[WARNING! SPOILERS ABOUT STEPHEN KING’S NOVEL CARRIE]
Like many other people, I saw Brian de Palma’s very popular 1976 film Carrie (scripted by Larry D. Cohen) before reading King’s 1974 novel. The question I’m exploring these days with my students is how and why the visualization contributed by audiovisual adaptation through production design, casting, photography and so on has the power to colonize our imagination, to the extent that if we later read the adapted text we borrow from the film images even for scenes that are not present in it. I was twelve when I first saw Carrie. My impressionable young age and the high quality of de Palma’s film turned my imagination into a fully colonized territory, which is why I didn’t read the novel until many years later. I saw no point. I eventually saw the 2013 film version directed by Kimberley Peirce, so inferior to de Palma’s. This film, however, had the unexpected effect of partly liberating me from de Palma’s visualization. I believe I have now, after reading Carrie again, managed to regain my colonized imagination.
When I was invited by Festival 42 to a round table which will deal with the various adaptations of Carrie, now a fully-fledged franchise including a musical and the new Mike Flannagan’s series (see the whole list here), I quickly volunteered to talk about the novel. I’m joining the chorus of frustrated King fans seeing yet another pretty girl as Carrie (Summer H. Howell in Flanagan’s series) when the whole point of the novel is that this teen girl is mercilessly bullied in part because she’s not attractive and in part because her fanatical mother has turned her into a weirdo. In my new reading, however, I’ve noticed that I may have missed King’s ugly duckling view of Carrie, so I’m going to show here how she is actually presented in the novel. Basic close reading.
Carrie is not really (or only) a horror novel, but science fiction. To begin with, the plot unfolds in 1979, five years after the novel’s publication, which is odd in itself (Carrie, born on 21 September 1963 is still sixteen on 27 May 1979, when she destroys her hometown). Carietta White (that’s her full name) carries a gene, transmitted by both her late father and her mother, that gives her telekinetic powers of a very high magnitude. Reading the Wikipedia summary and others, you might think that Carrie is a straightforward page-turner, but actually it’s structured as an ongoing lineal narrative intertwined with many extracts from the academic articles and the books published after the events, all foreshadowing the massacre that Carrie causes among her fellow Maine citizens. The novel is, in short, a report in the devastation she causes, but also its narration.
In a quotation from one of these books, it is said that Carrie’s telekinesis “may be glandular in nature,” not at all supernatural, and much less Satanic, as Mrs. White firmly believes. Her brutal ill-treatment of her daughter contributes to the tragedy, as she fuels the massive anger that Carrie amasses in the almost 17 years when she is simultaneously bullied at home and at school. Carrie’s very late first menstruation does not trigger the onset of her telekinesis, as many believe, but her ability to control it through a process of committed self-training. I’m 100% sure that King, a huge Shirley Jackson fan, borrowed from The Haunting of Hill house the episode in which three-year old Carrie is so scared by her mother’s overreaction because she has seen a neighbour girl in a bikini (this is 1969) that she causes stones and bricks to rain on their house. This is very close to what the child Nell does in Jackson’s novel when her father dies.
I’m promoting the idea that writers are the visual designers of their novels in what we call worldbuilding (in reference to speculative fiction). King occupies a peculiar territory because it is his habitual practice to set his fiction in perfectly recognizable places, even when they are invented. He often chooses his home state of Maine for his locations, though he has also used other states (famously Colorado in The Shining). King correctly supposes that horror is far more intense if we feel as readers that the characters inhabit a place close to reality, in which he’s actually following Mary Shelley, R.L. Stevenson and Bram Stoker. He adds to the talents of his Gothic predecessors his own notable powers of observation about everyday life, needing no filthy medical workshops or exotic castles. This means that his small town of Chamberlain is totally mimetic and believable, from its Ewen High School down to the Whites’ home, with its plastic religious figures and the dirty closet where Mrs White locks up her daughter whenever she thinks she has sinned, which is all the time.
Carrie is first seen naked in the shower stalls she shares with her classmates after PE: “Carrie stood among them stolidly, a frog among swans. She was a chunky girl with pimples on her neck and back and buttocks, her wet hair completely without color. It rested against her face with dispirited sogginess and she simply stood, head slightly bent, letting the water splat against her flesh and roll off. She looked the part of the sacrificial goat, the constant butt, believer in left-handed monkey wrenches, perpetual foul-up, and she was.” When she is pelted with tampons and sanitary pads by the girls, who mock her because Carrie thinks she’s bleeding to death, misunderstanding menstruation, “She looked around bovinely. Her hair stuck to her cheeks in a curving helmet shape. There was a cluster of acne on one shoulder. At sixteen, the elusive stamp of hurt was already marked clearly in her eyes.” Carrie, always sweaty, prone to shedding green snot when she cries, dressed in old-fashioned garments she makes herself, is clumsy, shy, nervous, and much disliked.
This is not who Carrie used to be as a little girl. Her neighbour Stella Horan (the girl in the bikini) recalls her thus: “She was so pretty, with pink cheeks and bright brown eyes, and her hair the shade of blonde you know will darken and get mousy. Sweet is the only word that fits. Sweet and bright and innocent. Her mother’s sickness hadn’t touched her very deeply, not then.” The narrator, focalizing through Carrie herself, describes her as a girl who has lost her figure to anxiety: “She was thick through the waist only because sometimes she felt so miserable, empty, bored, that the only way to fill that gaping, whistling hole was to eat and eat and eat—but she was not that thick through the middle” (original italics). Carrie is curvy, not fat, and has good legs. If only she ate less chocolate, fixed her hair, bought herself “pantyhose and blue and green tights” and dressed in the “little skirts and dresses from Butterick and Simplicity patterns” she might look good and feel alive, she reflects. Carrie, the narrator claims, hated above all “her face, her dull, stupid, bovine face, the vapid eyes, the red, shiny pimples, the nests of blackheads.” Note the repetition of “bovine” in the girl’s description.
