Melody Blackmore
“the horror film stages and re-stages a constant repudiation of the maternal figure” – Barbara Creed[i]
Rob Reiner’s film adaptation of the classic Stephen King novel Misery sees an obsessed violent woman terrorize a harmless man, yet this tale is not all that it seems, with a non-traditional female role played by Kathy Bates in her momentous performance as the monstrous madwoman, Annie Wilkes.
Films often represent females, especially the mother, negatively, positioning them as the abject in the socio-cultural and patriarchal arena. Barbara Creed argues that the horror film shows the “terror of self disintegration, of losing oneself or ego, often represented cinematically by a screen which becomes black, signifying obliteration of self.” [ii] Horror films and psychoanalysis go well together for this very reason: psychoanalysis provides a means of understanding the cultural roles and anxieties represented in the monstrous assumption of power in horror. In Reiner’s Misery, Annie Wilkes is placed as castrating mother and Paul Sheldon as regressed needy child in this exploration of phallic power and male dominance. It was Freud (1905) who elaborated the importance of child psychosexual stages as a source of both pleasure and tension. The stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency, genital) are crucial to personality development and assist with controlling the id in socially accepted ways. Misery focuses predominantly on the phallic stage and the male fear of the aggressive female and her threat of castration.
The film tells the story of best-selling author Paul Sheldon, famous for his romance books featuring Victorian heroine Misery Chastain, heading home from Silver Creek after finishing a new book as a means to leave Misery behind and move on to a different chapter of his career. However, Paul has a car accident due to the heavy snow, and his rescuer Annie Wilkes then keeps him locked away, forcing him to write a new Misery book for her, his number one fan. This essay will interpret Misery as a tale of male identity crisis and of phallic fear and regression. After the accident, Paul descends into a hallucinatory Wonderland and regresses back to his own childishness towards the mother – a figure of authority as well as a way for him to restructure his lost self. Annie plays the phallic, castrating “Duchess,” who both nurtures and violently castrates – a good, yet bad mother and a figure of maternal abjection. Paul must deal with his identity issues by regaining masculine power over her, but not before Annie castrates both him and his identity in a bid to seize phallic power and keep Paul with her forever.
Wonderland
The opening scene in Misery shows Paul leaving Silver Creek Lodge after finishing his newest book. He has concluded his famous Misery books and is journeying onto the next chapter of his life – an uncertain time and one he is unconsciously afraid to begin. The severe weather causes Paul to crash, however, and viewers see a flashback to Paul having a discussion with his editor about ending Misery and moving on with different books. From this moment, I suggest that Paul’s rescue is an hallucination – a Wonderland that he enters – a desire and need to regress and deal with his identity issues around separating from Misery. Paul’s fear is disguised as a desire to return to the mother and regress to a state of dependency. Unfortunately, this wish for Wonderland is not purely pleasurable, but also becomes a descent into a nightmare, where the mother is violently phallic and horrifically castrating.
Duchess – Good Mother, Bad Mother
Annie states that she is Paul’s number one fan – something a mother is to a child. Mothers will often praise and support their children, imparting confusing morals to them, much as the Duchess in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland does: “Flamingos and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is – ‘Birds of a feather flock together.’”[iii] It is often not until adulthood that we find our mother’s morals to make sense or hold true. On the one hand, both Annie and the Duchess reflect the concept of the the good nurturing mother – nursing Paul back to health, feeding him, and caring for him. Yet, both are also far from being the loving and caring mother: they castrate and place fear into the hearts of children. As Samuelsson writes: “The qualities which the Duchess as a mother should possess, such as warmth, love and care, are non-existent…the Duchess is rather more closely linked to a cunning and violent female than mother.” [iv] Annie and the Duchess cause confusion because they can switch between cheerful and kind to sudden outbursts of violence – they are both good and bad mother. The Duchess violently shakes her baby yet sings a lullaby:
“Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes,
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.”[v]
Annie’s “child,” Misery the pig
Another thing Annie and the Duchess have in common is that the Duchess in Alice in Wonderland has a baby that turns out to be a pig, and, in Misery, Annie introduces Paul to her pet pig, Misery, which is like her own child. The disorientation caused by the competing good mother and bad mother can threaten identity and cause loss of self. Melanie Klein claims that the baby projects their own destructive drives onto the maternal breast, and so the bad mother is the bearer of sadistic projections.[vi] Paul’s fears are being projected onto Annie: he needs her good nature and caregiving, but his violent projections have also caused her to become a bad, phallic mother.
