a conceptualisation of the erotic in which a young girl projects sexual feelings onto another girl.[8] This is understood as a transitory period where the next phase of development is a transference of these sexual feelings towards a member of the opposite gender, fulfilling the heteronormative convention. Although not explicit, Clark’s narrator questions the developmental normalcy of Violet and Joan’s relationship, asking Joan’s mother, ‘I asked Amanda if she had any concerns about their insular friendship.’[9] The use of ‘concern’ here is loaded as Carelli implies through his questioning of Joan’s mother that there was something about Joan and Violet’s relationship to be concerned about, encouraging her to respond in the affirmative and agree that Joan and Violet’s relationship is developmentally important. There is a subtle suggestion through Carelli’s questioning and speculation on the girls’ sexualities that Clark’s narrator deems Joan and Violet’s relationship as somewhat abnormal, or at least significant when considering why the girls committed the act of violence. Furthermore, there seems to be an implicit consideration, or question, surrounding the importance of homoerotic relationships in the development of violent behaviour. Interestingly, Clark throws this into contention through the presentation of Jayde Spencer, the only openly gay character and the only girl Carelli evaluates who is not involved in Joan’s killing. This is one of the ways in which Clark draws attention to Carelli’s subjective and unreliable point of view; another is through his evaluation of parental and sexual abuse.
As part of his evaluation of the crime in Crow-on-Sea Carelli evaluates the girls’ relationship to their parents. Through his discussion on Angelica, Dolly, and Violet, he establishes how close the girls were to their fathers and mother respectively: ‘Angelica was a daddy’s girl-always had been, always would be,’ ‘Dolly was a daddy’s girl’ and ‘she [Violet’s mother] didn’t think she should be her daughter’s best friend.’[10] Similar to close relationships with those of the same gender, close relationships with parents are also regarded as a transitory period of adolescence in psychoanalytic theory. In Female Adolescence, Dalsimer stresses the importance of establishing distance in parent-child relationships saying, ‘with the body sexually mature, the threatened reawakening of oedipal passions, both sexual and rivalrous, makes it the more imperative that the parents be relinquished as the primary objects of love.’[11] Through his consideration of parental relationships, Carelli establishes that at some point each of the girls was exceptionally close to one of their parents, therefore framing this as a significant part of their development. His speculation on what he cannot prove is also important as Clark’s narrator spends substantial time theorising on the appropriateness of Angelica’s interactions with her father’s friend and paedophile, Vance Diamond, as well as Violet’s experience of child sexual abuse. Arguably, Carelli does not draw on the Oedipus complex directly, however his signposting of the girls’ familial relationships and the potential sexual abuse associated with these relationships establishes an implication of cause and effect.
Despite this, Carelli is incredibly careful not to implicate himself with these speculations. When he considers the alleged sexual abuse of Dolly by her father, he openly criticises the validity of the claims saying to Dolly’s sister, ‘Mr Hart entering Dolly’s room may not have been as sinister as it appeared. I am a father myself.’[12] By relating his own experience of fatherhood to Dolly’s relationship with her father, Clark not only emphasises Carelli’s subjectivity, but also his inconsistency. It seems that Carelli only spotlights the potential dysfunctionality of close family relationships when it benefits his narrative. Therefore, when discussing his own daughter’s suicide (which is referenced throughout ‘his’ book) Carelli regards the nature of their parent-child relationship as uncorrelated. Clark establishes this as a double standard in which Carelli’s explanations for tragedy are not transferable beyond the context he presents them in, suggesting that Carelli’s eagerness to diagnose or explain violence only applies to those whose narrative he has the power to manipulate.
Through this Clark establishes her narrator as having a consistent and calculated control over ‘his’ narrative, yielding an authoritative male voice to evaluate and diagnose the young female characters. This is remarkedly reminding of Elin Diamond’s reflection on Freud’s role as a psychotherapist, whom she characterises in her book Unmaking Mimesis as, ‘play[ing] both director and audience, judge and witness, which casts the patient in the role of the performer, if not criminal.’[13] Diamond goes onto quote from Sarah Kofman who says, ‘that when she consents to reveal her secrets, “the hysteric collaborates with the doctor and... recognises his word as the voice of truth.”’[14] Arguably, Carelli embodies this Freudian persona, presenting a seemingly unbiased version of the truth whilst simultaneously refusing to acknowledge that it is he who holds all the power over the narrative. Importantly, Diamond draws attention to the gender of the psychoanalyst – it is ‘his voice’ which creates the voice of female experience. This unbalanced power dynamic, between the male authority figure and female ‘hysteric,’ or in Penance’s case, young female offender is critical to Clark’s narrative. Arguably, by choosing her narrator to be an older, more experienced man speculating on the life experience of young girls – including contemplating on sexuality and experiences of sexual abuse, Clark is making a commentary on the exploitative position of men in power towards young women. Particularly, it seems, the exploitative position of men in the press or literary industry – men who have the ability to create narratives about women which become perceived reflections of the truth.
