yes carrie killed over 400 people ok. thats bad i know. but have you considered that i feel really bad for her :(
carrie deserved to kill 400 ppl as a treat
That’s because he didn’t write, nor intend to write, a horrible terrible disturbed woman beyond redemption. The genesis of Carrie (told in its entirety in the 1999 edition’s introduction that you can read here, and in King’s memoir On Writing), was this: sometime in high school, King read an article in Life magazine about supposed poltergeist activity in a home, which seemed to be associated with the teenage girl who lived there. The article included the hypothesis that poltergeist activity is, in some way, tapped into or manifested by girls at that critical and tumultuous age.
And some years before that, King had gone to school with a couple of girls he pseudonymously calls Tina and Sandra, who were bullied and shunned by the other kids—Tina for wearing the same clothes every day, Sandra for her epilepsy and extremely religious mother, but both really for having some undefinable Other quality that kids pick up on like blood in the water. Both of them were dead by the time King began writing Carrie: Tina by suicide, Sandra from her epilepsy.
Carrie was what King imagined might have happened if that explanation of poltergeist activity were correct, and if Tina and Sandra had been able to tap into such an energy. He started writing the story a few years after getting married (his wife Tabitha is also a writer), but abandoned the idea a few pages in; the raw, merciless adolescent cruelty the story called for was too much to deal with, and what did he know about teenage girls, anyway? But Tabitha dug the pages out of the trash and read them, and convinced him it was a story that needed telling.
Carrie is a story which, perhaps like poltergeist activity, could only happen to a girl on the brink of womanhood, when every emotion and sensation is excruciatingly vivid and nothing makes sense anymore and every single occurrence in your life is the most important thing that will ever happen to you. It’s about being horribly powerful and vulnerable at the same time, and alienated from your own body. It’s about the visceral, starved animal fear and rage of being a teenage girl, and it goes to show what an arcane and powerful craft creative writing is that a man could manage to capture that without having experienced it firsthand.
“Sometimes—quite often, in fact—I wish that Tina and Sandy were alive to read it,” King says in the 1999 introduction to Carrie. “Or their daughters.”
Yeah, if you read the man’s own words she was clearly intended to be sympathetic and human
This is actually why I hated the modern reboot of Carrie and consider it one of the most crucial misunderstandings of material being adapted.
Carrie White is not an edgelord villain. She is not a morally gray disturbed monster. She is a kid. She’s the kind of kid who might’ve gone to your high school, and you might’ve watched from the sidelines while she got absolutely terrorized for no real reason. You might’ve tried to stand up for her, or you might’ve stayed back to avoid attracting any of her bad luck to yourself as well. Hell, maybe you helped terrorize her too.
Regardless of how you treated her, Carrie White is meant to be the kind of person you think of decades down the line and cringe deep in your chest. She was meant to be a memory that fills you with retroactive shame and regret, because you didn’t know then what seems so clear now.
I have so many thoughts and feelings about Carrie but most of them boil down to: I feel so sorry for Tina and Sandra and so conscious of that Otherness King called “the pirate radio station of the heart”.
i just want good things to happen for her and i’m so tired of the story where something brutal happens to a girl, or many brutal things happen to a girl, and she ‘goes cr*zy’ and becomes violent in her own defense or in defense of those she loves, and yet she is the monster that has to be put down or killed like an animal
(hi, jean grey in the xmcu, you are also in this category)
i just want a story where instead of people responding to a trauma reaction with violence and murder, they respond with compassion and kindness. i want hurt girls to stop having to be monsters for people to realize something has gone terribly wrong.
i’m just so tired of this tragedy, this constant retracing of a tired old trauma narrative that we should know better than by now.
what do we, as a society, actually get out of these stories about girls driven to monstrosity? does it actually convey the moral that we, as a society, hurt girls too deeply, and that can lead to tragedy?
isn’t that something we should already know?
It was two real girls who inspired Carrie, and I think about that a lot. Every time I see the book or film mentioned, in fact. (Sorry.)
I don’t know their real names, Stephen King never gave them in his introduction to the novel, he just called them Tina and Sandy. Both of them ended up dead before they were thirty, Tina through suicide and Sandy through an epileptic fit. (No-one was around, it seems from King’s deliberately vague retelling of it, to call an ambulance for her.) Stephen King refers to these girls-barely-given-the-chance-to-turn-women as ‘unfortunates’, and he mentions he never did anything to stop either of them being the victims of bullying, and I think there are definitely parts of Carrie that are him trying to assuage his guilt-
-but oh man, it’s been like 40 years since Carrie and still no-one gets it. Virtually every single cover of Carrie features a pretty thin girl, when Carrie is explicitly described as chubby and plain! Because that’s the only girl anyone wants to read a story about, I guess? Or something?
God, I was so like Carrie at school. (Right down to the embarrassing, awful period incident in front of people.) I knew a lot of Carries, too. But yeah, I’m tired of hearing stories where the Carrie dies in the end. Just let her live and be awkward and determined and surviving and ugly, whatever the fuck ‘ugly’ is. There are so many girls who’re told that their lack of beauty or their lack of thinness or their ordinary bodily functions make them less than deserving. You shouldn’t be kind to them just because they might have telepathetic powers that could kill you, you should be kind to them because…I don’t want to say ‘because they’re people’ because that sounds too trite and obvious. Okay, you should be nice to them because Tina and Sandy, whoever they were, deserve a better legacy than a betrayed, neglected, dead girl whose own author didn’t even like her.
