Terrible Mothers and Fantastic Language or Fantastic Mothers and Terrible Language?

: Stephen Kings Unflattering Representations of Monstrous Mothers

Yi-jung Lin Ph.D student, Department of English, National Taiwan Normal University 162, He-ping East Road, Section 1, Taipei 10610, Taiwan

Horror stories are not really about ghosts, monsters, mutants, aliens, or murderous psychopaths. These creatures are not so scary after all since readers dont actually believe in them, as King acutely points out in his foreword to Night Shift: When you read horror, you dont really believe what you read. You dont believe in vampires, werewolves, trucks that suddenly start up and drive themselves (xvii). In spite of the disbelief, horror literature is still capable of scaring the reader because it explores those real fears and anxieties which find no better expression than being suggested by symbols of monstrosity in the fictive world. Explicating the working of horror literature, King firmly locates the source of horror in reality by stressing that the key is to get the audience identify with the characters: human beings are not secondary to the theme of horror . . . You cannot scare anyone unless you first get the audience to care about these make-believed characters (Magistrale, Hollywoods 12)1. Jonathan P. Davis observes intricate processes of interchanging between the real and imagination in the minds of both the writer and the reader: Horror fiction blends the real and the unreal to produce a whole experience that allows the reader to utilize the imaginary for application to reality through horrors allegorical mechanisms (23). While Davis considers Kings weaving of imagination and reality artistic, King finds the element of allegory so essential to horror fiction that it is present in either primitive tales or intricately composed
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See Steves Take: An Interview with Stephen King in Hollywoods Stephen King. 1

novels: the tale horror, no matter how primitive, is allegorical by its nature (Danse 43). Therefore, the blend of the real and the unreal, characteristic of horror literature, justifies the need of an allegorical reading to find out the mainspring of each tale. Kings graphic depictions of gratuitous violence and nauseating behaviors usually incur complaints from critics who believe that Kings work is better without them. Greg Smith blames the hack conventions of the horror genre for spoiling the quality of Kings work: the quality of his work overall tends to be uneven, exhibiting in its worst manifestations the two dimensional stock characters, superfluous narrative description, and gratuitous scenes of violence typical of junk horror fiction (340). Similarly, Joseph Reino views the better part of Kings oeuvre as a proof of Kings ability to improve the hackneyed devices of a century-old art form whereas the rest of his stories are still not free from the tendency toward grotesquery and senselessness, characteristic of modern Gothic fiction: much of his work is entrapped in the absurd confinements, crude vulgarities, and simple-minded exaggerations of late twentieth-century gothic fiction (139). Though the gross-out is one of the effects horror writers produce to entertain readers, the other two being terror and horror, in Samuel Schumans view, King resorts to this particular effect way too often while he should use it as moderately as Shakespeare in whose works gross scenes are exceptional rather than common: Kings second major problem is a fairly regular and deliberate absence of taste. . . . He himself says that, when he cannot achieve a higher effect, he will aim at revulsion (108-09)2. While some critics choose to leave out the gross-out in Kings fiction out of a belief that they are meaningless and exist solely for shocking readers, others see no reason why shock effect
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King ranks the levels of effects in horror fiction as follows: I recognize terror as the finest emotion . . . and so I will try to terrorize the reader. But if I find I cannot terrify him/her, I will try to horrify; and if I find I cannot horrify, I will go for the gross-out. Im not proud (Danse 37). Besides, in Schumans view, Kings first major problem, one that is typical of prolific writers such as Shakespeare and Dickens, is a tendency to overwrite and the ensuing careless mistakes which could be avoided if he had the habit of revising what has written down: he has the tendency to churn out enormous volume of prose with a great speed and without much of an inclination to go back over what he has written and make sure he has got everything just right. As a consequence, he is often uneven (108). 2

cannot be compatible with allegory: The insight which King offers into the work of horror is based upon a bimodal or dualistic vision which insists upon the necessity of reading between the lines (Gallagher 37). James Egan, for whom the Gothic and the melodramatic are always bound with each other, sees in Kings overt intent to treat his readers to spectacles an covert attempt at articulating his view of the world. Not unlike his Gothic predecessors, who found the realist prose and the rationalist view insufficient to account for the universe and the human condition, King deems the melodramatic a fitting vehicle for a world which keeps getting more and more inexplicable in spite of human beings progress in science and knowledge: the territory of the unknown is immense and probably expanding, not diminishing, despite the increasing sophistication of modern investigative methods. . . . The plot, characterization, rhetoric, and world view support these thematic premises and may be viewed, in melodramatic terms, as vehement arguments for them (Egan, Single 64)3. Kings much-censured willful indulgence in blood and gore looks inevitable given the fact that the horror genre is more often than not grounded in the conflict between the Apollonian and the Dionysian forces of the universe: the tension between the Apollonian and the Dionysian . . . exists in all horror fiction (King, Danse 242). The calmness of our familiar surroundings is disturbed when the Dionysian force of irrationality and chaos suddenly erupts and asserts dominance. The perennial war between the opposing forces goes on day after day both inside and outside the human mind. King identifies the struggle, which he believes Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde typifies, as one between rationality and desire within each person: the twinning of Jekyll and Hyde suggests another duality . . . between the

Vernon Hyles distinguishes Gothic literature in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from modern Gothic fiction in terms of the use of Gothic apparatus as metaphors. Whereas eighteenth-century Gothic fiction used to hint at an alternative world view to the more constrictive thinking of the Age of Reason, modern Gothic tales replaces the sublime with the grotesque as an expressive vehicle more in accordance with the contemporary view of the human condition as absurd and senseless: Much as the Gothic temperament was a pervading metaphor for the wild, romantic spirit of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the grotesque has become the primary metaphor for the twentieth century world view and for Stephen King (63). 3