Phallic Mother
As Creed mentions, motherly authority is the first authority: “Maternal authority is the trustee of that mapping of the self’s clean and proper body; it is distinguished from paternal laws within which, with the phallic phase and acquisition of language, the destiny of man will take shape.” ix Also, according to Creed, the phallic mother hides and conceals the phallus, and because it is not as obvious as the male’s phallus, she is fantastically endowed. This fantasy of the phallus leads to castration anxiety. Annie is a phallic mother to Paul: she nurses him, feeds him, shaves him, but also threatens to castrate him and causes anxiety – she has the power and the phallic maternal authority, and, as Mowery warns, beware the mother as master: “…the nourishment she offers is not freely given; it is as paralyzing, as fixating, as freezing as the father’s law.” [vii]
In the 1980s and 1990s, phallic women were shown in many films to be sexually desirable: for instance, Sharon Stone (Total Recall 1990); Glenn Close (Fatal Attraction 1987); Julia Cotton (Hellraiser 1987); and Daryl Hannah (Blade Runner 1982). All were sensual and sexually attractive. Annie, however, is not sexually attractive, nor is she sensual; she is as “ugly as the Duchess,” an object of abjection.
Abjection
“All human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject.”[viii]
In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva argues that the mother is a figure of abjection and often represented as the monstrous-feminine, a figure that threatens identity and order because it does not respect borders or societal rules. Annie is an abject figure: she makes pig noises, overeats, and crosses societal boundaries throughout the film. When Annie talks with Paul after he empties his bladder, she sloshes it around carelessly, making both the viewer and Paul recoil. Annie also appears masculine, crossing gender boundaries: she can lift a man from a car wreck, and she dresses plainly. She is the monstrous madwoman, with an intrusive inability to respect borders. The borders that Annie crosses resonate with Creed: “The place of the abject is the ‘place where meaning collapses’…the place where ‘I’ am not. The abject threatens life; it must be ‘radically excluded’…from the place of the living subject, propelled away from the body and deposited on the other side of an imaginary border which separates the self from that which threatens the self.” Creed continues that the particular form of maternal abjection is experienced by all individuals “at the time of their earliest attempts to break away from, the mother.”[ix] Paul wishes to separate from his abject maternal figure in order to regain his own independence, and Misery thus shows us that abjection plays a significant role in the mother/son crisis.
Castration
Annie’s castrating violence becomes a real threat when she discovers that Misery is dead – “You dirty bird” – and her anger and violence become all too apparent. Yet, just as the Duchess from Alice in Wonderland returns from croquet in a pleasant mood, so does Annie return from her temper tantrum calm and pleasant. Paul’s attempts to diminish his castration anxiety through the idealization of the phallic mother soon becomes a need to castrate her and reclaim his own masculinity, however. But many of his attempts fail at first; for instance, when he requests a different typing paper in a bid to control the situation and get Annie to leave so that he can attempt escape, she drops the paper onto his legs, reminding him of her castrating power. As Keesey argues: “Paul’s fixation on images of dismemberment can be understood as an attempt to move beyond castration anxiety to a sense of masculine entitlement.”[x]
Annie hobbles Paul
Both Annie’s fear of losing Paul and his efforts to leave his room to steal a knife lead to THAT FOOT SCENE!—the Kimberley diamond mines tale of “hobbling” that Annie recalls whilst she sets up one of the most horrific scenes in horror. Annie’s crippling blows to Paul’s feet can be interpreted as a castration that serves as both punishment and confirmation that he won’t leave. From this point on, Paul realises that he must separate from Annie by seizing back his power. His attempt to manipulate, control, escape, or to drug her has failed; he must take back his masculinity, even if that means weight-lifting typewriters!