Feeling awfully guilty and ashamed of her participation in Carrie’s harassment in the shower episode, Sue Snell asks her good-natured, good-looking boyfriend Tommy to take Carrie to the prom (she will do penance at home). What he sees when he approaches Carrie surprises us readers and him. Paying actual attention for the first time, Tommy realizes that Carrie is “far from repulsive. Her face was round rather than oval, and the eyes were so dark that they seemed to cast shadows beneath them, like bruises. Her hair was darkish blonde, slightly wiry, pulled back in a bun that was not becoming to her. The lips were full, almost lush, the teeth naturally white. Her body, for the most part, was indeterminate. A baggy sweater concealed her breasts except for token nubs. The skirt was colorful but awful all the same: It fell to a 1958 midshin hem in an odd and clumsy A-line. The calves were strong and rounded (the attempt to conceal these with heathery knee-socks was bizarre but unsuccessful) and handsome.” ‘Ugly Betty’ Carrie is here closer to singer Billie Eilish (except for the green eyes and died hair!) than to any of the actresses that have played her so far. That would be a peculiar casting indeed…
There are no full-length mirrors in Carrie’s house, as her mother abhors vanity, which means that the girl does not really know what she looks like from head to toe (except for her blurry reflection on the window). For the prom, she makes herself a floor-length gown of crushed red velvet. The skirt, the narrator observes, “was loose, but the waist was snug, the material rich and unfamiliar against her skin, which was used to only cotton and wool. The hang of it seemed to be right—or would be, with the new shoes.” When Tommy appears to fetch her, he’s stunned into silence; when she shily asks him “Do you like me?” he declares “You’re beautiful.” The narrator adds “She was.” When the pair reach the ballroom (actually the school’s gym) Carrie’s classmate Norma enthuses about her looks, in capital letters: “You look so DIFFERENT” (…) “You’re positively GLOWING. What’s your SECRET?” When Carrie sees the King and Queen thrones and says they’re beautiful, Tommy insists again: “You’re beautiful” (original emphasis). PE teacher Miss Desjardin, uses the same words, also seduced by Carrie’s transformation. Neither character says “you look beautiful”; both say that the girl is beautiful, in ways that connect her to Cinderella and to Eliza Doolittle.
Carrie’s newfound beauty is mercilessly destroyed by the attack that her main abuser, Chris, and her violent hillbilly boyfriend perpetrate against her, consisting of pouring two buckets of pig’s blood onto her (and Tommy) when the rigged voting has them crowned Queen and King. In de Palma’s film, Sissy Spacek was clad in a simple satin white gown, which, as I see it, carries a richer symbolic load than King’s red velvet gown, and, besides, helps visualize better the horrific metamorphosis. In the novel, King uses a racist remark to describe Carrie’s new appearance, for only her eyes are not red; the narrator sees in that a resemblance to Jewish singer Eddie Cantor, who used to be in blackface, “doing that pop-eyed act of his.” That, a survivor recalls, “was what made people laugh. We couldn’t help it. It was one of those things where you laugh or go crazy. Carrie had been the butt of every joke for so long, and we all felt that we were part of something special that night. It was as if we were watching a person rejoin the human race, and I for one thanked the Lord for it. And that happened. That horror.”
Almost three hours later, after Carrie goes on a rampage across town that claims 409 lives, with 49 persons missing, Sue finally comes across her, lying down on a parking lot, unable to move (in the film, Carrie murders her mother and wrecks their house, which collapses killing her). The beautiful girl is gone: “Her body seemed to have become twisted, shrunken, crone-like. The prom dress was in tatters and flaps, and the pig blood had begun to clot and streak. There was a smudge of grease on her forehead, and both knees were scraped and raw-looking. (…) Her eyes were preternaturally bright, hawklike, but her mouth was trembling.” Carrie passes onto Sue telepathically the many images of her suffering and her anger, wondering, before dying, why everyone had picked on her. The autopsy report determines that Carrie dies of a haemorrhage (her mother stabs her with a knife in the shoulder), shock, coronary occlusion and possible coronary thrombosis, but ignores her badly burned chest. Carrie’s heart, in short, bursts because, in her effort to seek revenge against the whole town, she stretches her powers too far. The autopsy also reveals “CERTAIN UNUSUAL FORMATIONS IN THE CEREBRUM AND CEREBELLUM OF THE BRAIN” (original capitalized text), perhaps the seat of her telekinesis.
This Carrie is not the Carrie I have seen in the films. It’s King’s Carrie, but it’s now also mine, as I have fought to erase the images that had colonized my imagination. It can be done, though it helps that I haven’t seen any adaptations in a long time, and that this is my second (perhaps third) reading of the novel. I must accept now that Carrie was pretty as a child and is a beautiful young woman, if you know how to look at her. It is, however, also important to accept that her teen self is not that of a conventionally pretty girl, but that of the acne-ridden, overweight, bad-looking victim of constant bullying. Now I need to think whether the ugly duckling trope helps King to send his anti-bullying message. If he meant that bullies are blind to the reality of the persons they victimise, I can accept that, though I still have my doubts about how that helps the victims who will never become beautiful swans.