“Carrie” was published in 1974. Margaret Atwood explains its enduring appeal.
Credit…Elizabeth Renstrom for The New York Times
By Margaret Atwood
Margaret Atwood is the author of “The Handmaid’s Tale” and many other books. Her latest, “Paper Boat: New and Selected Poems: 1961-2023,” will be published in October. This essay is adapted from her introduction to the anniversary edition of “Carrie,” published this month by Vintage.
- March 25, 2024 (nytimes.com)
Stephen King’s “Carrie” burst upon an astonished world in 1974. It made King’s career. It has sold millions, made millions, inspired four films and passed from generation to generation. It was, and continues to be, a phenomenon.
“Carrie” was King’s first published novel. He started it as a men’s magazine piece, which was peculiar in itself: What made him think that a bunch of guys intent (as King puts it) on looking at pictures of cheerleaders who had somehow forgotten to put their underpants on would be riveted by an opening scene featuring gobs of menstrual blood? This is, to put it mildly, not the world’s sexiest topic, and especially not for young men. Failing to convince himself, King scrunched up the few pages he’d written and tossed them into the garbage.
But his wife, Tabitha — a dauntless soul, and evidently of a curious temperament — fished them out, uncrinkled them, read them, and famously convinced King to continue the story. She wanted to know how it would come out, and such desires on the part of readers are perhaps the best motivation a writer can have.
King proceeded. The novel grew into a book with many voices. First, of course, there is Carrie herself: Picked on by her religious fanatic of a mother, by her fellow high school students and by the entire town of Chamberlain, Maine, she is clumsy, yearning, pimply, ignorant and, by the end, vengefully telekinetic. But we also hear from the next-door neighbor who witnessed a violent display of the toddler Carrie’s telekinetic manifestations; from various journalistic pieces, in Esquire and in local papers, about Carrie’s unusual powers and the destruction of the town by fire and flood; from Ogilvie’s Dictionary of Psychic Phenomena and from an article in a science yearbook (“Telekinesis: Analysis and Aftermath”); from Susan Snell, the only one of Carrie’s female classmates to attempt to atone for the wrongs they did to her; and from the academic paper “The Shadow Exploded: Documented Facts and Specific Conclusions Derived From the Case of Carietta White.”
Then there are the inner voices of various other characters, as overheard by Carrie, who toward the end of her life becomes telepathic and can listen in on the silent thoughts of others, as well as broadcasting her inner life to them. Together, the many voices tell the horrifying tale.
What is it about “Carrie” that has intrigued me? It’s one of those books that manage to dip into the collective unconscious of their own age and society.
Female figures with quasi-supernatural powers seem to pop up in literature at times when the struggle for women’s rights comes to the fore. H. Rider Haggard’s “She” appeared toward the end of the 19th century, when pressure for more equality was building; its electrically gifted heroine can kill with a pointed finger and a thought, and much verbiage is expended on male anxieties about what might happen — especially to men — should She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed train her sights on world domination. (Naomi Alderman, whose novel “The Power” coincided with the rise of the #MeToo movement, went one better and gave most young girls the ability to kill by shooting out energy rays, like electric eels.)
“Carrie” was written in the early 1970s, when the second-wave women’s movement was at full throttle. There are a couple of nods to this new form of feminism in the novel, and King himself has said that he was nervously aware of its implications for men of his generation. The male villain of “Carrie,” Billy Nolan, is a throwback to the swaggering hair-oiled tough-male posturing of the 1950s, which is seen as already outmoded, though still dangerous. The female villain, Chris Hargensen, is the archetypical Queen Bee cruelty ringleader of high school drama, the negative version of Sisterhood Is Powerful.
A side note on names. “Chris” — for “Christine,” for “Christ” — is self-evidently ironic: Chris is an anti-savior. “Carrie White” is an interesting combination. “Carrie,” as King takes pains to point out, is not a nickname for Carol or Carolina. Carrie’s given name is “Carietta,” an unusual variant of “Caretta,” itself derived from “caritas,” or “charity” — loving and forgiving kindness, the most important virtue in the Christian triad of faith, hope and charity. This kind of charity is noteworthily lacking in most of the townspeople of Chamberlain. (Yes, there is a real Chamberlain, Maine, and I wonder how its inhabitants felt when they discovered in 1974 that they’d be obliterated in 1979, the year in which “Carrie” is set.)
Most particularly, charitable loving kindness is entirely absent from Carrie’s mother, nominally a devoted Christian, who knows about Carrie’s superpowers, believes she has inherited them from an eldritch, sugar-bowl-levitating grandmother, and ascribes them to demonic energies and witchcraft, thus viewing it as her pious duty to murder her own child. Carrie herself wavers between love and forgiveness and hate and revenge, but it’s the hatred of the town that channels itself through her, tips her over the edge and transforms her into an angel of destruction.
As for “White,” you might be inclined to think “white hat, black hat,” as in westerns, or “white” as in innocent, white-clothed sacrificial lamb, and yes, Carrie is an innocent — but also please consider “white trash.” In fact, read the book of that name by Nancy Isenberg; and, for added raw and gritty details, read the novel “The Beans of Egypt, Maine,” by Carolyn Chute. The white underclass has existed in America from the beginning, and white trashers going back generations are thick on the ground in Maine, Stephen King’s home territory — a territory he has mined extensively over the course of his career.
He based the situation of Carrie on two girls from that underclass whom he knew at school, both of them marked by poverty and decaying clothing, both of them taunted and despised and destroyed by their fellow students. Everyone in the town was an underdog in the carefully calibrated class structure of America — not for them the fancy private schools and university educations, unless they got really, really lucky — but there are no dogs so under that they don’t welcome another dog even lower in the social scheme, to be made use of as a blank screen onto which all the things they dislike about their own positions may be projected. Given a choice between dishing out the contempt and rejection and being the recipient of it, most will choose to dish out. And so it was with King, and so it is with Sue Snell, though both later repent.
King is a visceral writer, and a master of granular detail. As Marianne Moore said, the literary ideal is “imaginary gardens with real toads in them,” and boy, are there a lot of toads in King’s work! He writes “horror,” the most literary of forms, especially when it comes to the supernatural, which must perforce be inspired by already existing tales and books. All the quasi-scientific hocus-pocus about the genetic inheritability of telekinesis is just cover-up (as is the “natural” source of Ayesha’s powers in “She,” and the something-in-the-drinking-water, experiment-gone-wrong stuff in “The Power”: You can’t just say “miracle” or “witch” anymore and get instant credibility).
But underneath the “horror,” in King, is always the real horror: the all-too-actual poverty and neglect and hunger and abuse that exists in America today. “I went to school with kids who wore the same neckdirt for months, kids whose skin festered with sores and rashes, kids with the eerie dried-apple-doll faces that result from untreated burns, kids who were sent to school with stones in their dinnerbuckets and nothing but air in their Thermoses,” King says in “On Writing.” The ultimate horror, for him as it was for Dickens, is human cruelty, and especially cruelty to children. It is this that distorts “charity,” the better side of our nature, the side that prompts us to take care of others.
I think this is part of King’s widespread appeal. Yes, he shows us weird stuff, but in the context of the actual. The clock, the sofa, the religious paintings on the walls — all the daily objects that Carrie explodes during her rampage — these are drawn from life, as is the everyday sadism of the high school kids that makes “Carrie” feel as frighteningly relevant as ever.
A version of this article appears in print on April 7, 2024, Page 12 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Essay / ‘Carrie’ at 50 /. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe
(Contributed by Michael Kelly, H.W.)