Carelli’s authorial ability to create truth, is particularly well reflected in the prose sections of the novel where he embodies an invented experience of female adolescence. These sections of the book are justified by Carelli in order ‘to give the reader an emotional insight into each perpetrator’s emotional life,’ which begs the question of where this ‘insight’ has been developed from.[15] In the section which centres Violet’s ‘emotional life’, Carelli says, ‘sometimes she wondered if she was a psychopath.’[16] The use of diagnostic language once again positions Carelli in the role of the psychoanalytic therapist. More than this though, Carelli’s assertion that this is an ‘emotional insight’ into Violet, and not a subjective opinion of his own, creates a sense of factuality to the assertion. This is supported through Carelli’s construction of Violet’s voice in the present tense. In another mediation on psychoanalytic interview technique, feminist critic Jacqueline Rose asks ‘why the staging? Why do these moments have to be lived in the present tense?’[17] Here, Rose is referring to the interviewing of patients asked to recall traumatic events so that they can be successfully diagnosed by a psychotherapist. However, when applied to Carelli’s sections of prose in Penance it could be suggested that in order for Carelli’s assertions about the girls to be believable, they must be spontaneous, urgent and grounded in real life. Expanding on Rose’s question it seems that there is a juxtaposition here as her use of ’staging’ implies that Carelli is putting on a façade for the purpose of spectacle, or at least dramatising the girls for the purpose of psychoanalytic diagnosis.
Reflecting on the concept of ‘truth’ in Deconstructing True Crime Literature, Charlotte Barnes quotes from Simon Blackburn saying that ‘one thing we cannot do is pass verdict on something of which we have no experience of.’[18] Perhaps Carelli feels like he knows the girls or understands their experience of adolescence because of the extensive interviews he has undertaken, his relocation to Crow-on-Sea, or his experience of fathering a teenage daughter. Arguably, Clark undermines any sense of Carelli’s authenticity at the end of the book when her narrator reveals in an interview that, ‘I’ve always thought of the truth as quite a plastic thing’ going on to refer to his ‘authority of the writer.’[19] Here, contrary to the justification of his book through genuine interest and research, Carelli highlights his knowledge of the power he possesses as a writer and how he utilises it to his advantage. The description of truth as ‘plastic’ suggests how Carelli recognises the moldability of truth, something which he believes he has the ‘authority’ to craft and shape; plastic is also a man- made substance, like Carelli’s constructed narrative. Importantly however, this construction exists on two levels through Clark’s use of a metanarrative. Arguably this creates an even greater distance between the novel and the conception of truth, as Carelli is a fictional narrator who fictionalises his own narrative. Returning to ideas presented by Diamond in Unmaking Mimesis, she asks, ‘what are the implications of a contaminated text, a realism without truth?’[20] Here, Diamond is referring to the ‘destabilising’ relationship between text and performance in theatre, however I would suggest that the same concept can be applied to Clark’s use of a metanarrative in Penance.[21] Carelli’s use of fiction as a performance of truth, and Clark’s ironic nods toward this establishes a separation between the realist form of Clark’s novel and the ‘truth’ it’s meant to represent, therefore justifying it’s use of the descriptor ‘contaminated.’ Furthermore the ‘implications’ of a novel ‘without truth’ is explored through Clark’s pastiche of the true crime genre.
In a review of Penance in The Spectator Andrew Hankinson suggests that Clark’s novel ‘is almost ethical true crime’ likening it to ‘a good vegan burger: good enough that there is no need to chop up a real carcass’[22] Colloquialisms aside, Hankinson’s suggestion that Clark’s novel is an ‘ethical true crime’ novel is interesting, especially when placed in contention with Diamond’s conceptualisation of a ‘contaminated text.’ If we consider Clark’s novel as simultaneously both ‘contaminated’ and ‘ethical’ it seems that when considering the ethics of true crime, there is a suggestion that in order to be a ‘ethical,’ the text must be contaminated beyond the point of being true. It is this distance from truth which allows Clark to explore the ways in which true crime functions without considering the lives and deaths of real people. Therefore, the contamination of truth in Penance, although ethical due to its fictionality, exposes the ways in which true crime, as a literary genre, has the power and authority to actualise false narratives on real people. This consideration of both the literary genre and cultural phenomenon of true crime is at the forefront of Clark’s writing and is made particularly obvious through her references to Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood. Capote’s novel functions in a similar way to Carelli’s book in Penance, in that it fictionalises and evaluates a real crime, and was described by himself as ‘a non-fiction novel.’[23] Carelli refers to ‘his’ novel using the same terminology at the end of Penance, making the comparison between In Cold Blood and Carelli’s text abundantly clear. As established, this idea of a ‘true’ or ‘non-fiction’ novel is very much satirised by Clark using her narrator, however contemporary reviewer Matt Rowland Hill asks; ‘But is Clark missing the irony here, too?”[24] Here, Hill could be making a reference to the end of the novel when Carelli condemns both the online true crime culture and ‘Creepy and Criminal Tour’ in Crow-on-Sea, saying ‘the snake has eaten its own tail.’[25] The irony here, of course, is that Carelli is condemning exactly the kind of thing he promotes. However, if Clark is conceptualising true crime as a genre which feeds and nurtures itself then to what extent does Penance also endorse the sensationalism of the genre?
