Harriet Stilley
When protagonist Paul Sheldon proclaims that he is “in trouble,” that “this woman” – namely, psychotic super-fan Annie Wilkes – “is not right,” he invokes insidious, if not invidious, questions regarding the role gender plays in the articulation of horror. Indeed, Stephen King’s fictional universe abounds with vehemently unhappy, violently unhinged, and villainously uncanny female characters–from Misery’s “number one” sadistic nurse to Carrie White and her “unutterably evil” mother, Mrs. Massey, the “decaying… woman from Room 217,” and Dolores Claiborne, “another… goddam nasty… bitch.” [1] This type of monstrous female sexual difference has habitually haunted the horror genre since its very inception, but arguably reaches new heights in the works of King as the culmination of male anxiety, antipathy, and abjection amidst the various social, economic, and demographic changes that transformed the post-war American landscape; in particular, the advent of Second-wave feminism.
“You crazy bitch.” Academy Award-winning actress Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes (left) and Dolores Claiborne (right).
The resurgence of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s – the era in which King notably first emerges as a published novelist – arose principally as a response to the polarized “masculine” and “feminine” registers of being which monopolized American culture during the post-WWII domestic revival. Such reified gender demarcations, assured within culturally restricted principles of order and hierarchy, specifically endorsed the male domestication and rationalization of women so as to ensure that “feminine” would remain a synonym for “submissive,” in contrast to an axiomatically empowered, active, and forceful masculinity. However, as the modern women’s movement began to challenge men’s domination of the workplace, those regulating fictions that consolidated and naturalized socioeconomic, phallocentric supremacies were shown to be increasingly anachronistic, if not profoundly phantasmagorical–ultimately predicated on a series of politically sanctioned and socially practiced mechanisms of oppression. The female admission to an historically all-male public sphere, in other words, openly affronted men’s economic and social privilege for the first time, and in so doing, repealed the oppositional vulnerabilities and weaknesses upon which normative masculinity’s traditional, virile values depended. It is no surprise, then, the extent to which – as a direct result of the gelding impact of post-sixties progressive liberalism on those previously dominant patriarchal paradigms – women were literally and literarily rebuked as the physical purveyors of feminizing forces and values that destroyed national life and, moreover, displaced the male ego.
Considered most commonly as the “wrong sort” of women – that is, ambitious, assertive, amoral, or aberrant – female villains like Carrie White, Mrs. Massey, Dolores Claiborne, and of course, Annie Wilkes, thus become the allegorical incarnate of what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar termed “the male dread of women,” and specifically cognate metaphors for the “destabilizing function of female expression free of patriarchal constraints.”[2] In explicit terms, this “uneasy masculine shrinking away from the future of female equality”[3] invokes female monstrosity in King’s fiction. Indeed, one of the most significant facets of the author’s canon is how the “woman-as-monster” is accordingly exploited as an instrument of this conservative agenda; exposed, as Lisa Appignanesi suggests, by society’s persistent efforts to conceptualize women as either “mad, bad, or sad.”[4] The sociohistorical implications of positioning the woman as monster in contemporary film adaptations of King’s works should therefore be read as intimately connected to more extensive hostilities toward women, derived directly from the concomitant threat of non-phallic sexuality and the potentially castrating force that woman, as sexual Other, represents. For feminist film critic Barbara Creed, this concept of the “monstrous-feminine” – as instructed within phallocentric ideology – signifies a specific kind of abject inversion, a state of being that “violates cultural categories, disrespects organizing principles, and generally serves to present a chaotic alternative to the place of order and meaning.”[5] The abjection associated with and created by the feminine monster is, in other words, effectively produced at the border that separates those who assume their “proper” (gender) roles from those who do not. If we take Rob Reiner’s film adaptation of Misery (1990) as exemplary, we can see the myriad ways that the dialectic between Annie Wilkes’ (Kathy Bates) feminine monstrosity and Paul Sheldon’s (James Caan) masculine misery portends the destruction of an entire order of cultural politics, ultimately allowing for an unusually prolonged sadistic reversal, but one which, very importantly, nevertheless still leads in the end to a triumphant hypostatization of masculinity.
“An oddball situation.” Severely wounded and completely immobilised after a car crash, Paul is entirely dependent on Annie for basic assistance. This role reversal of the “active” female subject and the “passive” male object forms the basis for the film’s conflict.
To gain a better understanding of how Misery ingeniously conflates this concept of the female monster with a narrative of white masculinity perpetually in “crisis,” we must first look beyond just the fact that Annie the antagonist is a monstrous woman, and focus, instead, on the ways in which her modes of monstrosity are coded as distinctly feminine.
