Teen-Age Identity Construction in Stephen King: a Gendered View
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Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, y Traducción e Interpretación TESIS DOCTORAL TEEN-AGE IDENTITY CONSTRUCTION IN STEPHEN KING: A GENDERED VIEW Realizada por: Luis Florencio Díaz Pulido Bajo la dirección de: Dra. Dña. María Felisa López Liquete Vitoria – Gasteiz 2016 (c) 2016 LUIS FLORENCIO DIAZ PULIDO ACKNOWLEDGMENTS After a long and hard journey, I have finally reached my destination. The pages contained in this dissertation are the product of never-ending research and endless hours of thinking, writing, correcting and checking the Internet looking for information … and people wiser than me that could help me develop my ideas. The adventure started for me long time ago with an illusion, a starting point and an uncertain outcome. I would like first give thanks to my family and friends for tolerating long – and sometimes tedious for them – conversations on terror, movies, Stephen King and anything that thrills me. Without their continuous emotional support, this dissertation would have been impossible. Of course, to confront such an astounding academic task, every rookie apprentice needs a mentor figure, a tutor. In this case, in my long and intermittent academic life, I have enjoyed the advices and tutoring of nothing but three magnificent people and scholars. To Professor Federico Eguíluz, whenever you are: I did it! Thanks for helping me to give my first steps and infusing me with the attracting literary worlds of Edgar Allan Poe to develop my MA. This gratitude is also applicable to Eterio Pajares, who accepted me in a moment of uncertainty after Federico Eguiluz left us, and after that, he was sincere enough to abandon me again because he felt that my way was mine but not his. Last but not least, I give special thanks to Professor María Felisa Lopez Liquete, the person who helped me to write this dissertation and reset my mind. Thanks, Feli, for your time, advices, corrections and talks. Without your academic support, this dissertation would have been impossible. INTRODUCTION 1 Chapter One: Carrie Origins and Antecedents in Fact and Fiction 9 Feminine Powers Unleashed 20 Tomboys: of Bad and Horrible Mothers Tomboys, Part II: Perfect Partners, the Good Girl and the Bitch Goddess Cinderella's Apocalyptic Revenge: Kill the Mother and Run Away The Consumption of Femininity Chapter Two: Christine Technology Made Flesh: the Human Machine 41 Metaphorical Vehicles Consuming Masculine Powers 48 Manhood in America The Failure of the Self-Made Man Cars and Girls as Consuming Goods The Father Usurps the Son Avoiding the Gay Side of Things Masculinity, the Disposable Genre Chapter Three: “The Body” Assimilating Death and Legacy 69 The Bodies in “The Body” Gordon's Rebirth A Cold War Western: Cowboys without Hat, Pioneers without Land Saving the Day, but not Life Assimilating Death and (Lack of) Legacy Chapter Four: The Talisman Facing Reality as It is 99 Fantasy for Dummies: Definition and Rules The Talisman, an Old Modern Myth Through a Glass Darkly: the World of The Talisman and Reagan's America The Hero's Journey: Separation 138 Crossing Thresholds, Reagan's Policies and the Unbalance of the Feminine Principle Roads, Trials, Enemies and another Threshold Of Wolfs, Men and Transformative Stages The Hero's Journey: Initiation 166 Defeating the Father Figure King and Straub, Raiders of an Alternative Masculinity Chapter Five: It Defeating Fear, Cha(lle)nging Patriarchy 189 Pennywise, the Ambiguous Villain of a Cultural War Flawed Heroes in a Democratic Myth Defeating It as Children: a Youthful Victory Defeating It as Adults: an Incomplete Resolution CONCLUSION 239 WORKS CITED 251 INTRODUCTION For four decades, Stephen King has been creating worlds that are enthusiastically visited by literally millions of readers. He is, undoubtedly, one of the most recognizable writers of American fiction. However, it is this recognition, this popularity that has in the past stifled King's acceptance in the academia. Many scholars repudiate Stephen King as a pulp fiction writer regurgitating only one kind of story for cheap thrills with an impossible, superhuman, and often annoying, regularity. On the other hand, other critics maintain that “Anything so popular for so long merits attention, whether it is Stephen King, The Beatles, the Ford Mustang, or William Shakespeare” (Davis 8). Nowadays icons of a globalized world culture, The Beatles and William Shakespeare were once common. Yes, even William Shakespeare was to an extent dismissed by the intellectual elites of his times as popular “junk,” but we come to learn that, in literature as in life, time puts things in their proper place and that “popular items of one generation become the classic items of the next” (Davis 9). Now, only time will tell whether King's works will endure long enough to be considered iconic or classic, but two things are evident: Stephen King is highly popular, and he is widely read outside the academic world. The fact is that there is