Carrie

Blood is a complex motif that King uses to develop three of the novel’s major themes: The Destructive Impact of Othering, How Zealotry Begets Violence, and Coming-of-Age as Liberation. Blood takes on several different meanings for different characters through the work, yet in each use it evokes the fundamentals of life. In a purely materialist sense, blood is what carries the genetic markers that transfer telekinesis to newer generations and is therefore responsible for the continual cycle of destruction alluded to at the end of the novel. 

For Carrie, blood is primarily a marker of her outsider status, making it a motif of the destructive impact of othering. She envisions a “red-plague circle” drawn around her from the first day she attended school, separating her from the other children. After her menstruation in the locker room, this idea combines explicitly with blood: “[T]he red-plague circle was like blood itself—you could scrub and scrub and scrub and still it would be there, not erased, not clean” (28). Carrie views blood as dirty, unalterably tainted by sin, and shameful to display, all of which she learned from her mother. When her mother slaps her after learning about Tommy’s invitation, Carrie’s cheek turns blood red, which Margaret declares is “the mark” of her sinful wrongness. Since Carrie cannot escape the truth in her blood, this “mark” is eternal. Chris’s vengeful act, dousing Carrie with pig’s blood, makes Carrie’s Otherness explicit and visible, and when Carrie responds, it is as this inescapable Other. 

In addition, King draws on blood’s Christian symbolism to demonstrate how zealotry begets violence. In the context of the book’s religious imagery, the events at prom resemble a baptism, which Christian tradition conceptualizes as being “washed” in Jesus’s blood and thus granted new spiritual life. For Margaret, blood takes on this spiritual dimension, but while she believes the blood of Christ will bring eternal life, her relationship to human blood is almost exclusively negative. Her ritualistic understanding of sacrifice helps her to imagine that killing Carrie will atone for her daughter’s sinfulness: “[B]lood was always the root of it, and only blood could expiate it” (184). This harkens to Margaret’s association of blood with Eve: Once Carrie menstruates, she joins the sinful ranks of the original woman who was responsible for humanity’s expulsion from Eden. Here, blood gains its inherent sinfulness, corrupting those around; Margaret calls it “[t]he curse of blood” (68), as she is sure that “after the blood the boys come” (119). Carrie’s menstruation is therefore threatening to Margaret, signifying Margaret’s loss of control over her daughter. 

Blood also develops the theme of coming-of-age as liberation through the novel’s focus on menstruation. Menstrual blood signifies both the potential for life (i.e., the ability to become pregnant) and the notion of death (i.e., the lack of pregnancy). Carrie’s first period suggests the burgeoning of her life as an adolescent and the deeper awareness of her telekinesis, but it also foreshadows her death in that its appearance begins the cycle of abuse that culminates on prom night. Sue’s menstrual blood at the end of the novel signifies life in the sense that she continues on and is liberated from her childhood and past life, but it also marks death in the form of a pregnancy loss—the last vestige of her former life. Blood therefore evokes the cyclical nature of life, always beginning and always ending, as suggested by the passing on of telekinesis matrilineally to a new generation.