An Approach to (Vulner)able Women in Paula Hawkins’s Novels

Abstract

The notion of vulnerability has had a very prolific role in the last years, as the term has been applied to many and varied fields of research, being contemporary literature one of them. Taking Emmanuel Lévinas’s notion of the ethical encounter between the self and the other my aim is to explore through literary analysis how vulnerability is portrayed in contemporary literature and how it may affect that ethical connection. Vulnerability allows us to explore the notion not only as it has been traditionally understood —as a weakness, difficulty or impairment to the subject— but rather as a tool for self-acceptance, empowerment and agency that may facilitate the ethical connection. To address this idea, I will focus on the way that vulnerable female characters are presented and developed in two contemporary and widely popular British novels: Paula Hawkins’s novels The Girl on the Train (2015) and Into the Water (2017).