Masculinity
Throughout the film, the Sheriff of Silver Creek, Buster, searches for Paul: he is the law, or, should I say, the Father-of-the-Law. Abject horror images will often show a split between maternal and paternal authority, and the Sheriff in Misery is the symbolic Father, the way for the child to separate from the mother and to safely repress her. Unfortunately for Sherriff Buster, he fails, and Annie destroys him with a shot gun. This is the moment that Paul realises it is time that he must disavow Annie and destroy her himself. As soon as Annie forced Paul to burn his manuscript, his already fragile identity was broken and diminished along with his male power. Annie phallically seized it and constantly threatened him– or performed castration on Paul to keep him at a loss and in fear. Yet Paul had hope, in the form of the-Father-of-the-Law (Sheriff Buster), and when this was destroyed, Paul seized back his male dominance on his own.
The car accident, the hallucinatory trip to his own Wonderland, the Duchess-like phallic mother in Annie, and Paul’s masochistic fantasy of his male psyche being stripped of independence, all come to a head towards the end of the film. Keesey claims that “Paul fantasizes a phallic other from whom he can seize strength, as a masochist identifies with the sadist’s powers.”[xi] Paul has been living a masochistic nightmare with sadistic Annie, yet the end involves Paul himself becoming the sadist in order to triumph and separate from the phallic mother. This leads him to orally rape Annie, by shoving the burning manuscript down her throat as they fight – “Eat it till you choke, you sick, twisted fuck!” As Keesey notes: “…striking Annie with the typewriter and making her eat his manuscript becomes the triumphant assertion of his male identity and superiority.” Ultimately, though, it is the pig ornament that kills Annie, as Paul lands the final blow in the fight for power, for separateness, for identity, for masculinity. The pig adds a nice metaphorical touch: Annie as a child killer, is killed by a pig, which has signalled a child—both for the Duchess and for Annie.
Misery shows that patriarchal power remains and that men must deal with their fears of castration and the phallic power of women by reclaiming their own masculine influence. Paul’s Misery Chastain threatened his masculinity, and he suffered a fear of separation from her, causing a descent into Wonderland, a regression to mother and a nightmare about regaining identity and virility.
[i] Creed, 63.
[ii] Creed, 64.
[iii] Carroll, 79.
[iv] Samuelsson, 12.
[v] Carroll, 54.
[vi] Klein.
[vii] Creed, 51.
[viii] Mowery, 6.
[ix] Creed, 44.
[x] Keesey, 64
[xi] Keesey, 60.
Works cited:
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. 1865 & 1871. Penguin, 1998.
Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” Screen, vol. 27, no.1, January/February 1986, pp. 44–71, https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/27.1.44.
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. 1905. Verso, 2017.
Keesey, Douglas. “‘Your Legs Must Be Singing Grand Opera’: Masculinity, Masochism, and Stephen King’s Misery.” American Imago, vol. 59, no. 1, 2002, pp. 53-71.
Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946-1963. 3rd ed. Vintage, 1997.
Misery. Directed by Rob Reiner, Castle Rock Entertainment, 1990.
Mowery, Diane. “The Pharse of the Phallic Pheminine: Beyond the ‘Nurturing Mother’ in Feminist Composition Pedagogy.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Conference on College Composition and Communication, San Diego, CA, 1993. ERIC, Institute of Educational Sciences, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED359534.pdf.
Samuelsson, Emma. “A Psychological Approach to the Wicked Women in Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.” Thesis, Lund University, 2013. http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=4286049&fileOId=4286066.