Apollonian (the creature of intellect, morality, and nobility, always treading the upward path) and the Dionysian (god of partying and physical gratification; the get-down-and-boogie side of human nature) (Danse 83). Recognizing the excessive nature of Gothic writing, Fred Botting in Gothic opposes it to what rationalists and humanists have held to be true about the world and human nature since the eighteenth century: Gothic signifies a writing of excess. It appears in the awful obscurity that haunted eighteenth-century rationality and morality. It shadows the despairing ecstasies of Romantic idealism and individualism and the uncanny dualities of Victorian realism and decadence . . . . In the twentieth century, in diverse and ambiguous ways, Gothic figures have continued to shadow the progress of modernity with counter-narratives displaying the underside of enlightenment and humanist values. (1-2) The use of horror fiction, as far as King is concerned, is not solely for showcasing the upsetting of the Apollonian aspect of the universe by the Dionysian force. Horror fiction, King believes, foregrounds the restoration of order, a comfort for readers whose fears in reality are confronted and dealt with along with those in fiction, after monsters are driven out or slain or the encroachment of the supernatural on the mundane world is stopped: For a little while the deeper fear . . . has been excised. It will grow back again, but that is for later. For now, the worse has been faced and it wasnt so bad after all. There was that magic moment of reintegration and safety at the end (Danse 27). One of the horrors to be contained is the fears associated with the physical body. Fears for the body and anxieties about bodily functions, as Leonard G. Heldreth concludes, dominate horror fiction: Consciousness of the physical bodyits sensations, vulnerability and ultimately terminationis the focus of horror literature (64). Kings comments on carny freaks in Danse Macabre indicate that he is aware of physical aberrations power of horror.
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The fear that the staples of the freak show, such as the Siamese twins, cause is for the most part related with the body: people might be curious about every possible bizarre exingency [sic] of life among the mortally attached: the sex life of, the bathroom functions of, the love lives, the sicknesses (44). Besides deformity, other bodily defects can also border on monstrosity. For example, the monstrosity of fat is confirmed when some easy tasks in everyday life cannot be performed without great efforts or cant be performed any more: Has the obese person reached the point of monstrosity when he or she can no longer go to the movies or to a concert because his/her buttocks will no longer fit between the fixed armrests of a single seat? (King, Danse 47). Also, acne could become so abhorrent that it reminds King of the most disgusting scene in Alien: Im talking about the case of acne that runs absolutely apeshit . . . pimples on pimples, and most of them red and suppurating . . . . Like the chest-buster in Alien, its enough to put you off your popcorn . . . except this is real (Danse 49). King makes use of the fears associated with the body in many of his stories such as The Stand and Night Surf where the human species is endangered by a deadly virus which has wiped out most of the population when the stories begin. In stories about people who are dead or appear dead but still capable of feeling, such as The Breathing Method and Autopsy Room Four, physical sensations are found so incredibly entangled with death that readers are confronted with phenomena which violate the materialist assumption that death is the end to all sense perceptions. The fears portrayed in The Body are articulated in concrete terms. The boys on their way to view the dead body of a boy killed by a train have been threatened by bodily harm of many sorts including being chased and bitten by a dog, being run over by the train and being brutalized by older boys. There is nothing abstract about the dead body of the boy that they are dying to see, either. The boy has become a piece of rotting meat, impervious to the insects crawling in and out of all the openings on his face, probably busying themselves with eating or nesting: There were ants and bugs all over his face and
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neck. They ran briskly in and out of the round collar of his tee-shirt. His eyes were open, but terribly out of syncone has rolled back so far that we could see only the a tiny arc of iris; the other stared straight up into the storm (King, Body 409). Like the unnatural stare of the dead boy in The Body, the shape, size and functions of the body are constantly twisted and exaggerated in tales of horror to the extent that the carefully-guarded boundary between normalcy and monstrosity is crossed in order to cause fear. In Kings eyes, our cultures desperate attempt to prevent the contamination of the acceptable by the abnormal reflects human beings craving for order: it is not the physical or mental aberration in itself which horrifies us, but rather the lack of order which the aberrations seem to imply (Danse 50). Meditating on physical aberrations which used to be viewed as signs of evil or associated with deviltry, such as left-handedness, widows peak, and moles on womens bodies, King notices that the line separating normalcy and monstrosity changes over time and concludes that [n]ormality is a sociological concept and is accordingly historical and endemic (Danse 48)4. People are thus taught to love or hate, as Edward J. Ingebretsen rightly points out while they are led to believe that their choices of the objects of desire or fear are free from the mandates of a culture eager to define the scope of the permissible by naming and excluding social deviations: terror likewise presumes a prior discrimination and its use suggests implicit authority. Those who create the monster (or the monstrous) must either continue reminding us of the fact or convince us to do that work ourselves. Consequently, neither love nor terror can be considered merely natural or, in a democratic regime, freely chosen (xxiii).
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According to King, left-handedness has a long history of being suspected of evil for the alleged association of the left side with Satan: Left-handed baseball players are all considered screwballs, whether they are or not. The French for left, bastardized from the Latin, is la sinister, from which comes our word sinister. According to the old superstition, your right side belongs to God, your left side to that other fellow. Southpaws have always been suspect (Danse 49-50). He also enumerates physical aberrations which used to indicate those people who engaged themselves with witchery or sorcery: almost every physical and mental human aberration has been at some point in history, or is now, considered monstrousa complete list would include widows peaks (once considered a reliable sign that a man was a sorcerer), moles on the female body (supposed to be witches teats) . . . (Danse 50). 6

The body is among the things people are instructed to hate or fear. Noticing Lovecrafts obsession with the bodys constant resistance to definition and discipline, Ingebretsen concludes that the body is almost synonymous with monstrosity for Lovecraft, who finds the intractability of the body almost bordering on the demonic and accordingly considers it an effective means to horrify readers: The body is Lovecrafts favorite source of outrageits generations and degenerations, and the way these affect identity, its duplicities and perplexing fluidity. The human forms disconcerting talent for losing locus, changing shape, or for transgressing the boundaries of the humane is, in short, Lovecrafts definition of the monstrum (161). Ingebretsen goes on to say, in his insightful book on the often neglected bound between theology and horror literature, Maps of Heaven and Maps of Hell, that the horror of the body can be traced back to Christianitys denial of the flesh in favor of the spirit: Wilbur Whateley in The Dunwich Horror, the bastard son of an unknown god and a mortal woman, embodies the deeply discountenanced horror of the flesh central to the abstracting, spiritualizing Christian imagination (161). The fear of the body is not only foregrounded in the Christian belief, it is also an integral part of Western culture: As Michel Foucault demonstrates in A History of Sexuality, a dread of the bodyits issues and fervors, its unspeakable of uncontrollable desiresprofoundly influences western culture (Ingebretsen 186). The struggle between the seriously injured popular writer, Paul Sheldon, and his number-one fan and abductor, Annie Wilkes, in Misery, as Bernadette Lynn Bosky sees it, is one between the mind and the body since Annie is bulky and overweight while Paul is wasting away from his injuries: The strong, fleshy nurse and the crippled, emaciated writer represent the body and the mind (154). Moreover, Pauls loss of body parts to Annie, who chops off his foot and thumb in extreme rage, literally reduces his corporeality. The more his body is mutilated, the more he is convinced of Annies craziness, which must be dealt with more cautiously by rational thinking and self-discipline: he keeps control over himself and
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does not give up or make desperate mistakes . . . Paul is always thinking and calculating. Stripped of all his vicesfrom cigarettes and alcohol to his own false pridePaul fashions himself into a Spartan-like being (Magistrale, Art 275). Paul attributes his incredible productivityhe is writing at a pace of twelve pages a dayto the rigorous way of life Annie has forced him into: Part of the reason was that he was living an amazingly straight life. No long, muddled nights spent bar-hopping, followed by long, muddled days spent drinking coffee and orange juice and gobbling Vitamin B tablets . . . . No more waking up next to a big blonde or redhead he had picked up somewhere the night before . . . . No more cigarettes (King, Misery 163). Besides, that he continues to write even after his thumbectomy is a sure proof that the power of the mind is in inverse ratio to corporeality. Western cultures emphasis on the superiority of the mind over the body finds one of its manifestations in peoples overanxiety about fat and body-weight: According to Chernin, Western dualism between the mind (or spirit) and the body, and emphasis that the former must overcome the latter, is one reason for contemporary obsession with slimming (Bosky 146)5. When King discusses physical aberrations and their relation to the concept of monstrosity in Danse Macabre, fat is not only the first trait that suggests itself, it also occupies a large part of Kings discussion to peoples interest in and fascination with the inconveniences faced by extremely fat people, such as having to buy two seats when flying and being stuck in a revolving door. In Kings horror landscape, it does not require a hungry wolf to turn Grandmas loving embrace into a deadly trap; fat can also do the trick. In Gramma, a contemporary rendition of Little Red Riding Hood, the six-year-old George is terribly frightened by his blind, mostly bedridden grandma whose weight of two hundred pounds impresses him most: he had cried with terror whenever Gramma held out her heavy arms toward him . . . she held out her white-elephant arms, wanting him to come to her and
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Bosky is referring to Kim Chernins idea in The Obsession: Reflection on the Tyranny of Slenderness. 8

