Revealing the dark side of American schools’ promises, proms and pageants, the pioneering tale of growing up in small-town America, Carrie, celebrates its 50th year
By Pramod K Nayar
Well before school shootings became its trademark, bullying and cancel culture defined the American high school system. Authors like Sinclair Lewis (Main Street) mapped the idiosyncrasies, class tensions and gossip of the American small town, but to map its nightmares required the arrival of the man who would single-handedly invent modern horror fiction. Exactly 50 years ago, the monarch of the macabre, Stephen King, made his debut with Carrie.
The Prince of Darkness had arrived.
In the true lineage of Edgar Allan Poe, Thomas Love Peacock, Charles Brockden Brown and the Gothic authors, King examines the gristle and bone of the human unconscious, the evil that lurks under the gaiety and the camaraderie. And it began with Carrie. The horror genre was revived by King along with Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby, 1967) and William Peter Blatty (The Exorcist, 1971, whose film version released to huge success in 1973). Carrie sold four million copies and became a hugely successful film directed by Brian De Palma, starring Sissy Spacek and John Travolta. The 2013 reboot stars Julianne Moore and Chloë Grace Moretz.
- The school, like the rest of American society, is driven by class dynamics and people are excluded or included depending on wealth and privilege, suggests King in Carrie
Carrie White is the eponymous protagonist, born to fundamentalist parents in Chamberlain, Maine. A social misfit, the butt of jokes in school and harangued by her demented mother who believes that the bodily transformations that accompany puberty are signs of evil, Carrie’s life is pure hell. She also possesses telekinetic powers which are nascent but grow through the novel. In a horrific incident, she is mocked and ill-treated in the school’s shower room because she does not recognise that she is menstruating, her mother having never prepared her for it. One of the girls who harassed her, Sue Snell, in an act of contrition, persuades her boyfriend to take Carrie to the prom. At the prom, Carrie and her escort Tommy Ross are crowned King and Queen. At this very moment of glory, two buckets of pigs’ blood, perched high in the ceiling by the boyfriend of one of the harassers, are emptied on the two. Carrie, yet again, sits there soaked in blood. The audience erupts in laughter at the sight. Carrie leaves the hall but returns to the site of her final humiliation. And then she turns her attention to the town.
School of Horrors
King describes Carrie as ‘a frog among swans’ and a ‘group scapegoat’ in contrast to people like Christine Hargensen who is described as a ‘typical society bitch’. In America, King notes, identity, belonging and socialising all hinge on class (race does not enter into this novel). The taunts, the physical assaults and the isolation that mark Carrie’s life, ironically, also mark the life of the adolescent who actually sets the pigs’ blood trap, Billy Nolan (who is instigated by Christine although she has no idea he would go so far), who is also from a working-class background and for whom the very sight of the school triggers a ‘familiar gorge of disgust and hate’.
- The school, like the rest of American society, is driven by class dynamics and people are excluded or included depending on wealth and privilege, suggests King in Carrie
Determined to make the most of the prom invite, to belong, Carrie designs her own dress which receives considerable praise because she does fit in among the fancier people:
Beautiful shadows rustled about in chiffon, lace, silk, satin… scooped bodices…Empire waists. Long skirts, pumps. Blinding white dinner jackets, cummerbunds, black shoes that had been spit-shined…
It is this class-marked, costumed social order that King focuses our attention on when Carrie sets out on her programme of mayhem:
Turn on the sprinkler system and close all the doors. Look in and let them see her looking in, watching and laughing while the shower ruined their dresses and their hairdos and took the shine off their shoes.
School and small-town America, King, shows, is a nightmare if you come from the wrong class. Carrie, the critic Heidi Strengell notes in Dissecting Stephen King, thus exposes the ‘xenophobia of small-town America’. In fact, as critics like David Simmons note, King identifies himself with small-town America, and is a chronicler of places like Derry (the setting of novels like It). Another critic Tony Magistrale observes:
One of King’s greatest fortes remains his ability to render the most perverse and grotesque aspects of the American high school experience with unflinching accuracy.
In Carrie, King does not make allowances for the ‘kids’ at school, although a character does emphasise that when the horror happened to Carrie and in the town, they were just kids. For King, evil does not have an age (King specialises in the adolescence-evil, adolescence-horror linkage in other novels, including Bag of Bones, Mr Mercedes, The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, Dreamcatcher, Rage and other works). The school is the site of unspeakable cruelty and the early sections of Carrie and Rage read like a suburban version of William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. The school, finally reduced to cinders, is a symbol of the unjust social order and Carrie’s destruction of it is emblematic of the revenge of the underdog and the socially excluded.
The theorist of horror, Carol Clover, argues that King provides ‘a new language to [Carrie’s] victimization and a new force to the anger that subsidizes her own act of horrific revenge’. Since Carrie does not date, does not dress in trendy clothes, does not hang out at the local hotspots, she exists as the negative other of the prototype teen and hence is the object of ridicule. She wishes to fit in, and even disobeys her mother to go to the prom, but that fitting in also turns out to be a mirage because of the trick played on her.
- Unlike the traditional novel of growing up which ends with the protagonist’s integration with society, Carrie ends with the disintegration of society at the hands of the protagonist
Inverting Cinderella
Women are the central protagonists in Carrie, Firestarter, Cujo, Misery, Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, Rose Madder and Song of Susannah. But these, critics like Mary Pharr note, lack substance and unsurprisingly, King has been treated as a misogynist. There is some truth to this charge. But what King achieves in Carrie is something else.