A nurse by profession, Annie is closely tied to the maternal-feminine sphere from the film’s outset, breathing life into Paul in the opening scenes and indulging him “like a baby” throughout the course of the plot. Despite “tending to [him] nearly twenty-four hours a day,” the highly stylized, maternalistic quality of Annie’s control over Paul carries particularly menacing overtones, however, as nurturance soon distorts into a cannibalizing, castrating mother compulsion. Indeed, discussing how Annie force-feeds Paul food and drugs intravenously, before eventually re-breaking his legs “to make sure [he] could never run away” from her, Sally Robinson candidly describes the infantilizing and effeminizing aspects of Annie’s caregiving as a “horrible embodiment of the maternal function,” one that cares and cherishes while “simultaneously threatening castration at every turn.”[6] Tony Magistrale similarly calls attention to Annie’s unjustified, if not uncanny maternalism, arguing that, as an “unmoored being” – completely “bereft of [any actual] social or familial bonds” – her pathological femaleness uncomfortably unsettles the phallogocentric foundations of patriarchal discourse by corrupting the identification of woman as mother.[7] As the “nightmare phallic mother,”[8] Annie thus not only perverts culturally accepted notions of “proper” womanhood or domesticity through her faux-wholesomeness, but further exhibits a grotesquely gestative femininity that functions to hinder Paul by preventing him from healing, while also masochistically binding the male author to her sole female dominance, literalized in her statement: “you better hope nothing happens to me. Because if I die, you die.”
“It’s best to remain immobile.” James Caan as the besieged and (quite literally) bed-bound Paul Sheldon.
Withheld in a helpless state of total emasculation, Paul’s physically imposed inertia can be viewed, to this end, as a cinematic manifestation of the male’s “infantile dread of maternal autonomy.”[9] Specifically, in forcefully confining Paul to her home environment, Annie arguably arrogates the masculine prerogative by inverting the traditional exclusion of women from certain male public spaces and fundamentally refigures the domesticized and violent isolation and alienation of women as a powerful threat that stifles and subordinates men. Her victimization of Paul is not just “a gendered violation,” but also “a violation of gender,” one that articulates fully and explicitly “the crisis of cultural politics as it is played out within a crisis of masculinity.”[10]
This analysis extends, of course, to the inevitably male sphere of creativity and Annie’s principal role in the film as Paul Sheldon’s “number one fan.” Indeed, one of the most horrifying facets of the film’s gendered conflict resides in Annie’s power as audience and the larger cultural trauma caused by such a female audience, “whose insatiable demands threaten to destroy authentic cultural value in their relentless pursuit of the ‘fix’ of popular romances.” As Kathleen Margaret Lant explains, “if writing, power, and masculinity are for Paul associated with his power to assert, enter, control, and dominate,” then the fact that Annie has rule over all in this relationship demonstrates the extent to which she manages to “[pervert] and [deform] the essentially heterosexual relationship between writer and reader.”[11] Annie’s inability to accept the role of passive female consumer, and constant endeavours to usurp Paul’s masculine power to produce, in other words, are indicative of an essential erosion of the dichotomies – between the serious/popular, masculine/feminine, maker/monster – on which cultural hierarchy depends. The manner in which the film analogizes this struggle over cultural legitimacy in somatic terms significantly links Paul’s bodily vulnerability with his creative impotency, and, thus, effectively entrenches his gender crisis in a portrait of “white male authorship under siege.”[12]
“I never meant for it to become my life.” Held hostage by his “number one fan,” Paul is forced to resurrect Annie’s beloved heroine by writing Misery’s Return.
In this respect, it is important to recognize the ways in which Annie’s attachment to Paul is, from the outset, purposely represented as a desire to introject her ego-ideal by “invading” him; first physically, through injections and spoon-feedings, and then psychically, by forcing him to burn his first “serious” literary manuscript and then to continue to “make up new [Misery Chastain] stories.” Paul in point of fact locates his writerly dissatisfaction within his celebrity status as a commercial writer, exclaiming “I haven’t been a writer since I got in the Misery business.” By imperilling the creative dynamic by which Paul operates, and inevitably imposing her consumerist desire onto his efforts in a process of palimpsestic displacement, Annie therefore putatively “demotes him from creator to created.”[13] It is, as such, worthwhile pointing out here the ways in which the film sets up a parallel between Annie’s alleged “creativity” and Gilbert and Gubar’s conceptualization of the indignant creative spirit that is “the mad woman in the attic.” According to Gilbert and Gubar, these types of (mad)women are “accidents of nature, deformities meant to repel, but in their freakishness, they possess unhealthy energies, powerful and dangerous acts.”[14] Committed only to her “own private ends,” Annie’s creative madness, figured explicitly as an “unhealthy” monstrosity, is nowhere more apparent than in her own encoded “artwork,” specifically her Memory Lane scrapbook, which conceals the “dangerous acts” of her murderous nursing career.[15]
“Angel of Death.” Annie’s Memory Lane scrapbook consists primarily of newspaper clippings from her nursing career, including her arrest and murder trial following a series of mysterious infant deaths.