be hugged to that huge and heavy old white-elephant body (464). Bosky observes that of all the features of the body that King usually employs to do a sketch of a character, body-weight carries with it more suggestions while other physical characteristics, such as stature and skin color, are mostly descriptive6. She goes on to attribute Kings highly-suggestive use of body-size to the complicated conception of fat in the culture at large: body-weight is highly charged with significance, both to King and to our culture in general (138). Overweight is usually suggestive of lack of will-power, insatiable desire, untidiness and idleness, the unwholesome behaviors that our culture considers destructive to ones moral integrity. Bosky proposes that fat is among the evils, which have nothing to do the demonic but hint at immoral human behaviors, that are held responsible for setting the supernatural force to work in It: It links fat with self-indulgence or even immorality that borders on evil . . . (144). The protagonist, Richie Grenadine, in Gray Matter is gradually devoured by a slimy, jellylike gray substance as a result of a fungus infection which he has got from a beer contaminated by some unknown bacteria. Before he got sick, Richie had been notorious for being a wanton beer-drinker. Later, he was injured at work so he got compensation from the company and accordingly does not have to work any more and could spend the rest of his life drinking and watching TV. When he was still working, he was fond of drinking; his jaw and arms reminded people of pork and ham. After he retires, his fat, not unlike the endlessly dividing fungus he is infected with, begins to get out of control: Usually hed be by once a day to pick up a case of whatever beer was going cheapest at that time, a big fat man with jowls like pork butts and ham-hock
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Kings African American characters, especially his super black heroes, also strike critics as flat and undeveloped. Aimee Labrie, for instance, criticizes King for limiting the use of African American characters to helping white protagonists or opting for a mystifying presentation, instead of a realistic portrayal: his African American characters . . . do not appear to do much more than assist or guide the almost exclusively white-man protagonists. . . . Coffey is a throwback to notions of the mysterious/primal/ native black man. In one of his interviews in Playboy, collected in Gothic Horror, King accepts Chelsea Quinn Yarbors criticism of his inability to create convincing female characters and goes on to confess his problem of presenting black characters: Both Hallorann in The Shining and Mother Abigail in The Stand are cardboard caricatures of super black heroes, viewed through rose-tinted glasses of white liberal guilt (96). 9

arms. Richie always was a pig about his beer, but he handled it okay when he was working at the sawmill out in Clifton. Then something happeneda pulper piled a bad load, or maybe Richie just made it out that wayand Richie was off work, free an easy, with the sawmill company paying him compensation. Something in his back. Anyway, he got awful fat. (King, Gray 106) As if the association of fat with alcoholism and laziness were not bad enough, King goes on to connect it to child abuse, ghoulishness and cannibalism. Richie threatens to infect his son, Timmy, if the boy, frightened by his condition, calls the doctor: Dont you dare. If you do Ill touch ya and youll end up just like this (Gray 110). Timmy decides to seek help in spite of his fathers intimidating words when he looks through the peephole and sees his father eating the rotting flesh of a dead cat infested with maggots. Moreover, the decayed smell coming from Richies flat suggests to Henry, the shopkeeper of a local store whom Timmy has turned to for help, an infamous connection with the disappearance of several local people after dark. The horror of the body, typified by the contemporary fear of fat, is usually exaggerated by the overanxiety about the links among overweight, sickness and death to the extent that it finds modern horror fiction congenial since the latter often deals in the horror of mortality: Modern horror fiction, including Kings own fiction, is indebted to the fear of mortality . . . and the identification between fat and death is certainly evident in Kings work (Bosky 147). Fat characters in Kings horror landscape are either pitied or bullied by people who have clung to the connection between fat and death as if mortality could be held at bay by rejecting fat people and their presumed closeness to unhealthiness and death. Ben Hanscom, one of the members of Losers Club in It, is well-liked by the librarian, Mrs. Starrett, for his intelligence and manners. However, she cannot help but feel sorry for him because she thinks fat is not only isolating but also killing him: Mrs. Starrett was charmed by his grave politeness and a
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little saddened by his size. Her mother would have said the boy was digging his grave with a knife and fork (King, It 181). Even Ben himself seems to be vaguely aware of the danger of eating too much candy when he likens popping candy into his mouth to shooting himself in the mouth: He honestly meant to save the Pez for watching TV that nighthe liked to load them into the little plastic Pez-Guns handgrip one by one, liked to hear the accepting click of the small spring inside, and liked most of all to shoot them into his mouth one by one, like a kid committing suicide by sugar (King, It 169). The sickening image of the bedridden Gramma is composed of her lack of control over the mind, the figure, the bladder, and the bowels, symptomatic of senility and disease, whose association with mortality cannot be overlooked: Gramma was noisy when she had her bad spells, but mostly she just lay in the bed she had taken to three years before, a fat slug wearing rubber pants and diapers under her flannel nightgown, her face runneled with cracks and wrinkles, her eyes empty and blindfaded blue irises floating atop yellow corneas (King, Gramma 468). In Misery when Annie tries to resuscitate Paul, her nauseating breath tells Paul a lot about her excessive eating and bulkiness: Paul smelled her on the onrush of the breath she had forced into him the way a man might force a part of himself into an unwilling woman, a dreadful mixed stench of vanilla cookies and chocolate ice cream and chicken gravy and peanut butter fudge (King, Misery 5). What is more, Annies breath also reminds him of death, putrefaction and hell: He smelled something on her breath, something from the dark and sour chambers inside her, something that smelled like dead fish. . . . It brought back the memory of her sour breath (! breathe goddamnit Breathe!) blowing down his throat like a dirty wind from hell (King, Misery 159-60). It is in Annies putrid breath that converge the feminine, the bodysuggested by fat and bulimia and death. In Kings fictive universe, the corporeal, death, and the feminine are so intractably linked to one another that sometimes they are almost synonymous with
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each other. Kings unflattering representations of fat women in Misery and Gramma lead critics to fault him for reproducing our cultures stereotypical association of fat and the corporeal with the feminine: In our culture, body-shape, and especially fat, is seen as feminine problem (Bosky 148). Though there are many monstrously overweight women in Kings work, none of them is more useful to exemplify the connection between fat and the feminine than Kings portrayal of the fat boy, Ben. Bens hips, thighs and chest are often made fun of by the bullies in school, as if fat, presumed to be an exclusively female trait, deprived him of his masculinity and turned him embarrassingly androgynous: He rose . . . an eleven-year-old kid with a can roughly the size of New Mexico said can packed into a pair of horrid new blue jeans . . . and went whssht-whssht-whssht as his big thighs brushed together. His hips swung girlishly. His stomach slid from side to side. . . . He almost always wore baggy sweatshirts because he was deeply ashamed of his chest and had been since the first day of school after the Christmas vacation, when he had worn one of the new Ivy League shirts his mother had given him, and Belch Huggins, who was a sixthgrader, had cawed: Hey, you guys! Look it what Santy Clause brought Ben Hanscom for Christmas! A big set of titties! (It 162-63) If fat contributes to effeminacy, Bens lack of masculinity due to his body-size finds another expression in the biased association between effeminacy and homosexuality. When Ben is on his way to the library, Henry and his friends wait under an oak tree to ambush him. Henry is a big boy in Bens class who has stayed back. It looks like he is going to repeat the fifth grade again and he blames Ben for it because Ben would not let him copy his paper. In Henrys eyes, Bens clothes, the way he runs and how he responds to attacks are not only girlish but also sissy: Henry watched the fat little prick scutter across the street; his belly bouncing, the cowlick at the back of his head springing back and forth like a goddamn Slinky, his ass
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wiggling like a girls inside his new bluejeans. . . . He thought they could probably get him before he made it inside, but Hanscom might start screaming. He wouldnt put it past the little pansy. If he did, an adult might interfere . . . ( It 170). The close connection between the body and woman and the repeated rejections of both betray mans fear of womans uncontrollable otherness, which often centers on her sexuality. Kings Carrie, as Douglas Winter sees it, is a story about what men fear about women and womens sexuality (qtd. in Roberts 33)7. The horror King presents in Carrie starts from the girls onset of puberty, which is believed to speed up the development of her psychic power, and culminates in her setting the senior prom on fire telekinetically. Carries first menstruation terrifies not only herself but also her classmates, who respond to the horror of menstrual blood by teasingly throwing tampons at her while shouting plug it up, which reveals their unconscious fear of the menstruating bodies that the culture at large has taught them to reject: Then the laughter, disgusted, contemptuous, horrified, seemed to rise and bloom into something jagged and ugly, and the girls were bombarding her with tampons and sanitary napkins . . . They flew like snow and the chant became: Plug it up, plug it up, plug it up, plug it (Carrie 8). In his essay on the close relationship between sex and horror, John Nicholson argues that horror writers are breaking ground by creating teenage girls, such as Regan in The Exorcist and Carrie, whose supernatural power or demonically deviant behaviorspeeing in front of guests and masturbating with a crossare almost simultaneous with pubescence since Gothic fiction in the eighteenth century seldom employed womens sexuality as a source of fear: female sexuality in the context of horror was breaking taboos . . . Mrs Radcliffes heroine may have been frightened out of their wits but we had never needed the soggy pants (251). Carries telekinesis and Regans deviancy are disturbing not only as metaphors of
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The original source is Douglas E. Winters Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. 13

