Carrie

The text continues to chart the paths Carrie and Sue take after the locker-room assault while also expanding its focus to include Chris Hargensen. The actions of these three girls are the precipitating factors behind the calamity of the Spring Ball.

Sue accepts the punishment Miss Desjardins administers, glad for the chance to alleviate her guilt. She even stands up to Chris, telling her to shut up and seemingly maturing in the process, as her voice takes on “a dead, adult lifelessness” (79). However, when Sue accepts the punishment, she is aware her actions have “nothing to do with nobility” (91); she simply wants to go to the prom. Sue realizes she is at a moral turning point.

After her run-in with Chris, Sue views herself as outside the popular clique, and this appears to liberate her. She takes concrete action to alleviate her guilt and in doing so mirrors Chris: Each decides to undertake action relating to the prom, but Chris’s is vindictive while Sue’s is benevolent. Rather than simply believing that her punishment balanced out her transgression, Sue attempts atonement, telling Tommy “someone ought to try and be sorry in a way that counts” and giving Carrie a chance at having a normal human experience (103).

A tenderness underlies the scene in which Tommy asks Carrie to the dance. At first, Carrie can’t speak and instead echoes her earlier animalistic sound, “Ohuh?” (8, 105). However, as the narration lingers in Tommy’s perspective, Carrie takes on desirable qualities, moving from “far from repulsive” to “handsome” (105). This suggests that Sue’s act of compassion, invests Carrie with worth in the eyes of others by treating her as deserving of normal human experiences. Yet the scene grows complicated as the connection between Tommy and Carrie becomes evident. Tommy understands Carrie’s initial reticence and recognizes his own agency in the decision to invite Carrie to the prom, realizing that Sue’s gesture of atonement is “only at secondhand” (107). Tommy is alone in his decision to take Carrie’s hand, displaying a fundamental and concrete kindness that has been denied to Carrie.

Fear is the primary dynamic between Margaret and Carrie. Margaret uses it to maintain power over Carrie, instilling in her daughter a fear of sin, hell, eternal consequences, and the Devil’s corrupting influence. Margaret, “a very big woman” (64), also physically abuses Carrie and uses her considerable strength to force Carrie to practice her faith. At the beginning of the third section, this dynamic shifts. Margaret uses her strength to quell Carrie’s rebelliousness, abusing her through a ritual of penance, but when Carrie threatens to bring back the stones, there is a noticeable power shift. Margaret is deeply afraid of Carrie’s telekinetic powers. Carrie recognizes her mother’s fear, which emboldens her to embrace her ability and the autonomy it offers.

The beginning of the fourth section sees Carrie putting her rigorous religious instruction to a different use. Carrie moves a brush, a rocker, and her bed with her telekinesis, exercising her power with newfound awareness. When her mother asks what she is doing, Carrie claims she is saying her prayers. This equating of her power with prayer gives insight into Carrie’s moral understanding of her ability. She begins the section still ambivalent about the origin of her power, reverting to her mother’s vocabulary in her thoughts: “i a witch momma the devil’s whore” (98). By the end of the section, Carrie casts aside her mother’s oppressive presence in accepting her telekinetic power, and she does so through a religious lens, deciding that she doesn’t care “if her gift came from the lord of light or of darkness” (122). As Margaret feverishly prays, Carrie imagines how she will use her ability to prevent anyone from ruining the dance, mother and daughter each resorting to her own form of spiritual understanding.

The fourth section depicts the evolution of Carrie’s social fear. While buying the velvet for her prom dress, Carrie is frightened by the richness of the fabric and “intimidated by the size of the place, the chic ladies wandering here and there” (113). She quells her fear with confidence in her power, drawing on the biblical image of Samson pulling down the roof of the temple on the heads of his oppressors. This foreshadows the end of the novel and also depicts an evolution of the novel’s biblical imagery, which Carrie reflexively used to suppress her fear before realizing her abilities.