Of course, even while offering a compelling source for Paul to read, the fact that Annie’s “text” is a mere biographical pasteboard production, with little more depth than a gruesome true crime magazine, significantly problematizes the initially subversive discourse of the film centred upon the monstrous-feminine and her threat to patriarchal control. In fact, following the work of Linda Williams, it becomes clear that the horrifyingly sensationalized nature of Annie’s artwork, comprised mainly of her silent image, succeeds in securing the female’s objectified and abject status within “patriarchal structures of seeing.”[16] From this perspective, Annie cannot and does not function as a representative for the assertive female self since her body, in line with Laura Mulvey’s feminist film theory, “is being read as an emblem of another’s, a male’s pleasure, not as a proclamation of self-identity.”[17] Put simply, Annie is “still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning,” and thereby bound to a symbolic order in which woman is reduced to the obvious oppositional archetypal against which man principally measures his superior manhood and essential humanity.[18] Rather than interpreting Annie’s “intrusive and violating presence” on screen as indicative of her “domination,”[19] it hence becomes necessary to acknowledge the ways in which Paul’s point-of-view frequently guides the camera across Annie’s phallic and fibrous female form, and in so doing engenders a strong affinity and identification between the audience and the scrutinizing male gaze.
“Think of me as your inspiration.”
Despite taking the wounding of the white male body to a materialized extreme,
Annie’s fibrous body is the camera’s central focus throughout most of the film.
For Douglas Keesey, the crucial point here is that Paul assigns Annie the phallus only so that he may “identify with it and appropriate it for himself.”[20] In psychoanalytic terms, Paul thus “allays his castration anxiety” first through a “festishistic idealization of Annie as phallic mother,” and then through “an attempt to castrate the phallic mother as proof of his superior potency.”[21] His ordeal is, as such, reimagined as a test of masculine omnipotence, through which patriarchal systems of moral and social order can be reaffirmed. Coupled with the film’s representation of a seemingly feminized, “vulnerably embodied male authorship in crisis,” then, is a newly reconstructed “masculinization of the writing process,” epitomized in Paul’s utilization of the typewriter as a tangible weapon to finally overcome the female monster.[22] With this in mind, it is important to recognize that, while the presence of the monstrous-feminine in Misery does challenge the view that the male is almost always situated in an active, sadistic position and the female in a passive, masochistic one, Annie’s existence still speaks to us more about male anxieties and fears than female desire, feminine subjectivity, or feminist creativity. That is to say, even as the film appears to offer a transgressive rebellion against gendered norms, in effectively “remasculinizing writing as an embodied process, a process embodied as male,” the presence of the monstrous-feminine is accordingly stylized within particular androcentric codes that protect male dominant power structures.[23] As Paul explains, “Annie Wilkes, that whole experience, helped me,” ultimately providing him with the means to finally write a “serious” novel that he can be proud of. Annie’s story, on the other hand – like Frankenstein’s female monster before her – is destroyed before completion. In the classic gothic manner, the eruption of unlicensed (female) desire is, then, castigated, contained, and controlled by governing (male) systems of limitation. Yet given that the spectre of Annie – and the gendered anxieties and tensions that she evokes – still remains at the close, Misery nonetheless suggests that, beneath its (re)assertion of masculinity, is an expression of woman’s enduring power in difference–because “without it, what else is there…?”
Notes:
[1] King, Misery, 14; King, Carrie, 257; King, The Shining, 237; King, Dolores Claiborne, 155.
Works Cited:
Appignanesi, Lisa. Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from 1800 to the Present. Hachette, 2011.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 2015.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 2000.
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.
King, Stephen. Carrie. Doubleday, 1974.
—. Danse Macabre. Everest House, 1991.
—. Dolores Claireborne. Viking, 1992.
—. Misery. Viking, 1987.
—. The Shining. Doubleday, 1977.
Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “The Rape of Constant Reader: Stephen King’s Construction of the Female Reader and Violation of the Female Body in Misery.” Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture, edited by Kathleen Margaret Lant and Theresa Thompson, Greenwood, 1998, pp. 159-81.
Magistrale, Tony. Hollywood’s Stephen King. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Misery. Directed by Rob Reiner, Columbia Pictures, 1990.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6-18.
Robinson, Sally. Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis. Columbia University Press, 2000.
Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, edited by Mary Anne Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams. University Publications of America, 1984, pp. 83-99.
