Carrie
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Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of graphic violence, gender discrimination, bullying, child abuse, emotional abuse, physical abuse, sexual content, sexual violence, rape, pregnancy loss, self-harm, mental illness, animal death, child death, and death.
The Cycle of Trauma
In King’s novel, Carrie, her mother, and their town are trapped in a cycle of trauma that devastates their memories and relationships with one another. Margaret’s painful history with Carrie’s father warps her perception of herself and the world, leading her to emotionally and physically abuse her daughter. This mistreatment contributes to Carrie’s isolation and rage, which eventually explode with disastrous consequences for the whole town. Carrie portrays trauma as a relentless cycle with brutal consequences that echo through generations and across communities.
Carrie’s mother is a deeply traumatized figure whose efforts to shelter herself from her difficult memories only cause further harm. As King reveals late in the novel, many of Margaret’s actions can be traced back to the night that her husband raped her. Compounding her pain, she’s lived with a violent loathing for herself and all women ever since because she experienced physical pleasure during the attack. When Carrie tells her about Tommy’s prom invitation, Margaret’s traumatic memories lead her to yell at Carrie about the lust of men. She briefly references her husband’s attack when she says, “He. Took. Me.” (119), but she can’t bring herself to face what happened until she realizes that she’s dying. Margaret seeks to protect herself by avoiding her traumatic memories, but this approach keeps her from healing and instead leads her to harm herself and her daughter.
Carrie’s character arc is shaped by her mother’s abuse, revealing how trauma impacts memory and identity. Although her telekinetic powers are a key part of who she is, she represses her awareness of them for years just as she represses her recollections of her mother’s violence toward her. Crucially, reclaiming her powers restores her memories, underscoring their connection as well as the ways that trauma erodes her sense of self. As she grows more comfortable with her abilities, she recalls a childhood incident in which her mother attempted to kill her after a fraught interaction with the neighbor’s daughter. During this incident, Carrie caused stones to rain down upon her home, the first major indication of her telekinesis. With the onslaught of memory, Carrie gains confidence in the fact that she has been practicing her ability all her life, and she also gains a deeper insight into her mother’s fear. This allows Carrie to seize power in the relationship and take charge of a fundamental self she has kept buried in the haze of fearful memory. Ultimately, Carrie devastates others because of the ways that she’s been deeply hurt.
King expands on the theme of trauma by showing how the Whites’ town struggles to process the trauma of Carrie’s attacks. The novel’s epistolary structure takes pieces from a range of books, magazine articles, press releases, and interview transcripts to reveal the incidents’ far-reaching effects, and several excerpts describe how the witnesses seem trapped in the traumatic memories they’re describing. This evokes the difficulty of coming to terms with an experience that reveals a formerly trusted world to be hostile; it also suggests the harmful, repetitious cycles that prevent trauma survivors from moving forward. The final excerpt from Sue’s autobiography indicates that she is still haunted by her final experience with Carrie. She emphasizes that Carrie was not a monster but falls short of valorizing Carrie or rationalizing her reaction. Sue thinks only of “that long tunnel into blackness” Carrie’s brain death revealed to her and states that she still needs time to think things over (303). Coupled with the fractured nature of the epistolary sections in the book, Carrie is very much a novel informed by the persistence of trauma in human memory. By showing how one family’s pain ripples out to destroy a community, King examines the vicious cycle of trauma.
Coming-of-Age as Liberation
By focusing on a cast of characters on the verge of adulthood, King portrays coming-of-age as a chance for liberation that, tragically, not everyone can realize. The story is organized around the physical and cultural rites of passage, from puberty to high school prom. The novel also hits the narrative beats of a typical coming-of-age story, such as first experiences of sexual activity, increased distance from parents, and the end of high school. However, King turns these classic developmental milestones into opportunities for horror to focus on the gathering and dispersal of young women’s agency.
Carrie’s physical maturation represents a major component of the theme. Her first period and the ensuing bullying incident in the locker room serve as the novel’s inciting incident. Menstruation is typically viewed as the beginning of puberty, and in Carrie’s case this is certainly true. That it occurs so late (and so publicly) emphasizes Carrie’s otherness. Carrie’s mother’s reaction underscores this: In an inversion of coming-of-age stories in which a young girl’s mother is proud to welcome her to womanhood, Margaret uses the fact that Carrie is now a woman to stress her inherent sinfulness, immediately asking Carrie to “pray to Jesus for [their] woman-weak, wicked, sinning souls” (66). Margaret’s belief that all women are tainted by Eve’s original sin strips the moment of its positive connotations and further imprisons Carrie in a body that she does not understand and cannot control.
