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3 Patriarchal Mediations ofCarrie'. The Book, the Movie, and the Musical Douglas Keesey The Curse: Telekinesis and Menstruation in Stephen King'sCarrie The novel’s birth was almost as difficult as its title character’s. Conceived at the suggestion of a friend who challenged King to create a credible female character (“Why are you writing all of this macho crap? . You don’t have any feminine sensibility at all"), the work was soon aborted when King realized just how difficult the task of writing a woman's story could be (King, quoted in Underwood and Miller, 85 86). King’s wife Tabitha then retrieved the manuscript from the wastebasket, launching him again into the unfathomable depths of a woman’s world but also, by answering his questions, helping him to survive in that world; hence, the dedication: “This is for Tabby, who got me into it—and then bailed me out of it”(Carrie).' Despite his wife’s collaboration and the novel’s successful coming to term, King remains ambivalent about his ability to create a believable woman, fearing that he may have fallen into the stereotypes identified by Leslie Fiedler in Love and Death in the American Novel'. “When I think I'm free of the charge that most male American writers depict women as cither nebbishes or bitch-goddess destroyers, I create someone like Carrie—who starts out as a nebbish victim and then becomes a bitch goddess, destroying an entire town in an explosion of hormonal rage” (quoted in Beahm, 38). “Hormonal rage” suggests the connection between menstruation and telekinesis that is the book's main focus; as King readily admits,Carrie is in many ways the sexist nightmare of an immature male who, like Billy Nolan, fears female equality as a threat to his masculinity:“Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, and what men fear about women and women's sexuality . which is only to say that, writing the book in 1973 and only out of college three years, I was fully aware of what Women’s Liberation 32 Imagining the Worst implied for me and others of my sex. The book is . an uneasy masculine shrinking from a future of female equality”{Danse Macabre, 170). But King has tried to get beyond a masculimst perspective and to bridge the gender gap: Not only has he givenCarrie aspects of his own life as a child—King too was “fat.” “estranged from other kids my age,” “deserted” by his “father,” and prone to “violent” feelings, “particularly in my teens” (King, quoted in Beahm, 27)—but King has also attempted to tell the story from a feminist perspective, interpreting his own “male fears—about menstruation and about dealing with women who eat you up” as misunderstandings of nature, fears so strong that they become self-fulfilling prophecies (King, quoted in Underwood and Miller, 95). Though never explained, it is clearly no mere coincidence that the awakening of Carrie’s psychic abilities is tied to the onset of her first period: Menstruation and telekinesis are both referred to by an uncomprehending society as “the curse,” and it is patriarchal society's very attempt to repress the power of female sexuality, to keep the blood hidden, that causes the defiant eruption of Carrie’s paranormal powers. In Carrie, the supernatural rises to assert the inevitability of natural female forces that society has tried to deny, if Carrie’s power is a “curse,” it is one society has brought upon itself. The fantastic elements in the book are thus an integral part of its social commentary: The metaphysical power of mind over matter is the only channel of force open to Carrie in a society in which men have monopolized all the physically active roles. As King explains, Carrie is “Woman, feeling her powers for the first time and, like Samson, pulling down the temple on everyone in sight at the end of the book”Danse ( Macabre, 170). At crucial moments in the novel (3-4, 7, 37), King compares Carrie’s psychic powers to the force of a nuclear bomb, suggesting that natural energy (female or atomic) will inevitably backfire on society if that energy is directed toward misogyny or war. King likens society's oppression of Carrie to a “chain reaction approaching critical mass”: the explosion of Carrie’s feminist rage. Nature has her laws and will not be denied. The young women who bombard Carrie with tampons in the opening shower scene display the “revulsion” and “disgust” (6) they have been taught to feel at the sight of their female natures. Even the gym teacher, Miss Desjardin, whose “nonbreasted,” “muscular" physique and skill at “archery” suggest a feminist identification2 and whose close mother-daughter relationship helped her feel pride in her first period (5, 9-10), is overwhelmed with “self-shame” when she sees