Carrie

“Sue was throwing them too, throwing and chanting with the rest, not really sure what she was doing—a charm had occurred to her mind and it glowed there like neon: There’s no harm in it really no harm in it really no harm—It was still flashing and glowing, reassuringly, when Carrie suddenly began to howl and back away, flailing her arms and grunting and gobbling.”

Sue is swept in the maelstrom of the mob. The repetition of a self-confirming argument over and over allows Sue to convince herself to assault a girl she pitied moments before. The flashing and glowing self-speak facilitates the dehumanization of Carrie—in a single sentence she is compared to a dog, a pig, and a turkey.

“If only it would be today and Jesus coming not with a lamb and a shepherd’s crook, but with a boulder in each hand to crush the laughers and the snickerers, to root out the evil and destroy it screaming—a terrible Jesus of blood and righteousness.

And if only she could be His sword and His arm.”

This passage provides insight into Carrie’s conception of power, framed by her religious upbringing and her building aggression. The promise of Jesus’s Second Coming, in which the meek and downtrodden will gain power, receives a violent interpretation through Carrie’s increasing need for retribution. There is no middle ground for understanding; even this early in the novel, Carrie’s rage dictates that all transgressors must be punished.

“Here the memory was, suddenly bright and clear. As if it had been here all along, just below the surface, waiting for a kind of mental puberty.”

Moments after weaponizing her telekinesis for the first time, Carrie recalls the day she rained stones on her home. She sees the recollection as a gift unlocked alongside her newfound control of her telekinesis. Her traumatized memories of the power become clearer and less threatening as she grows into herself and her body during this “mental puberty.”

“Evil, bad, oh it was. Momma had told her there was Something. The Something was dangerous, ancient, unutterably evil. It could make you Feeble. Watch, Momma said. It comes at night. It will make you think of the evil that goes on in parking lots and roadhouses.”

As Carrie experiences pleasure touching her own body, her mind reverts to the repressive and paranoid teachings of her mother. Margaret’s articulation of her fear is vague, but her assurance that the “Something” will morally weaken what it inhabits is unquestionable. Her mention of the roadhouse ties into the shamefulness of the body and equates this shame with sexual activity.

“But now there was this shower thing, where she had gone along and pitched in with high, savage glee. The word she was avoiding was expressed To Conform, in the infinitive, and it conjured up miserable images of hair in rollers, long afternoons in front of the ironing board […], of joining the P.T.A. and then the country club…”

Sue’s burgeoning awareness of her own moral crisis comes to the fore. Her willingness to join in the locker-room assault disturbs her and extends outward to encompass other kinds of groupthink, including the expectations she holds for the rest of her life. She realizes that the act of conforming inevitably traps one further in conventional society, and Sue is coming to realize that this isn’t what she wants.

“Momma was the minister, Carrie the congregation.”

This one-way formula describes Margaret and Carrie’s relationship in all spheres. Carrie is the passive recipient of her mother’s singular perceptions of the world. Margaret’s perspective, her belief practices, comprise virtually all of Carrie’s world, and this sentence suggests the prevailing power structure in the White household.

“Unfortunately, Ewen is staffed completely by men in its administration wing. I don’t believe they have any real conception of how utterly nasty what you did was.”

Miss Desjardin’s lament exposes the gender disparity of the school’s power structure and its implications. Because the men have never experienced menstruation, they cannot imagine how traumatizing the girls’ attack was for Carrie. This contextualizes the female characters’ general lack of agency and suggests why they must work though men to achieve their ends (Miss Desjardin through the Principal, Chris through Billy, and Sue through Tommy). It also suggests the patriarchal nature of Christianity, explaining why neither Margaret nor Carrie can draw much comfort from their religion.

“‘Have you said your prayers, Carrie?’

‘I’m saying them,’ she called back.

Yes. She was saying them, all right.

She looked at her small studio bed.

Carrie equates the use of her telekinesis with prayer—the bridge between the human and the spiritual world. This is a vital step in the psychological process through which Carrie separates herself from her mother’s conception of ultimate power and begins to embrace her own. It also suggests divine consent to use her power.

