Carrie

After Carrie is showered with blood, the text inverts one of its major motifs—the human/animal dichotomy. A classmate describes witnessing Carrie at the prom as, “[I]t was as if we were watching a person rejoin the human race” (209). Carrie finally enjoys an equal place. When Carrie returns to the gym to attack her tormentors, however, her position has changed again. The panicking crowd “scream[s] and burrow[s] like cattle” (212), with Carrie the only human among them. Carrie also reduces her classmates to animals, imagining that they look “like fish in an aquarium” (232). The dichotomy that separated Carrie from her peers has inverted, yet the separation remains.

When Carrie returns to the gymnasium, her intentions aren’t homicidal. She seeks retribution, but not the biblical devastation she regularly imagines. Instead, she simply craves the inversion of the power balance that has victimized her. Incensed that her classmates laughed at her, she simply wants to activate the sprinklers in the gym so they can see “her looking in, watching and laughing while the shower ruined their dresses and their hairdos” (231-32). This somewhat childish desire reflects Carrie’s immaturity and illustrates her true self: a sheltered girl who merely seeks acceptance. It is only after she does not gain the reaction she wants from the soaked crowd that her thoughts turn to harming them and displaying the full breadth of her power. Carrie, longing to laugh at the shocked expressions on her classmates faces, instead laughs for the first time as a boy named Josie is electrocuted onstage.

Watson details another shift after Carrie is drenched with blood. Carrie, who thus far has only shared her telekinetic connection with Tommy, widens her reach. Watson’s thoughts take on the rhythmic nature of Carrie’s projections, thinking, “My God, my God, my God” before she experiences the invasion of an outside thought (211). She states, “I was thinking about Carrie. And about God. It was all twisted up together, and it was awful” (211). This confluence of Carrie and God, of not being able to tell them apart, is a direct projection of Carrie’s fractured psychology and the final consummation of what Carrie has craved: recognition. Several of the witness accounts claim that their thoughts were infused with knowledge of Carrie. Carrie’s projection of self, at first limited to Tommy and his benevolent acceptance of her, has become warped by his death and reflects Carrie’s altered acceptance of her power’s violence. It is now impossible to ignore Carrie White.

Because Margaret raised Carrie to see sin all around her, Carrie turns her destructive powers on the town with little explicit justification. By the time her rampage turns on the wider populace, electrocuting them and setting them aflame, Carrie is operating on the fundamentals of her religious upbringing. Even though she decides that “God had turned His face away” from her rampage (249), Carrie resorts to biblical images to support her violence. After characterizing a street of people as “Animals,” Carrie frames killing them as a sacrifice, mentally listing, “racca, Ichabod, wormwood” (249)—all biblical names that point to retributive destruction. Though Carrie kills her mother, her mother’s educational legacy endures. Carrie assumes a final mantle, “the Angel with the Sword” (264), an image drawn from the Book of Revelations and the definitive image of Christian retribution. Carrie-as-object becomes the mode of righteousness, carrying forward her mother’s religious ideals, displaying the true hold her mother’s beliefs have over Carrie’s perspective.