Carrie's bleeding and confesses that “Maybe there’s some kind of instinct about menstruation that makes women want to snarl” (10, 16). As on the day when she used a tampon to apply lipstick (8), Carrie in the shower scene has once again exposed an aspect of female nature that is considered unnatural and unfeminine. Like her menstrual blood, the fat, sweat, mucus, and shit Carrie exudes are all mocked by a society that considers the body a threat and that associates women with the body (7, 8, 13). Thinking about it later, Sue Snell realizes that she and the other young women in the shower scene were unconscious participants in a social ritual: Patriarchal Mediations ofCarrie 33 women finding a place in patriarchal society by projecting their own unacceptable female traits onto Carrie and making her the scapegoat for them. To rise in society, Sue must see through men’s eyes, oppressing undesirable females like Carrie and repressing the undesirable femaleness within: Wearing hair rollers and taking birth-control pills, Sue ensures that her body will be presentable to the male gaze (34). Sue comes to realize that her social popularity is bought at a high price; in ostracizing Carrie, she is not only denying sisterhood, she is also repudiating her own female independence: “And having something she had always longed for— a sense of place, of security, of status— she found that it carried uneasiness with it like a darker sister” (33). For her own sake as well as Carrie’s, Sue attempts to reintegrate femaleness back into the social body before it surfaces vengefully as a “dark thing" to destroy the society that denied it light. First she reintroduces a female awareness of the body into her relationship with Tommy. Whereas earlier she had viewed their relationship through society’s eyes ("they fit together walking . she could look at their reflection in a store window and think, There goes a handsome couple”), now she begins to see things from her own perspective: Having sex to gain social advancement is not true love but a brutal, unfeeling act: “[S]he had let him fuck her (do you have to say it that way yes this time I do) simply because he was Popular” (33-34). Only when Tommy stops trying to score and admits to her that he got the rubber on wrong, only when she stops trying to be the perfect model she thinks he wants her to be and confesses that the first time was painful, do they really make love. Sharing with each other their doubts about the future, Sue and Tommy find that an admission of bodily weakness brings not repudiation but a mutual recognition of their common humanity. It is no accident that Sue finds the sight of Tommy “looking pensively out the back window with his pants still down around his ankles” both “comic and oddly endearing” (32): The male mind that admits to physical vulnerability is more attractive than a sham of invincible intellect. Sue’s second step toward reintroducing a female acknowledgment of the physical is to undo her earlier scapegoating of Carrie and ask Tommy to take Carrie to the prom in her place, thus claiming her own ability to do without social affirmation and giving Carrie a chance at the acceptance she herself has had. Tommy’s acquiescence to Sue’s request shows his unchauvinistic regard for Sue and her need to atone for her cruelty toward Carrie; it also shows Tommy's truly masculine willingness to face society’s censure at his association with Carrie in a romantic setting. Like dark doubles of Sue and Tommy, Chris Hargensen and Billy Nolan also chafe at social conformity, but only work their way in deeper in an effort to get out. Chris’s conformist assault on Carrie (and refusal to atone for it by doing the gym exercises set as penance) has gotten her barred from the very prom to w'hich Carrie has now been invited. The ferocious zeal of Chris’s conformist assault has backfired, excluding her from her place as leader of an adolescent rite of passage (Queen of the Prom) and alienating her from her 34 Imagining the Worst former entourage, who agreed to submit to the punishment prescribed by authority. Chris’s overzealous attempt to conform is both a sign of her deep insecurity about fitting in and an indication of a female independence trying to get out: Chris has channeled all her nonconformist rage into being an exceptional conformist, a standard of standardized womanhood; in Chris, the goody-goody and the bad girl are one and the same. Like Sue, Chris finds that packaging herself for male consumption makes her attractive to society men, but the sex that ensues is also prepackaged, already programmed, a simulacrum of feeling between a commercial-perfect couple, a consummate joining of gender stereotypes.

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