Carrie

Carrie

Stephen King's Carrie (1974) was filmed by Brian De Palma in 1976, and has become one of King's best-known and popular works. There are subtle differences between original book and film version, but the film remains true to the book's essential elements: a young girl, shy and socially ill-adjusted, is ritually tormented by her high school peers, and she enacts a terrifying revenge on them (and on the whole town) after the high school prom. In the process book and film together make a number of points about female sexuality, education and upbringing, and the nature of "monstrosity". The novel leaves with a final question: is it Carrie who is the 'monster', or is it rather the society and upbringing which is monstrous and which turns Carrie into a victim of that society? It is little wonder that the novel and film has been described as being about female 'Rites of Passage'.

Book and Film. To start with it is worthwhile to look at the differences between the book and film. The book is told in flashback, using a mixture of conventional narrative, mixed with archive and documentary material, within a framework of (quasi-scientific) attempts to explain the telekinetic ability exhibited by Carrie. The film, perhaps by virtue of the cinema medium itself, is more visually graphic, and dispenses with the telekinetic explanatory framework in order to foreground the visual display of gore: it is not told in retrospect, and does not attempt to explain why Carrie acts as she does. The film also adds a final tour-de-force scene in which Carrie is shown to live on, even after her death. What strikes you about these differences between the film version and the original book? Are the differences due solely to the differences between the two mediums, or do they raise issues of perspective and interpretation?

Narrative structure and pattern. Carrie, it might be argued, is essentially a new version of 'Cinderella' or the 'Ugly Duckling', but with a conclusion which turns the fairy-tale elements upside down. Such fairy tales do, inevitably, bring in wider issues of themes such as individual differences, social adjustment, tolerance (or, rather. intolerance) for those who are different, etc. Carrie is no exception, as we shall see. How, then, is the novel put together? Try to draw out a structure-diagram of the novel, in terms of actions and characters, and to see how it follows some sort of basic narrative pattern. You might also look at the way in which the novel is essentially a 'Revenge' narrative - how does it look from this perspective?

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Carrie, Monster or Victim?

This question is fundamental to both the book and the film, and obviously much depends on the way in which Carrie and her point of view is constructed in the novel, and the ways in which we respond to her and her point of view. She is an ugly duckling, possible a product of genetic dysfunctioning, the product of a monstrously repressed religious upbringing, and living with small-town prejudice, and female high-school culture of conventional romance and beauty, and a victim, quite possibly, of the mere fact of being female. Do we, then, see Carrie as a plausibly human character, who hates herself because that's the only way she knows, and yet she wants to be a 'whole person' (p. 89). How is she presented in relation to high school peers such as Susan Snell (who sees the 'monstrosity' of the patriarchal society in which they grow up , p 46 and 73)? How does the characterisation of Carrie contrasted with Chris (who might even be seen as the true 'monster' in the narrative?). Look also at the presentation of her mother and her warped and perverted Christianity which is, the narrative suggests, itself the product of frustrated sexuality (e.g. the monstrous Christ statue, p. 40). One way of seeing Carrie would be to see her as essentially a child, an innocent space, subject to 'colonisation' by her mother's religion, by categories of 'beauty', 'normality' and 'beauty', by her own sexuality. The real 'horror' of the novel, it might be suggested, lies in this sort of colonisation, rather than in her violent and destructive reaction to it, (i.e., when she turns on her peers, the school and the town and destroys it).

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Wider perspectives. Is Carrie, do you think, a critique, a positive criticism, of the social, sexual and psychological order into which Carrie is born, and which attempts to absorb and 'normalise' Carrie? Or is it simply a vicarious and gratuitous display, a disruption of the normal for its own sake? What does the book (and the film) have to say about the 'otherness' of Carrie, or perhaps the 'otherness' of the society in which she lives that refuses and excludes her? Do you feel that the novel and the film attempts to have us identify with Carrie and her situation and, if so, why? Is it to be suggested that there is a 'Carrie' in each of us, and that her ritual destruction of, and revenge on, the town is a positive irruption of healthy rage at an enslaving and repressive society? In what ways do you feel that, in book and film, Carrie is an exploration of the 'horror' of growing up female in such a society. There have been, insofar as the film is concerned, critics who have seen Carrie as fundamentally misogynist, where 'Every Woman is Carrie', presenting women as irrational and dangerous, wholly controlled by their biology, and understood in terms of sexual frustration and potency. Alternatively, you could see the text as a libertarian text, in which Carrie revenges herself on a whole culture and society which attempts to limit, police and enslave her into the 'family system'. What do you think? I think you'll agree that, whether intended or not, Stephen King is playing around with some very powerful ideas in this text.

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