However, as Carrie continues to mature, she begins to defy her mother and achieve a significant, albeit brief, liberation. King links Carrie’s first period to the reclamation of her telekinetic ability, a vital step in the coming-of-age process that offers her a way to resist her mother’s abusive control. Early on, Carrie thinks, “like the memory of the stones, the knowledge of menstruation seemed always to have been there, blocked but waiting” (49). Carrie’s extraordinary power enables her to shift the power dynamic in her home immediately. While teenagers’ growing independence is usually seen as a healthy and necessary aspect of development, Carrie’s coming-of-age ends in death and destruction. She achieves an unprecedented degree of freedom and agency during the climax, in which she kills many of the people who tormented her. However, she finds she is unable to exist in the world on her own; as she is dying, she regresses into a child seeking the comfort of her mother, thinking, “i want her o it hurts my chest hurts my shoulder o o o i want my momma” (289). Tragically, Carrie’s coming-of-age enables her to realize her power and free herself from those who harmed her, but her determination to take her pain out on others prevents her from beginning a new life beyond her oppressive environment.
In contrast, Sue’s character arc offers a more hopeful vision of maturation. Much of her narrative consists of her attempts to navigate her new freedom, unsure how to act and certain only of what she does not want to become. For Sue, the locker room assault is a moral awakening. She begins inside the popular clique, swept along by groupthink after Chris initiates the bullying. Acting under a “charm,” Sue only recognizes her complicity in the event later. Sickened by her part in the bullying, Sue refuses to obey the typical expectations of a popular teenage girl and begins to define herself as an individual. A key part of Sue’s liberating coming-of-age is her awareness that she will not conform to the social expectations for her future. Tommy asks her to accompany him to the dance, completing their outward portrait as a typical “handsome couple.” However, Sue’s realization that the future she pictured was nothing more than conformity upends the idyllic image of high school romance. At the end of the novel, Sue feels “the slow course of dark menstrual blood” (291). This implied pregnancy loss brings closure to the story with a different kind of liberation than the one Carrie’s menstruation offered. Earlier in the novel, she imagined a conventional future as Tommy’s wife and the mother of his children, but her menstruation is a reclamation of her body and future; Sue is liberated from her past and is now free to face her adult life. Through Carrie and Sue’s vastly different experiences of adolescence, King explores how coming-of-age offers a difficult yet liberating opportunity to redefine oneself outside of familial and social expectations.
How Zealotry Begets Violence
Carrie’s storyline presents a case study of a survivor of abuse finding their only source of power in retributive violence. Her mother regularly uses religious terror to maintain her power over Carrie. The incessant bullying Carrie faces at school isolates her from her peers, deepening the alienation her abusive and fundamentalist upbringing has caused. In Margaret’s Christianity, there is little notion of compassion or redemption, only punishment for transgression, priming Carrie to lash out violently when such retribution becomes possible.
Carrie’s thoughts intertwine vengeance and apocalyptic imagery, revealing her belief that her faith justifies using her power against her enemies. After the attack in the locker-room showers, her thoughts grow increasingly violent before flowering into the idealized figure that haunts Carrie’s home life, “savior jesus meek and mild” (27). The next time Carrie’s thoughts appear in the text, they combine selections from two biblical verses, Revelation 8:11 and 9:5, that directly point to divine retribution. These two references to Christian theology illustrate Carrie’s emotional state as it oscillates between the placidity of the Christ-figure and the cataclysmic moralism of Christian mythology. When first encountered in the text, Carrie is seemingly numb to the world around her. Once she is alone, however, the extent of her rage becomes clear. She envisions “Chris Hargensen all bloody and screaming for mercy ” and imagines crushing her head with a rock (27). This segues into imagery from Revelation, which depicts the retributive violence of God and the mass death and destruction preceding the coming of God’s kingdom: “Momma [said] there would be a Day of Judgement […] and an angel with a sword” (27). These biblical allusions reveal how Carrie’s fundamentalist upbringing teaches her that violence is permissible and even righteous.