teenage girls sexual awakening and womens sexual assertiveness, which society has a hard time regulating. Mens anxiety over female sexuality, Anne Cranny Francis points out, results from a deeper fear of a biological function unique to women, i.e. the power of reproduction. Francis proposes that women are pit derogatively against men and the correlatives of masculinity, such as humanity, rationality and normality for mens thinly disguised envy of her power to bear children: women do have an enviable power inherent in their differencethat of reproduction . . . that power is controlled by men who humiliate and degrade them purely in terms of that biology (a cunt) and/or terms of difference: from them, from men, from humanity. This is the chain of significations in which normality, humanity, is defined in terms of masculinity; the feminine is, therefore, both abnormal and inhuman . . . . (142) Upon knowing her daughters first menstruation, Carries mother, Margaret White, a self-ordained minister who preaches to her family at home instead of going to church, drags Carrie to the altar in their house and forces her to confess her sins. According to Margarets twisted interpretation of how Paradise is lost, Adam and Eve are compelled to leave Eden because of sex, the first among the sins unleashed into the world by Eves weakness, for which blood and the pang of childbirth are the retribution: And Eve was weak and loosed the raven on the world . . . and the raven was called Sin, and the first Sin was Intercourse. And the Lord visited Eve with a Curse, and the Curse was the Curse of Blood. And Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden and into the world and Eve found that her belly had grown big with child (King, Carrie 56). Besides, she stubbornly believes that sex will always be the breeding ground for all other evils in the world so long as Eve and her daughters would not stop having sex and start repenting: And following Cain, Eve gave birth to Abel, having not yet repented of the Sin of Intercourse. And so the Lord visited Eve with a third Curse, and
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this was the Curse of Murder. Cain rose up and slew Abel with a rock (King, Carrie 56-57). The belief that sex brings forth nothing but evils is so deep-rooted in Margarets mind that when she is big with Carrie, the idea of pregnancy never enters her head; she believes instead that she is having a cancer of the womanly parts and will soon die (King, Carrie 15). Kings misogynistic portrayal of the maternal comes to a climax when the monsters in Graveyard Shift and It are revealed as gross mutant creatures with or expectant of a seemingly numberless, equally nauseating descendants. The giant she-rat in Graveyard Shift occupying the basement of the factory has evolved into something that fits the darkness, dampness and sordidness of the tomb-like cellar. Moreover, there is a good chance that its offspring are on the way of mutating into something fierce and vampiric: The rat filled the whole gully at the far end of that noxious tomb. It was a huge and pulsating gray, eyeless, totally without legs. . . . Their queen, then the magna mater. A huge and nameless thing whose progeny might someday develop wings. . . . It was the shock of seeing a rat as big as a Holstein calf (King, Graveyard 50). In It, the gigantic she-spider bred by the rich filthiness of Derrys sewer system stuns the Losers by its monstrous fertility. Its saliva and the poison dripping from its fatal stinger are alive and the moment they strike the ground, they writhe away like protozoa. Moreover, the fear of the Losers culminates when their eyes meet the belly of the spider swollen with eggs and thats when they come to the realization that it has to be destroyed because it is female and is about to mother a lot of creepy progeny: Thats Its egg-sac, Ben thought, and his mind seemed to shriek at the implication. . . . Its female and Its pregnant. . . . Thats why we had to come back, no matter what, because It is female, Its pregnant with some unimaginable spawn . . . and Its time has drawn close (King, It 1005). As sickening as the spiders pregnancy is its nauseating body whose openings cannot stop oozing unwholesomely grayish or sickly foamy body fluid: Its eyes were bright malevolent rubies, bulging from sockets filled with some dripping chromium-colored fluid.
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Its jagged mandibles opened and closed, opened and closed, dripping ribbons of foam (King, It 1004). As Bosky notices, in the final confrontation with the monstrous spider, the Losers destroy their archenemy out of feelings of unconscious hostility toward the body, mother and woman: The monsters end combines resonances of body-hatred, mother-hatred, and rape (151). It doesnt seem enough, as far as Julia Kristeva is concerned, to trace Western cultures hatred of the body in association with the feminine and the maternal to the stress Western civilization has put on rationality, spirituality and subjectivity, the prerogatives placed on the side of masculinity. The biased opposition between masculinity and femininity is not just grounded in the contrast between the mind and the body reflective of a sexist ideology whose advocates have found womans biological otherness intimidating. Kristeva proposes instead that the nauseating images of corporeality and the threatening mother figures represented by artistic endeavors provide us with an opportunity to re-experience the construction of the self as a gendered social being, a process to which the separation from the maternal body and everything corporeal to establish the boundary between subject and object is integral. Therefore, the usual interchangeability between body-hatred and mother-hatred in Kings horror fiction is by no means indicative of the authors misogynistic fantasy. Rather, the sickening portrayals of terrible mothers, the menstrual, and the corporealwhich often centers on the excrementalcan be understood as the horror writers attempt to represent how the self has crossed the threshold between the languageless pre-Oedipal world and the symbolic world of language and subjectivity and the changes taking place of perspectives from which the corporeal and the maternal are regarded. One way to represent the wordless pre-Oedipal world is, according to Kristeva, through art that persists even after the efficiency of the symbolic has been called into question: In a world in which the Other has collapsed, the aesthetic taska descent into the foundations of the symbolic constructamounts to
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retracing the fragile limits of the speaking being, closest to its dawn, to the bottomless primacy constituted by primal repression (18). The art Kristeva has in mind is that of great modern writers, such as Dostoevsky, Lautramont, Proust, Artaud, Kafka, Cline (18). Clare Hanson extends Kristevas list to include modern horror writers because he sees in their preoccupation with the bodys disgusting physiology an attempt to represent a world where words stop short in the face of the bodys uncontrollable and unspeakable monstrosity: Horror fiction is dominated by those images of waste, putrefaction and decay which Kristeva associates with abjection: these are, so to speak, the staple of horror (153). The images of waste in horror literature are terrifying, in Hansons view, in that they remind the self of the primary abjection of the maternal body prerequisite for surmounting the Oedipus complex: Horror fiction is constituted of images designed precisely to stir memories of the early abjection of the mother and of the later traumatic passage through the Oedipus to the symbolic (153). Since the abjection of the mother is for the self to assume an identity in the symbolic, the identity is threatened when its process of construction is revealed by the disturbing presence of the abject, including everything reminiscent of the foundations of the symbolic construct of subjectivity, such as the excremental, which threatens identity from outside and the menstrual, which threatens from within (Hanson 141). Among the putrid images of bodily waste, Hanson singles out the menstrual as the most relevant to the abjection of the maternal body: Menstrual waste is for obvious reasons also connected particularly closely with the body of the mother and with memories of the primary abjection of that body (141). To facilitate the separation from the mother, especially from the maternal body, it is necessary to associate the mother with what the subject cannot wait to discard, the bodily waste that challenges the subject as a speaking being with something that stuns it to the extent of speechlessness. If subjectivity requires giving up symbiosis with the mother, i.e. setting up a boundary between the self and the mother, it is understandable accordingly that
17