“She was intimidated, but not stopped. Because, if she wanted to, she could send them all screaming into the streets. Mannequins toppling over, light fixtures falling, bolts of cloth shooting through the air in unwinding streamers. Like Samson in the temple, she could rain destruction on their heads if she so desired.”

Buying fabric for her prom dress is Carrie’s next step forward in embracing her power and the confidence it offers. She counters her intimidation with thoughts of unleashing terrible violence on others, restoring her sense of control. The quote also offers insight into Carrie’s vengefulness as the imagined violence escalates from knocking over mannequins and shattering lighting fixtures to collapsing the ceiling and killing those around her.

“And now, seemingly unbidden—like the knowledge of menstruation—a score of memories had come, as if some mental dam had been knocked down so that the strange waters could gush forth.”

Carrie accesses her memories with a new clarity. Realizing she has been using her ability her entire life affirms her sense of self and agency. After discovering this, she is able to shift the power dynamic between her mother and her. 

“Tommy Ross didn’t love her, she knew that. This was some kind of atonement, and she could understand that and respond to it. She had lain cheek and jowl with the concept of penance since she had been old enough to reason.

He had said it would be good—that they would see to it. Well, she would see to it. They better not start anything. They just better not. She did not know if her gift had come from the lord of light or of darkness, and now, finally finding that she did not care which, she was overcome with an almost indescribable relief, as if a huge weight, long carried, had slipped from her shoulders.”

Even though Carrie is unaware of Sue’s involvement in the prom proposal, she senses the need for atonement and responds because it aligns so closely with the type of religion she has practiced. This allows Tommy to build the trust that is necessary to their relationship. The second paragraph depicts Carrie’s shift toward self-assurance after gaining confidence in her telekinetic ability. She assumes agency for assuring a good evening, recognizing her own needs, while deciding that she isn’t bound to the moralistic structure of her mother’s beliefs.

“(you know you know something: accept something goddammit if it’s only yourself tell me)

They continued to color, and neither spoke. She knew it wasn’t as all right as Helen had said. It couldn’t be; she would never be quite the same golden girl again in the eyes of her mates. She had done an ungovernable thing, a dangerous thing—she had broken cover and shown her face.”

Sue recognizes that her choice to stand up to Chris and show compassion for Carrie has made her different from her peers. Helen has just refused to tell Sue if Chris is planning an attack at the prom, and Sue is aware of the lie. She sees Helen conforming, as Sue herself once did, but she now recognizes an essential part of her personality: the willingness to stand against the group, to recognize her own agency amidst the mob.

“‘I can see your dirtypillows. Everyone will. They’ll be looking at your body. The Book says—’

‘Those are my breasts, Momma. Every woman has them.’”

This exchange between Carrie and her mother reveals the shift in the dynamic between them. Margaret relies on her strange, childish term for female anatomy, then turns to notions of public shaming of the female body, and then tries to evoke her biblical rhetoric. Carrie cuts her off with two declarative statements. The first, using adult language to correct her mother’s immature name-calling, gives Carrie agency over her body. The second reinforces Carrie’s agency as she accepts herself as a grown woman.

“The thought came to her naturally and cleanly. First the sewing machine, driven through the living-room wall. The couch through a window. Tables, chairs, books and tracts all flying. The plumbing ripped loose and still spurting, like arteries ripped free of flesh.”

While experiencing anxiety over whether Tommy will actually arrive to bring her to the prom, Carrie’s mind slips into comforting visions of using her power to cause mass devastation. The passage reveals how close to the edge of violence she is, particularly in the way she humanizes the destruction, imagining inanimate objects in terms of flesh and blood.

“They’ve forgotten her, you know. They’ve made her into some kind of symbol and forgotten that she was a human being, as real as you reading this, with hopes and dreams and blah, blah, blah. Useless to tell you that, I suppose. Nothing can change her back now from something made out of newsprint into a person. But she was, and she hurt. More than any of us probably know, she hurt.”

Sue’s compassion for Carrie continues long past the events of prom night. She argues here for the essential humanity of someone whose suffering brought her to the point of destruction, rather than allowing the destruction and sensationalist newspaper accounts to define who Carrie was. Excerpts such as this one steer the novel away from simply depicting monstrosity.

