Carrie

Carrie’s menstruation initiates every event which follows it. This gives it central importance in the novel, in which the transformative rites of puberty and high school graduation are the organizing elements for King’s Gothic depiction of coming-of-age. The novel hits the narrative beats of a typical coming-of-age story—first experiences of sexual activity, increased distance from parents, and the end of high school—yet skews both the events themselves and their consequences in order to focus on the gathering and dispersal of female agency.

Carrie, Sue, and Chris each experience their significant coming-of-age moments after Carrie’s first menstruation and the locker-room assault. For Sue, it is the breach of a world she had forever accepted. 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, when she is in the midst of another conventional high school activity: sneaking off with her boyfriend for intimacy in the back of a car. Tommy asks Sue to accompany him to the dance, completing their outward portrait as a typical “handsome couple” (56). However, Sue’s realization that the future she pictured was nothing more than conformity upends the idyllic image of high school romance. Sickened by her part in the locker-room assault, Sue refuses to obey the typical expectations of a popular teenage girl and begins to define herself as an individual.

In a parallel scene, Chris also takes stock of her expected life, realizing she is on the cusp of a choice that will define her future. After examining the life she has gotten away with—wriggling out of trouble by allowing her lovers to take the blame for her indiscretions or utilizing her father’s legal presence to avoid punishment—Chris is yet again about to initiate an act for which she believes she will not face any consequences. Before she and Billy leave for the prom, she suggests that “Maybe it’s a bad idea” (164), but she allows Billy to convince her to move forward. Chris’s earlier lament that this would be “the last year the dance would be so formal or traditional” hints at her reasons for going forward with the attack (135). Chris’s coming-of-age is squarely rooted in conservative values that uphold the status-quo, which is not surprising for someone who is on top of a current power structure. The revelation she experiences at the end of the novel—that she is not in control of Billy or her future—stalls her in the perpetual treading of her teenage years. She dies before her life can change.

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 but does not negate its usual symbolism. 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 our 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.

Likewise, Carrie’s menstrual blood’s connection to her telekinetic ability also imprisons her in a lockstep toward her inevitable, destructive end. Carrie is imprisoned in her mother’s belief structure, trained to think of herself as fallen and irredeemable and unable to change the fact of her menstruation, yet the pairing of her first period with an increased awareness of her telekinesis also offers Carrie a path toward liberation—a vital step in the coming-of-age process. Early on, Carrie thinks, “like the memory of the stones, the knowledge of menstruation seemed always to have been there, blocked but waiting” (49). As she sorts through her memories of the event, Carrie comes to realize that the power dynamic under which she was raised is no longer applicable. Carrie’s extraordinary power enables her to shift the power dynamic immediately, and in the course of a night she liberates herself from her mother’s influence and realizes an identity that no longer keeps her beholden to her childhood home. While this is usually a defining moment of coming-of-age, however, Carrie moves from dark into further darkness. The slaughter Carrie enacts does not bring enlightenment, and Carrie finds she is unable to exist in the world on her own; as she is dying, she resembles 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).

The final human sensation in the linear narrative is “the slow course of dark menstrual blood down” Sue’s thighs (291). The implied miscarriage Sue experiences brings closure to Carrie’s story with a different sense of liberation than Carrie’s menstruation offered. Sue’s coming-of-age is complicated by her awareness that she will not conform to the social expectations for her future. Much of Sue’s 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. She earlier 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.

Carrie’s storyline presents a case study of a victim of bullying finding their only source of power in retributive violence. The incessant bullying Carrie faces isolates her from her peers, deepening the alienation her abusive and fundamentalist upbringing has caused. In her mother’s Christianity, there is little notion of compassion or redemption—only punishment for transgression—priming Carrie to lash out violently when her telekinesis makes such retribution possible.

After Carrie’s attack in the locker-room showers, her thoughts immediately intertwine vengeance, apocalyptic imagery, and a willingness to use her power against offenders. Carrie’s 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 virtually mute and 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).

Carrie herself longs to be “His sword and His arm” (27), foreshadowing the final identity Carrie takes on after her slaughter of the school and the town: the avenging angel. It is no surprise, then, that immediately after conceptualizing herself this way, Carrie weaponizes her telekinesis against her neighbors. Another vital shift in Carrie’s psychology occurs while she is buying the velvet for her prom dress. Intimidated by her surroundings, she 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 and is the continuation of Carrie’s earlier instinct: to suppress her fear with images of biblical desolation and draw deep comfort from the potential destructiveness of her telekinetic ability. Fear is also the primary dynamic between Margaret and Carrie. Margaret regularly uses religious terror to maintain her power over Carrie, but this dynamic shifts as Carrie spots fear in her mother’s eyes. Even when Margaret resorts to her physically imposing presence in the face of Carrie’s rebellious questioning, Carrie threatens to bring back the stones, and there is a tangible shift in power.

The secondary force shaping Carrie’s rage is the bullying she receives at school. While this contributes quite a lot toward Carrie’s ultimate motivation in unleashing her power, it does little to shape her concept of vengeance other than providing it with a concrete target. The most influential aspect of the bullying is the isolation it imposes upon Carrie. She is unable to alleviate the weight of the abuse she receives at home through connection at school, and she is suspicious of all around her. In the entire novel, Carrie only initiates one conversation, when she tells Tommy her curfew after the dance. Of all her classmates, Tommy is the one to whom she grows closest, coming to trust him at the prom. For a few moments, she is even his equal as prom royalty, but his quick death strands her again in a room full of people who only laugh at her.

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. After characterizing a street of people as “Animals” (249)—an inversion of the dehumanization that facilitated Carrie’s own victimization—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, the strength of her mother’s legacy endures. 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.