the mother and her associates have to go through what Kristeva calls a rite of defilement and pollution in the first place in order that they can be rejected later (17). Hence, by connecting abjection with the ritual of defilement, rather than with filth and dirt, Kristeva makes it clear that what stirs the feeling of anxiety is by no means the foulness of the waste but the blurring of boundaries between the subject and what it is eager to deny as part of itself: It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect orders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite (4). The mother has to go through the ritual of defilement because of the paradoxical nature of her relationship with the self. On the one hand, she is the life-giving force that gives birth to and nurtures the child. On the other hand, her nurturance and protection might hinder the childs independent identity as a social subject. The maternal is thus duly defiled in Kings short story, The Man in the Black Suit. At the literal level, the story is about a nine-year-old boys encounter with the Devil. However, by linking the boys mother to death and corporeality, King makes sure that the mother is exactly the devil the boy needs to confront before he can assume an independent identity with assistance from his father, a thinly-veiled metaphor for the symbolic. The boy, Gary, meets the man in the black suit when he is fishing. He recognizes the man as the Devil immediately because the man has orange-red eyes and gives off a smell of sulfur. Whats more, the man kills insects by simply clapping his hands and he burns patches of grass where he sits or steps on. The man tells Gary that his mother was stung by a bee and dropped dead because of allergy, the same way that Garys brother, Dan, was killed earlier. The man also attributes Dans death to the fatal inheritance he had received from his mother. Heart-broken and terrified, Gary runs away from the man, who threatens to eat him alive. When he is on the way home, he meets his father, who assures him that his mother is all right and promises to beat the man. When they get home, Gary is happy
18

to find that his mother is safe and sound. Garys love for his mother and his unconscious desire for the union with her is indicated by the way he appreciates her beauty at the particular moment before he leaves home to go fishing and by the vividness of the memory as if she were his first love: There was a curl of hair lying across the side of her forehead and touching her eyebrowyou see how well I remember it all? The bright light that turned that little curl to filaments of gold and made me want to run to her and put my arms around her. In that instant I saw her as a woman, saw her as my father must have seen her (King, Man 39). Besides beauty, Garys mother reminds him of warmth and nurturance because she is remembered most vividly by him for making bread in the kitchen, brightened by sunshine galore: my mother . . . was standing at a marble counter in a flood of strong morning sunshine fall through the double windows over the sink. . . . she was wearing a house dress with little red roses all over it, I remember, and she was kneading bread (King, Man 39). Death, however, casts a pall over Garys memory of warmth and sweetness and twisted the much-treasured remembrance into unforgettable nightmare: she had been stung by a bee, she had drowned in the warm, bread-smelling kitchen air (King, Man 53). As the smell of life-giving bread is tangled with death in the above-mentioned scene, Garys beautiful, caring mother is irrevocably entangled with death. What is more unsettling for Gary than the bad news about his mothers death might be her responsibility, according to the Devil, for her sons death: It was your mother who passed the fatal weakness on to your brother, Dan; you got some of it, but you also got a protection from your father that poor Dan somehow missed. . . . she killed your brother Dan as surly as if she had put a gun to his head and pulled the trigger (King, Man 51). Absurd as the words of the man may sound, Gary believes them deep down: But I believed him. On some level I believed him completely, as we always believe, on some level, the worst thing our hearts can imagine (King, Man 49-50). Consequently, no matter how beautiful and loving Garys mother has been, her association
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with death equals her in devilishness with the man in the black suit, who kills whatever he has laid his hand on: the chthonic powers of darkness is represented primarily by his mother and . . . secondarily by the devil (Hansen 299). As Gary runs away from the man toward his father for protection, he is also running away from his mothers deadly curse, from which he luckily escapes, thanks to, as the Devil bluntly points out, some genes he has inherited from his father which are able to counter the deadliness of those he has received from his mother. The fathers genes, as Tom Hansen understands it, are a metaphor for Christianity. Garys mother is presented as the opposite of Christianity not only through her close connection with death. Moreover, she refuses to go to church shortly after her sons death: my mother clapped her hands over her ears, got up, and walked out of the church basement. Shed never been back since, either, and nothing my father could say to her would change her mind. She claimed she was done with church . . . (King, Man 38). The distance Garys mother puts between herself and the church and her association with death both support Hansens reading of the story as one about a nine-year-olds unconscious seeking for help from Christianity to fight death: that protection [from Garys father] is Christianity, the promise of eternal life, the defeat of the maternal infernal death (299). When Gary goes back to the stream with his father to retrieve his fishing pole and creel, he does not intend to go without the Bible: I wanted to be prepared. As prepared as I could be, anyway. I had the family Bible . . . (King, Man 63). Similarly, the humiliation, i.e. the ritual of defilement, Carrie has gone through before the altar at home following the onset of her puberty results from her mothers overenthusiastic belief in Christianity. Garys paradoxical feelings towards his mother lead Hansen to points out that the mother and even her associate, death, have not always been horrible, at least before the ritual of defilement, which is prerequisite for defining what is to worship by excluding what is considered profane: This womb-as-tomb complex is fundamental to nature religions
20