an apparently insuperable breach between Stephen King and academics, between popular and high culture. Maybe, the ambivalent personification of this rupture, of this scornful definition of popular as something “suitable for ordinary people rather than experts” (mcmillandictionary.com) is critic Harold Bloom who, despite defining Stephen King as “a sociological phenomenon, an image of the death of the Literate Reader” (“Introduction” 3) or despising him as an “immensely inadequate writer on a sentence- by-sentence, paragraph-by-paragraph, book-by-book basis,” (“Dumbing Down American Readers”) has published to date with Chelsea House three editions of collected essays about King's fiction for which he has both edited and written Introductions; this suggests at least that he appreciates King's undeniable marketability, if not his significance as an American literary figure. Anthony Magistrale suspects that Bloom's point is to relegate King's place in American popular culture to an ephemeral commodity of our disposable epoch that carries no real significance beyond its moment in time and certainly not worthy of being 1 recognized as literature (“Why Stephen King Still Matters” 355). For him, this would explain why Professor Bloom was so incensed when Stephen King won the National Book Awards' annual Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters in 2003. However, if Stephen King will only be remembered as a sociological phenomenon, there are other, more insightful ways of interpreting him sociologically. His novels and stories are not merely cheap thrills to consume fast but, as Anthony Magistrale himself points out elsewhere, at the heart of his best work there is “a deep- seated awareness of the very real anxieties about how Americans live and where are we going, as nation and individuals” (America's Storyteller ix). These anxieties are expressed in Gothic terms because Stephen King has been pigeonholed as a master in horror literature, but his best stories transcend this genre to overlap others. In fact, this dissertation is not merely the study of a literary genre, but a way to offer a sociologically relevant discourse analyzing Stephen King's fiction. A starting point for this analysis would be to acknowledge that, much to Harold Bloom's distress and desperation, Stephen King embodies the birth of the Non-Literate Reader because his books are so compelling that they have attracted people who normally do not read much of anything, let alone thousand-page novels. Particularly, teenagers devour his books with passion. Maybe, this is so because the majority of his early production, the one which gave him fame and money, and the one this dissertation will be focused on, is crowded with teenagers and children they can identify with … or not. Since Carrie reached the bookstores in 1974 to the mid - 1980s, Stephen King has published twelve novels with infants and bags of hormones in their pages: Carrie, Salem's Lot, The Shining, The Stand, Firestarter, Cujo, Pet Sematary, Christine, Cycle of the Werewolf, It, The Eyes of the Dragon and the collaborative experiment The Talisman with Peter Straub. Apart from this, other narratives by King such as The Dead Zone and The Dark Half, several collections of short stories such as Night Shift or Skeleton Crew, collections of novellas like Different Seasons, with stories such as “The Body” or “Apt Pupil,” a seminal essay about horror where he gives his personal opinion concerning how the genre works, Danse Macabre, his fictions have been translated into motion pictures that have made him omnipresent in American popular culture and society; and if the American literary market were not saturated enough by his pen, he published several novels using the pseudonym of Richard Bachman, such as Rage, The Long Walk, The Running Man, 2 Roadwork and Thinner which became instant hits … once people knew Stephen King was behind the pseudonym. The writer could have died of success, but this was not the case. Encouraged by feminist critics who labeled him as unable to write a believable female character from sixteen to sixty-four – famous literal words asseverated by King critic Chelsea Quinn Yarbro (“Cinderella's Revenge” 9) – he embarked in a different period in his writing in the 1990s approaching strong and believable women. Novels such as Misery, Dolores Claiborne, Gerald's Game or Rose Madder are hugely appreciated by scholars of gender studies. He combined this trend with his most usual fantastic stories publishing The Green Mile or Desperation, another Bachman book, The Regulators and collections of short stories such as Nightmares and Dreamscapes and Hearts in Atlantis, or another collection of novellas, Four Past Midnight, until an accident in 1999 almost killed and moved him away from writing. In the first decade of the twentieth-first century, he resumed work completing his anxiously desired and critically praised saga of The Dark Tower with the novels Cell, Lissey's Story, Under the Dome and the collection of short stories Everything is Eventual acquiring certain literary relevance.