Carrie is an inverted Cinderella story as Linda Bradley notes in Writing Horror and the Body. In King, the core elements are all there: the tormented (Carrie), the tormentors (Christine and the rest of the school), a godmother (Sue Snell, who survives), magic (telekinesis), a prince (Tommy), a social event (the prom). Sue Snell persuades her boyfriend to take Carrie to the ball as a form of restitution. Sue herself was part of the gang that tormented Carrie in the shower rooms, but unlike others, she feels guilty. However, King does not let her sense of guilt and her restitutive act function as redemption. He writes:
Sorry is the Kool-Aid of human emotions. It’s what you say when you spill a cup of coffee … True sorrow is as rare as true love.
Like Cinderella, Carrie is the cynosure of all eyes at the prom until praise and admiration turn to mockery and humiliation. But unlike Cinderella, Carrie does not seek to get home by midnight. Far from it. She returns to the scene of her humiliation, bedraggled, injured (her mother stabs her) and decrepit, but she is an avenging woman warrior who employs her peculiar powers to destroy the site of her torment.
The magic of Cinderella’s transformation here is Carrie’s telekinesis which King casts as magical and inexplicable. There are other parallels, as Bradley notes:
Carrie … as the revenge of the nerds. … Carrie’s reversal of Cinderella’s happy ending, for instance, recovers the gruesome revenge elements of the tale’s folk originals (the stepsisters’ heels are sliced off and a dove pecks out their eyes)
If the Cinderella story caters to the masses in terms of the need for romantic endings, Carrie suggests something else. As King puts it:
They were still all beautiful and there was still enchantment and wonder, but she had crossed a line and now the fairy tale was green with corruption and evil.
Growing Up Horror
The avenging woman in Carrie looks forward to King’s later Dolores Claiborne as well: women whose victimhood turns into vengeance, and this, for critics like Sarah Langan in Teaching Stephen King, implicitly references the women’s movement of the era. King himself states in his Danse Macabre that ‘Carrie is largely about how women find their own channels of power, and what men fear about women and women’s sexuality’.
The traditional European tale of growing up, the Bildungsroman (the novel of growing up) depicts the boy growing up, finding his place in society, discovering love, lineage and property: in short, fitting in.
- Monsters are not aliens. They are us. And many are forged in the smithy of the education system and the social order
Carrie is about growing up and not fitting in. One could think of it as an inverted Bildungsroman too. The rite of passage that is the prom, which ought to have helped Carrie find herself — she proves to be pretty, witty and smart, as others discover — turns out to be the final humiliation for her. She giggles as she starts the mayhem, and King describes the sound as ‘triumphant, lost, victorious, terrified’. At the prom, drenched in pigs’ blood, she recalls the shower room humiliation, and Carrie tastes ‘the plump, fulsome bitterness of horror’.
Where the traditional Bildungsroman concludes on a note of success (one thinks of the fiction of Henry Fielding, for instance), Carrie ends with the death of the protagonist, and the destruction of the society into which she tried so hard to fit in.
Carrie’s death scene has her final thoughts and Sue Snell’s eyewitness account merged:
For a moment Sue felt as if she were watching a candle flame disappear down a long, black tunnel at a tremendous speed, (she’s dying o my god I’m feeling her die) And then the light was gone, and the last conscious thought had been (momma I’m sorry where)
But it does not suffice to say that it is a negative Bildungsroman. It is indisputable that, like in the conventional Bildungsroman, Carrie too discovers herself. After the drenching at the prom, she steps out and thinks of going back home, to her maniac mother, the praying, the penitence and punishments. The moment of self-discovery, so central to the Bildungsroman, is described thus:
Find Momma, admit she had been wrong —
(!!NO!!)
The steel in her — and there was a great deal of it — suddenly rose up and cried the word out strongly. The closet? The endless, wandering prayers? The tracts and the cross and only the mechanical bird in the Black Forest cuckoo clock to mark off the rest of the hours and days and years and decades of her life?
And Carrie has an epiphany:
She was forgetting
(!! THE POWER!!)
It was time to teach them a lesson. Time to show them a thing or two.
And the word echoed intoxicatingly in her mind. They were under her thumb, in her power. Power! What a word that was!
Her self-realisation about the power she possesses is mired in her religious instruction, which she tries to abandon in her quest for revenge:
She did not know if her gift came from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she didn’t care which, she was overcome with almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from her shoulders.
Here, Carrie’s self-realisation does not facilitate her entry into the social order: it destroys her. It does not lead to glory but to the grave.
King also suggests that growing up does not mean developing ethics and moral codes. In what is surely an indictment of both education and America, King says in Carrie:
People don’t get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don’t stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it.
- Monsters are not aliens. They are us. And many are forged in the smithy of the education system and the social order
Monsters are not aliens. They are us. And many are forged in the smithy of the education system and the social order. Carrie, the girl who would have been queen, embodies this.
The world does not, in the vision of the most fearsome imagination on the planet, protect the vulnerable for, as Stephen King puts it in the novel that remains, in its 50th year, a masterpiece:
The low bird is not picked tenderly out of the dust by its fellows; rather, it is dispatched quickly and without mercy.
One may not always agree with the vision, but the evocative power of the master storyteller remains.
The Prince of Darkness who began with Carrie is now King, Stephen King.
- School bullying, hazing and ragging, which finally attracted the attention of lawmakers only in the 1990s, as rituals of growing up, often chose the weakest individual as target