“Blood, fresh blood. Blood was always the root of it, and only blood could expiate it.”

Margaret’s circular thinking is heavily informed by biblical rhetoric and illustrates her deteriorating mental state. Carrie’s menstrual blood, which Margaret fears will attract lust-filled boys, stands for Carrie and womankind’s ultimate corruption. It is also Carrie’s blood that will “expiate,” or cleanse, the corruption, but only if it is spilled in the ritualistic manner of Abraham sacrificing Isaac, or God sacrificing Jesus.

“A picture rose in her mind instantly, her mother, droning endless prayers to a towering, faceless, columnar God who prowled roadhouse parking lots with a sword of fire in one hand. Terror rose in her blackly, and she had to fight with all her spirit to hold it back. She could not explain her dread, her sense of premonition.”

Right before Carrie votes for herself to win prom queen, she experiences this doomed vision of the role she will assume after killing her mother. It recalls the visions of biblical devastation that she uses to quell anxiety, but its premonitory aspect suggests that Carrie’s path of self-acceptance is irrevocably doomed and will only lead to her slaughter of Chamberlin.

“Carrie had been the butt of every joke for so long, and we all felt that we were part of something special that night. It was as if we were watching a person rejoin the human race, and I for one thanked the Lord for it. And that happened. That horror.”

Norma Watson describes Carrie’s coronation as the restoration of her humanity. She attributes the moment of communion that Carrie has with her classmates to “the Lord,” who seems to be a very different divinity than the vengeful God Carrie and her mother worship. In the next moment, when Carrie is showered with blood, her newfound belonging is lost.

“They were all screaming and burrowing like cattle.”

Carrie, whom the text has described as “bovine,” now witnesses her classmates become bellowing cattle in their panic to escape her wrath. Carrie, made human only moments before, stands outside her peer group once again. Her telekinesis has shifted the power dynamic, but the text makes clear that Carrie will perpetually be outside human society.

“She sat quite still, letting the noise wash over her like surf. They were still all beautiful and there was still enchantment and wonder, but she had crossed a line and now the fairy tale was green with corruption and evil. In this one she would bite a poison apple, be attacked by trolls, be eaten by tigers.

They were laughing at her again.”

Carrie witnesses the disintegration of her idyllic vision of the prom; the classmates who seemed like princes and princesses have now become trolls and tigers. Carrie recognizes her essential isolation as she realizes that she was never supposed to inhabit this space—that her very presence tainted the fairy tale. The laughter of her peers, which haunted her former life, has returned, and she understands that it was never really gone.

“She prayed and there was no answer. No one was there—or if there was, He/It was cowering from her. God had turned His face away, and why not? This horror was as much His doing as hers.”

In the midst of her destructive rampage, Carrie attempts to pray but reaches this conclusion. She discards her mother’s religion as she comes to the problem of evil: If God created Carrie, then God is culpable in Carrie’s devastation and not all-loving after all. Carrie instead elevates herself to a figure who causes God to cower, readying herself to assume the mantle of a vengeful god.

“A little slower, Momma. Do you know what the present is, Momma? What you’ve always wanted. Darkness. And whatever God lives there.”

Carrie’s killing of her mother is not vengeful but reflective of the love and compassion that Carrie retains in her heart, even after so much death and destruction. Her mother has been unable to commit suicide due to her religious beliefs, so Carrie ushers her mother into the afterlife she longed for, and the method Carrie uses—slowly stopping her mother’s heart—is kind considering that Margaret has just stabbed her after a lifetime of tormenting her. Carrie helps her mother to find God in an inversion of the roles Margaret believed they played.

“Sue smiled dolefully. Can this be the end of our heroine, Miss Sweet Little Sixteen? No worries about the country club and Kleen Korners now. Not ever. Gone. Burned out. Someone ran past, blabbering that Carlin Street was on fire. Good for Carlin Street. Tommy was gone. And Carrie had gone home to murder her mother.”

Sue, while sifting through the destroyed town, can finally discard the markers of the conformist life she’d imagined for herself. As she does, she experiences a widening of her world and is able to receive the first markers of Carrie’s telepathic connection with her. She recognizes what Carrie recognizes, and this prepares her for her final meeting with Carrie.