associated with Mother Goddess worship. The Life Mother is also the Death Mother (299). Death is viewed as a transformed mode of corporeality when it is conceived as a return to nature instead of as the end of existence. Nevertheless, when people are believed to continue existing only in the form of spirits after death, corporeality becomes something to be purged because the body is the part of a person that dies, decomposes and vanishes and thus carries all the weight of the horror of death: But patriarchal Sky Father religions, suppressing and displacing Earth Mother religions, wrote a new ending to the age-old story. Our bodies do return to nature, that greatest of all mothers, but our God-forged souls (In His image created Him them) return to the Father (Hansen 299). Each religion has its unique way of separating the holy and the unholy which, according to Kristeva, is one of the specific forms of abjection including the rite of defilement and pollution, exclusion, transgression and Christian sin: The various means of purifying the abjectthe various catharsesmake up the history of religions (17). Corporeality threatens the purity of the soul with death and temporality and thus needs to be rejected. The soul that departs from the body when a person dies does not seem to be different from the subject which used to maintain its bounds through abjection but now gets kicked out from the corpse: It is no longer I who expel, I is expelled. The border has become an object. How can I be without border? (Kristeva 3-4). If subjectivity has everything to do with border, it stands to reason that death, construed as returning to nature, should cause horror rather than bliss. When death is viewed as a reunion with nature, it is experienced as the loss of the boundary between the self and nature, that is, the loss of identity. This little macabre story of King hints at the similarity in foundation between subjectivity and religiosity. Garys soul/subjectivity is guarded against the death curse of the mother, which threatens Garys identity with annihilation, by Christianity, which guarantees the permanence of the soul in spite of death and putrefaction of the body. The foundation in
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question is abjection, prerequisite for both subjectivity and religiosity. Besides, neither religiosity nor subjectivity can be established without language because abjection has everything to do with language. Clare Hanson, following Lacan, states that the acquisition of language ensues the construction of identity because the childs need for language follows his or her separation from the mother, an experience of loss and absence perceived by the child as positive and affirmative through the mediation of language while the mother mediated by language is rejected as different and intimidating: For Lacan, the moment in which the unconscious is created, via the repression of the desire for the mother, is one and the same as the moment in which language is acquired, for it is only on perceiving the mother as absent/ different from her- or himself that the child will need to name her (137). That is to say, to resist the temptation of union with the mother and the accompanying loss of identity, the separation is supposed to be experienced as constructive while the state of symbiosis and the maternal should be mediated by language through abjection as negative and destructive. Besides, the childs entry into the symbolic is paid for not only by separation from the mother but also by disavowal of his or her bodily functions: horror fiction, in Hansons view, allows readers to re-experience the process of abjection and thus provides them with the pleasure which one originally felt in the pre-symbolic state, pleasure derived from unmediated experience of the maternal body and of ones bodily function (143). Language plays a similar role, as Kristeva observes, when Christianity attempts to define sin to the effect that it can be gasped and controlled: Abjection . . . finally encounters, with Christian sin, a dialectic elaboration, as it becomes integrated in the Christian Word as a threatening othernessbut always nameable, always totalizeable (17). Edward J. Ingebretsen regards the otherness repudiated to ground Christianity as first and foremost the body: Broadly speaking, an allegorical privileging of the spiritual resulted in a denial of the carnalin Puritan phraseology. This denial would be located in the body
22

itself . . . (xix). Ingebretsen accordingly observes a moralistic trajectory from Puritanism to secular devices of social control to popular horror fiction. The Puritan discipline of the body through the techniques of scrutiny and confession was gradually subsumed under the detection of criminality by civil laws and ended up in modern tales of horror where the spectacular overshadows the confessional and the moralistic. Ingebretsen states that the Divine in the Christian religious rhetoric could be put to social uses because people both feared and desired the revelation of Gods awful/awe-ful face. The monstrosity of Gods awful wrath was either displaced by peoples longing for the ecstasy of Revelation or prevented by peoples fear of Apocalypse: in this society of Revelation and imminent Apocalypse, God would inevitably be linked to the monstrumthe divine warning and remonstrance (xv). While the seeing of Gods awe-ful face steeped Puritans in self-annihilating ecstasy, the fear of self-loss that the transcendent moment caused was experienced as a blissful union with the numinous. The secret of the Gods double faces is revealed, as Ingebretsen insightfully argues, in modern popular horror literature where the numinous is deprived of sublimity: this secretthe Divines twin faces of fear and ecstasyis the secret hidden away in the repudiated pulp horror. The Sublimeerased by law and denied by commodity economicsnonetheless continues to speak (xxv). The various means of social control were, as a matter of fact, not to bring Puritans closer to the Divine but to protect them from Gods divine wrath. Therefore, people need to be shielded from the sense of the numinous no less than from the demonic dread by means of defining what is speakable within worldly grammars, the goal reached by Christianity and horrific literature respectively when they, quite paradoxically, speak excessively about the unspeakable: Theology and Gothic, then, are in effect narratives of the Unspeakable; together they fence off that which cannot be spokeneither because it exists beyond boundaries of grammar (and thus beyond human knowing) or because it cannot permissibly
23

be spoken within human boundaries (Ingebretsen xxiv). Ingebretsens observation on the similarity between the sacred and the scary is of special interest when it draws our attention to the division of what is beyond language into the unknowable and the unacceptable. The difference between the numinous and the abject disappears when it is made clear that they are both threatening for exceeding the bounds of human language and understanding : For beyond these limits lies the Unspeakable, the unimaginable, even the Ineffable: the nightmare of limitless possibilities, metaphorized as Holy and Horrible, against whose death-filled yearnings culture shields itself (Ingebretsen xxiii). Kristevas grounding of religiosity in abjection is, in effect, corroborates the discrimination in what is beyond language when religious rhetoric establishes itself by drawing a line between the sacred and the profane, which indicates that not all that is unspeakable has to go through abjection. Kings fiction, though regarded by some as notorious for joining the maternal with the abject, is not short of the connection of the mother with the numinous and thus less unfavorable aspect of the unspeakable, which is exemplified in Misery by Pauls repeated rumination on the goddess-like quality of Annie Wilkes. Kings interest in presenting terrible mothers is attributed by some critics to his fascination with the construction of the self as a gendered social being. Since abjection is integral to both the establishment of religiosity and the construction of the subject, religious rhetoric might be a useful metaphor for how the subject comes into existence. Take Hansens reading of The Man in the Black Suit for instance, the story could be regarded as a perfunctorily religious fable since what the boy unconsciously worries about is the death of his body rather than the loss of his soul. Hansen makes a good case when he cites Kings ridiculous characterization of the devil as indifferent to peoples souls and more than willing to let God have them while his only interest lies in feasting on the bodies: The ignorance and ineptitude of this would-be devil are profound. Bona fide devils hunger for the souls, not the
24

bodies . . . (297). King metaphorical use of religious rhetoric could be accounted for by Robert F. Gearys observation in On Horror and Religion of the replacement of religious beliefs by modern tales of horror as a result of a gradually secularized worldview: supernatural thrillers have no difficulty thriving in a secularized age which has weakened the old sacred cosmos without creating a replacement universally, or even generally, accepted. . . . the later day Gothic shockers give many the vicarious chills of the darkly numinous without binding them to institutional religion or its moral and theological framework (298-99). In Kings apocalyptic stories, such as Carrie and The Stand, elements of the Christian eschatology are detached from the original religious context to serve the purpose of illustrating the authors worldly fantasy about the end of the world: especially in The Stand the Christian commitment is generally circumscribed, indeed is sometimes treated with sardonic humor (Reino 51). Lois Parkinson Zamora explains the secularization of apocalyptic vision as the gradual realization of mans responsibility for destruction on a massive scale: our modern sense of apocalypse is less religious than historical, the cataclysm resulting from the events of recent history and mans own capacity for self-destruction (qtd. in Egan, Apocalypticism 216)8. Zamoras argument can be corroborated by Kings attribution of some of his early stories to contemporary events: the Vietnam War, the Watergate disclosures, and Americas assassinations and racial problems of the 1960s were the negative propellants of some early novels (Reino 50). That horror literature seems to take over the task of religious discourse to explain the inexplicable conforms to Kristevas argument that art continues to purify the abject after the collapse of all religious structurings: The various means of purifying the abjectthe various catharsesmake up the history of religions, and end up with that catharsis par excellence called art, both on the far and near side of religion. Seen from that standpoint, the artistic experience, which is rooted in the
8