Over the course of the novel, Carrie’s violent, zealous thoughts give way to brutal actions. While she is buying the velvet for her prom dress, she’s intimidated by her surroundings and draws on the biblical image of Samson pulling down the roof of the temple on the heads of his oppressors to reassure herself. This foreshadows the end of the novel when Carrie, who longs to be God’s “sword and His arm” (27), becomes an “avenging angel” with her slaughter of the school and the town. Margaret has raised Carrie to view the rest of Chamberlain as irredeemable, and this enables Carrie to turn her destructive powers on the town. Even though she decides that “God had turned His face away” from her actions (249), Carrie still resorts to biblical ideas to support her violence. She characterizes a street of people as “Animals,” an inversion of the dehumanization that facilitated her own mistreatment. Carrie imagines her killing of them as a sacrifice, listing in her mind “racca, Ichabod, wormwood” (249), biblical names that point to destruction as moral punishment. Even after Carrie has killed her mother, she continues to internalize and enact Margaret’s violent, zealous beliefs. Carrie assumes a final mantle in the novel, “the Angel with the Sword” (264), that echoes the Book of Revelation and Christ’s separation of the sinners from the saints at the end of days. Through the lens of horror, King critiques how religious zealotry endorses violence.
The Destructive Impact of Othering
In order to situate Carrie as an outsider, the text utilizes a strategy of comparisons that reduce her agency and prevent her from gaining acceptance. The novel constantly compares her to animals, particularly to cows. Carrie’s first “speech” is “a strangely froggy sound, grotesquely apt” (6), and after the other girls notice her menstruation, the text depicts her as “a patient ox” staring “bovinely” (8). Even Miss Desjardin, who halts the assault, thinks Carrie resembles an “ape.” This textual devaluation of Carrie reflects her separation from the rest of the people in the work. The belief that Carrie isn’t fully human “allows” others to view their bullying of Carrie as righteous and normal. Billy’s refrain, “Pig blood for a pig” (132), and Sue Snell’s mental “charm” in the locker room are self-confirming arguments repeated over and over until they become ingrained, allowing the characters to separate themselves from Carrie and any emotion she might feel. In Billy’s case, the dehumanization goes particularly deep, linking Carrie to the pigs on Henty’s farm that he has no qualms about maliciously killing. Those who don’t compare Carrie to animals still other her by regarding her as more of an object than an autonomous person. Tommy’s comparison of Carrie to Galatea casts doubt on Carrie’s agency on prom night. His intention is to suggest that Carrie has turned “from a drudge into a beautiful woman” (166), yet his choice of Galatea—a statue embodying the misogynistic sculptor’s idea of perfect femininity—indicates that Carrie is a constructed object, molded by her mother’s religious zealotry, Sue’s attempts at atonement, and finally Chris’s machinations. In all of this, Carrie is more object than human. Only in her decision to return to the prom and unleash her powers does Carrie exercise her agency.
Carrie’s symbolic baptism in blood reverses the dynamic of othering. Norma Watson, a surviving witness, describes the crowd’s reaction to seeing Carrie at the prom as like “watching a person rejoin the human race” (209). For the first time, the text allows Carrie to play a part in the humanity around her. However, this equality disappears as Carrie returns to the gym to attack her tormentors. When Carrie locks all the doors to the gymnasium, panic overtakes the crowd, and they rush the doors, leading Watson to depict her peers as “screaming and burrowing like cattle” (212). Carrie, whom the novel has repeatedly described as bovine, has achieved recognition of her humanity while dehumanizing her classmates. As Carrie observes the scene from the other side of the door, she also reduces the students to animals, imagining that they look “like fish in an aquarium” (232). Later, when she stands amidst a street full of Chamberlain’s citizens, she labels them with only one word: “Animals.” Immediately afterward, she slaughters them mercilessly, perpetuating the lack of compassion she was shown
The dichotomy reverses again at the end of the novel. When Sue comes across Carrie’s dying form, she is “reminded of dead animals […] that had been crushed by speeding trucks and station wagons” (285). The comparison to roadkill implies a degree of pity, but pity at arm’s length. It also suggests someone unable to live in the world that humans have constructed, just as an animal cannot understand or coexist with technology like cars. Carrie will remain forever isolated from those around her, and this is the enduring horror of her situation. Carrie has lived her life wholly alone, made inhuman by those around her, and Sue Snell’s autobiography confirms that this continues after her death, lamenting,
They’ve made her into some kind of a symbol and forgotten that she was a human being […]. Nothing can change her back now from something made out of newsprint into a person. But she was, and she hurt. More than any of us probably know, she hurt. (165)
The horror genre allows King to emphasize the destructive effects of bullying and urge his readers to respect others’ shared humanity.
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By Stephen King