Considering this question through the lens of female adolescence offers an interesting way into reading Penance. As suggested at the beginning of this essay, Clark’s novel is about the experience of ‘being teenage girls,’ simultaneously however, it cannot be removed from the context of true crime as the girls’ experience of adolescence is considered as an explanation for the violence they commit. Conceptually, this too can be understood through the metaphor of a snake eating its own tail as the reader, like Carelli, is encouraged to analyse and dissect the girls’ experience of adolescence in order to satisfy what reviewer Violet Kupersmith characterises as ‘that very desire of ours to know exactly what happened.’[26] Here, Kupersmith is most likely referring to the crime committed against Joan, however arguably the same can be applied to the girls’ experience of girlhood including relationships and friendships, online culture and emerging sexualities. Kupersmith goes onto say that ‘Clark shrewdly turns her own lens onto us, onto our obsession with true crime and the complicity in the industry it has spawned’[27] suggesting that perhaps it is not Clark who’s missing the irony of her novel, but rather her readers – particularly those who frequently engage with the genre of true crime. This suggestion, although useful in considering the popularity of true crime and interest in Clark’s novel specifically, is limiting when considering Clark’s novel as simply a true crime novel, or pastiche of the genre. Instead, I would argue that the association between violence and female adolescence specifically says considerable amounts not only about true crime, but also the media and public interest in female experience and development more generally. Carelli’s pathologisation of the girls’ behaviour, interest in their sexual experiences and actualisation of their inner thoughts all function to centre the offending girls in his narrative. His dismissal of Joan, the victim, suggests how Penance functions not as a novel about true crime, but as an ironic, yet exposing, psychological evaluation of female adolescence and experience.
Bibliography:
Barnes, Charlotte, Deconstructing True Crime Literature (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41045-1>
Clark, Eliza, Penance (London: Faber and Faber, 2023)
Dalsimer, Katherine, Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1986)
Diamond, Elin, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (London: Routledge, 1997)
Hankinson, Andrew, ‘An untrue true crime story: Penance, by Eliza Clark, reviewed’ in The Spectator <An untrue true crime story: Penance, by Eliza Clark, reviewed | The Spectator > [accessed 24 December 2023]
Hill, Matt Rowland, ‘Penance by Eliza Clark review- art or porn?’ in The Guardian <Penance by Eliza Clark review – art or porn? | Crime fiction | The Guardian > [accessed 23 December 2023]
Kupersmith, Violet, ‘‘Penance’ by Eliza Clark’ in The New York Times <Book Review: ‘Penance,’ by Eliza Clark - The New York Times (nytimes.com)> [accessed 5 January 2024]
Rose, Jacqueline, On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003)
[1] Violet Kupersmith, ‘‘Penance’ by Eliza Clark’ in The New York Times <Book Review: ‘Penance,’ by Eliza Clark - The New York Times (nytimes.com)> [accessed 5 January 2024]
[2] Katherine Dalsimer, Female Adolescence: Psychoanalytic Reflections on Literature (Connecticut: Yale University Press, 1986) p.5
[3] Eliza Clark, Penance (London: Faber and Faber, 2023) p.408
[4] Ibid, p.401
[5] Ibid, p.287
[6] Female Adolescence, p.5
[7] Penance, p.192
[8] Female Adolescence, p.8
[9] Penance, p.47
[10] Penance, p.81, 378, 181
[11] Female Adolescence, p.12
[12] Penance, p.387
[13] Elin Diamond, Unmaking Mimesis: Essays on Feminism and Theatre (London: Routledge, 1997) p. 16
[14] Ibid
[15] Penance, p.137
[16] Penance, p.234
[17] Jacqueline Rose, On Not Being Able to Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2003) p.213
[18] Barnes, Charlotte, Deconstructing True Crime Literature (Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2023) <https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-41045-1> p.1
[19] Penance, p.423-7
[20] Unmaking Mimesis, p.38
[21] Ibid
[22] Andrew Hankinson, ‘An untrue true crime story: Penance, by Eliza Clark, reviewed’ in The Spectator <An untrue true crime story: Penance, by Eliza Clark, reviewed | The Spectator > [accessed 24 December 2023]
[23] Deconstructing True Crime Literature, p.84
[24] Hill, Matt Rowland, ’Penance by Eliza Clark review- art or porn?’ in The Guardian < Penance by Eliza Clark review – art or porn? | Crime fiction | The Guardian > [accessed 23 December 2023]
[25] Penance, p.413
[26] Kupersmith, ‘‘Penance’ by Eliza Clark’
[27] Ibid