The original source is Lois Parkinson Zamoras introduction to The Apocalyptic Vision in America. 25

abject it utters and by the same token purifies, appear as the essential component of religiosity (17). In light of this, Kings employment of religious elements in some of his stories can be viewed as a metaphorical means to explore the power of art, especially that of writing. In Misery Annie Wilkes imagined as an African goddess not only fascinates but also terrifies Paul. The fear, nevertheless, does not have so much to do with the mediation of language as with the impotence of language since the goddess is fantasized in ambiguous rather than derogative terms9. Paul finds it most terrifying when Annies facial expression suddenly blanks out which is possibly the prelude to a fit of manic depression. The emptiness of Annies face usually strikes Paul as paradoxically abysmal and stone-like. Whereas the abyss-like quality of Annies sudden incomprehensibility implies a nasty fall all the way into a seemingly bottomless pit, the solidity is actually the worst fear: what frightened him . . . was . . . in that moment he thought that her thoughts had become much as he had imagined her physical self: solid, fibrous, unchannelled, with no places of hiatus (King, Misery 12). Since for Paul to wield the power of writing presupposes an entry into an alternative world through a hole, which Annies wanton capriciousness often serves as, her stoniness is no other than a roadblock that forbids trespassing: As always, the blessed relief of starting, a feeling that was like falling into a hole filled with bright light. . . . As always, the terror of not being able to finish, of accelerating into a blank wall. As always, the marvellous joyful nervy feeling of journey begun (King, Misery 46). Since the construction of the subject is the
9

My description of the limitation of language as impotence is doubly significant. First, the power of writing is usually sided with masculinity. According to Dianne Sadoff in Locus Suspectus: Narrative, Castration, and the Uncanny, the word, pencil, can be traced etymologically back to the word, penis: the word pencil, of course derives from Latin penicillus, which derives from the diminutive, penis, a tail. This common figure, the pen-as-phallus, represents the enabling power of writing to engender rendered life . . . (qtd. in Schroeder 144). King is also noticed by Kathleen Margaret Lant to conflate creativity and masculinity: Kings creativity is very closely associated for him with his masculine sexuality, with his power to assert, enter, dominate, and control (106). Moreover, the incapability of language to represent everything is often experienced as resulting from the castrating mother to conceal the fact that language is grounded in lack and absence in the first place. Magistrale, for instance, reads Annies power to hinder Pauls writing as castrating: Misery . . . is a novel about the destructive, potentially castrating nature of women (Second 126). 26

origin of language and the very first instance of the closely related power and impotence of language, it stands to reason that King makes use of it to explore the power of writing, a topic that he views as central to his artistic endeavor: Ive written so much myself that writing has become a vital part of my life. It is the biggest figure in my landscape, the analogue of the statue of the Bourka Bee goddess in Misery. My writing is at the center of my life. Wherever you go in my little part of the landscape, the writer is always there, looking back at the reader. So what I have written about writers and writing in the last five years or so has been a real effort on my part to understand what I am doing, what it means, what it is doing to me, what it is doing for me. (Magistrale, Second 11)10 If we are to trust this claim of King, we have no choice but to read Misery symbolically since the enigmatic African goddess, to whom Annie is constantly likened, is neither expressive of Kings misogynistic fantasy nor indicative of his interest in the construction of subjectivity but symbolic of his attempt to understand the power and working of writing. Through Annies association with the archaic and the primal in Pauls image of her as an African goddess, it is realized that the unspeakable horror she embodies lies at the origin. However, since the origin is perceived as a kind threshold across which the self enters into the symbolic from the imaginary through abjection, things could be very different before and after abjection. After abjection, language, which is founded on absence of and difference form the mother, begins to be perceived as positive and affirmative while the anxiety about its impotence is experienced as the horror of the castrating mother. Nevertheless, any representation of the origin also brings us inevitably back to the time when language is still linked indissolubly with the childs traumatic separation from the mother and thus leads to the
10

See Magistrales interview with King, which becomes the first chapter of Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half. 27

realization that language is nothing but a poor substitute for what has really happened. Therefore, the horror of the origin, as David Punter believes, comes from the transitory nature of experienceman always fails to grasp what h as happened; there is forever a unbridgeable gap between experience and the knowledge of it: the horror of origin is acutely felt in the Ur-loneliness, which arises from our ontologically peculiar knowledge of having forgotten the past the moment after it has happened (162). The inaccessibility of the past can be traced as further back as the moment when man is on the threshold of becoming an individual. Memory plays an indispensable role in the process of humanization. To become an individual, it requires the production of memory in place of what has actually happenedthe humanity lost is recast in a constructed memory as the humanity gained: the process of dehumanization is also a fabricated memory of non-humanization (Punter 169). Forgetting and remembering happen simultaneously on the threshold to keep us from the horror beyond the primal scene, whose memory is inaccessible and requires fabricated memory to be superimposed on its void: Beyond this threshold . . . there is only pervasion: there is only the lack of individuation, the absence of separable event (Punter 169). Kings fiction takes the reader to revisit the primal scenes in a vicarious way which stresses the constructiveness of memory: the super-fiction behind Kings fictions is that potential childhood traumas are laid out before us and we avidly revisit the forbidden places of past periods of our maturation . . . there are, as we have seen, no guarantees of the accuracy of these recollections (Punter 161). What is recast in the fictive primal scene is the process of psychic maturation. While some progress smoothly into psychological maturity, others might have a hard time trying to substitute fabricated memory for the traumatic moment. Punter warns against the danger of representing successful progression beyond trauma in fictive primal scenes, claiming that to do so is to allow the real of the past to be murdered by replacing it with a different story made up in the symbolic: the ever-present status of discourse as other than what it is, as that which
28

stands in for and, as Lacan says, murders the real through excess of the symbolic, becomes foregrounded and highlighted through the subjection of the past (172). Noticing Kings fascination with the primal experience and its significance in the construction of the gendered subject, Clare Hanson might be right about Kings work when he identifies the trajectory of his writing as an exemplary masculine one, moving as it were from mother to text (135). What he fails to see is that this masculine trajectory sometimes ends in a reluctance to progress beyond the primal experience due to a recognition that the horror of the primal scene is also prerequisite for the word: in Kings work, on the one hand, there is that phase of development where nature runs counter to nature, where development is at abeyance and we are at the mercy of uncomprehended forces which pre-date and attempt to resist our submission to the law; on the other hand, there is a figure invisibly saying that in the beginning was the word, and that the word is still with us (Punter 160). That is to say, Kings representation of the primal scene, of the founding moment of subjectivity and language, is usually contradictory. The separation from the mother perceived as constructive is complemented by the blissful union with the mother or by the impotence of language. Being forced to write to prolong his life, Paul imagines himself to be Scheherazade: But of course it wasnt Annie that was Scheherazade. He was. And if what he wrote was good enough, if she could not bear to kill him until she discovered how it all came out . . . (King, Misery 66). However, in his dream Annie is the Scheherazade, not him: He had dreamed that Annie Wilkes was Scheherazade, her solid body clad in diaphanous robes, her big feet stuffed into pink sequined slippers with curly toes as she rode on her magic carpet and chanted the incantatory phrases which open the doors of the best stories (King, Misery 66). Pauls dream about Annie as Scheherazade conforms to the close connection between the separation from the mother and the creation of the unconscious. If Paul is the word and Annie is the mother to be parted from for the self to acquire language, Pauls confusion about which
29

one of them is Scheherazade articulates Kings attempt to include both as contributing factors to the making of the story. Besides, Pauls power to imagine, which for King is integral to the power to write, is both despised and appreciated by his mother. When he was taken to the Boston Zoo as a kid by his mother, he was so sorry for a beautiful bird from Africa that he could not stop weeping for its tragic fate of being away from home, destined to be caged for the rest of its life and at last die in a far-off land. The birds fate, metaphoric of the prices each subject has to pay in order to enter the symbolic and to stay there, including separation from the mother and submitting to the Law of the Father, caused young Pauls sad fancy, which was teased by his mother as a sign of effeminacy: [the] great big bird . . . had the most beautiful feathersred and purple and royal bluethat he had ever seen . . . and the saddest eyes. He had asked his mother where the bird came from and when she said Africa he had understood it was doomed to die in the cage where it lived, far away from wherever God had meant it to be, and he cried and his mother bought him an ice-cream cone and for a while he stopped crying and then he remembered and started again and so she had taken him home, telling him as they rode the trolley back to Lynn that he was a bawl-baby and a sissy. (King, Misery 30) We are compensated for the separation from the mother by acquiring the word, which, symbolized by little Pauls fancy, is sometimes reminiscent of our pitiful condition of deprivation. However, on other occasions, Pauls mother enjoyed showing off his extraordinary ability to imagine and write: His mother liked to tell Mrs. Mulvaney on the other side of the fence what a marvelous imagination he had, so vivid, and what wonderful little stories he was always writing down (except, of course, when he was calling him a sissy and a bawl-baby) (King, Misery 31). The word is at first grounded in weakness and impotence but turns out to be powerful. Kings preoccupation with presenting the primal
30

scene reminds us of not only the power of the word but also its dependence on the maternal. As far as Paul is concerned, it is not enough to make sure that the word is always with him; it is no less important to assure himself that Annie is also with him. In his dreams and waking fantasies, he dug her up again and again because apart from horror, Annie almost promises the word (King, Misery 336).

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Works Cited Bosky, Bernadette Lynn. Playing the Heavy: Weight, Appetite, and Embodiment in Three Novels by Stephen King. The Dark Descent: Defining Stephen Kings Horrorscape. Ed. Tony Magistrale. New York: Greenwood, 1992. 137-56. Botting, Fred. Gothic. London: Routledge, 1996. Davis, Jonathan P. Stephen Kings America. Bowling Green: Bowling State U Popular P, 1994. Egan James. A Single Powerful Spectacle: Stephen Kings Gothic Melodrama. Extrapolation. 27.1 (1986): 62-75. Francis, Anne Cranny. On The Vampire Tapestry. Gothic Horror: A Readers Guide from Poe to King and Beyond. Ed. Clive Bloom. London: Macmillan, 1998. 134-54. Gallagher, Bernard J. Stephen King and Allegory. The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Ed. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1987. 37-48. Geary, Robert F. On Horror and Religion. Gothic Horror: A Readers Guide from Poe to King and Beyond. Ed. Clive Bloom. London: Macmillan, 1998. 287-301. Hansen, Tom. Diabolical Dreaming in Stephen Kings The Man in the Black Suit. Midwest Quarterly 45.3 (2004): 290-303. Hanson, Clare. Stephen King: Powers of Horror. American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King. Ed. Brian Docherty. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1990. 135-54. Heldreth, Leonard G. Viewing The Body: Kings Portrait of the Artist as Survivor. The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Ed. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1987. 64-74. Hyles, Vernon. Freaks: The Grotesque as Metaphor in the Works of Stephen King. The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Ed. Gary Hoppenstand and
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Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1987. 56-63. Ingebretsen, Edward J. Maps of Heaven, Maps of Hell: Religious Terror as Memory from the Puritans to Stephen King. New York: M. E. Sharpe, 1996. King, Stephen. The Body. Different Seasons. New York: Signet, 1983. 293-436. ----. Carrie. New York: Pocket, 1999. ---. Danse Macabre. New York: Everest, 1981. ---. Extract from an Interview in Playboy. Gothic Horror: A Readers Guide from Poe to King and Beyond. Ed. Clive Bloom. London: Macmillan, 1998. 96. ---. Foreword. Night Shift. By King. New York: Signet, 1979. xi-xxii. ---. Gramma. Skeleton Crew. New York: Signet, 1986. 464-94. ---. Gray Matter. Night Shift. New York: Signet, 1979. 105-116. ---. It. New York: Signet, 1981. ---. The Man in the Black Suit. Everything Is Eventual: Fourteen Dark Tales. New York: Pocket, 2002. 33-68. ---. Misery. New York: Signet, 1988. Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982. Labrie, Aimee. Stephen King: Exorcising the Demons. Blooms Biocritique: Stephen King. 2002. N. pag. Lant, Kathleen Margaret. The Rape of Constant Reader: Stephen Kings Construction of the Female Reader and Violation of the Female Body in Misery. Journal of Popular Culture 30.4 (1997): 89-114. Magistrale, Tony. Art Versus Madness in Stephen Kings Misery. The Celebration of the Fantastic. Ed. Donald E. Morse, Marshall B. Tymn and Csilla Bertha. Westport: Greenwood P, 1992. 271-78.
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---. Hollywoods Stephen King. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003. ---. Stephen King: The Second Decade, Danse Macabre to The Dark Half. New York: Twayne, 1992. Nicholson, John. On Sex and Horror. Gothic Horror: A Readers Guide from Poe to King and Beyond. Ed. Clive Bloom. London: Macmillan, 1998. 249-77. Punter, David. Laws of Recollection and Reconstruction: Stephen King. Gothic Pathologies: The Text, the Body and the Law. Hampshire: Macmillan, 1998. 158-79. Reino, Joseph. Stephen King: The First Decade, Carrie to Pet Sematary. New York: Twayne, 1988. Roberts, Garyn G. On Mad Dogs and FirestartersThe Incomparable Stephen King. The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Ed. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1987. 31-36. Schroeder, Natalie. Stephen Kings Misery: Freudian Sexual Symbolism and the Battle of the Sexes. Journal of Popular Culture 30.2 (1996): 137-48. Schuman, Samuel. Taking Stephen King Seriously: Reflections on a Decade of Best-Sellers. The Gothic World of Stephen King: Landscape of Nightmares. Ed. Gary Hoppenstand and Ray B. Browne. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State U Popular P, 1987. 107-14. Smith, Greg. The Literary Equivalent of a Big Mac and Fries?: Academics, Moralists, and the Stephen King Phenomenon. Midwest Quarterly 43.4 (2002): 329-45.

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