Two assigned film essay.

HORROR, FEMININITY, AND CARRIE'S MONSTROUS PUBERTY Author(s): SHELLEY STAMP LINDSEY Source: Journal of Film and Video, Vol. 43, No. 4 (Winter 1991), pp. 33-44 Published by: University of Illinois Press on behalf of the University Film & Video Association Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/20687952 Accessed: 12-08-2019 18:12 UTC

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HORROR, FEMININITY, AND CARRIE'S MONSTROUS PUBERTY

SHELLEY STAMP LINDSEY

Who, surprised and horrified by the fantastic tumult of her drives . . . hasn't accused herself of being a mon ster? (Cixous 280)'

What was conventionally the terrain of domestic melodrama?familial relations and the home?has been adopted by con temporary horror and fantasy films which engage the terms of domestic drama in order to depict horrors associated with what Vivian Sobchack calls the "familiar and familial" (181). With their congruent appeal to melodramatic family structures, the supernatural, and the rhetoric of hor ror, such films figure the eruption of vio lence and sexuality into the domestic sphere through supernatural forces which invade the family home or render its in habitants monstrous. Domestic space is terrorized in films like Night of the Living Dead (1968), The Amity ville Horror (1979), and Poltergeist (1982), which bring home horrors conventionally rehearsed in Transylvania or outer space. Alternately, the nuclear family itself breeds monstros ity in Rosemary's Baby (1968), It's Alive! (1974), and The Omen (1976), or yields a teen-monster in the midst of a tortured

adolescent trajectory in The Exorcist (1973), Martin (1978), and Amityville II: The Possession (1982).2 The family finally is monster in The Hills Have Eyes (1977) and Near Dark (1987).3 What is striking about these films is not just the familial context in which the horror takes place, but the familial nature of the horror de

Shelley Stamp Lindsey is a Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen's University in Canada.

Copyright ? 1991 by S. Lindsey

picted: perverse social relations breed monstrosity. No longer a place of respite which offers solace from otherworldly ter rors, the family is itself the very source of horror.

In first identifying the central role played by the family in contemporary horror, Robin Wood and Tony Williams cele brated the estrangement of familiar social structures possible in the hyperbolized language of horror (Wood "Introduction" and "American Family"; Williams). Wood's "Introduction to the American Horror Film" provides the critical frame work through which most of these horrific domestic narratives have been read. In the essay, Wood proposes that such films open up an alterior space in which social criticism becomes possible. He contends that the sexual repression demanded by patriarchal culture in order to generate neutered, nuclear families returns in hor ror films "as in our nightmares, as an object of horror, a matter for terror"?the repressed familiar returns as unfamiliar and monstrous (10).

Usually situated among this body of con temporary films which depict the familiar and familial as horrific, Carrie (1976) en gages the language of fantasy to represent the terrain of female adolescence. Begin ning with Carrie's first menstrual period, her initiation into mature female sexuality, the film traces the development of femi ninity to its (nearly) successful conclu sion. The film is in essence a melodramatic

rendering of female puberty where the mousy outcast triumphs (if only tempo rarily) over popular, better-looking girls

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by beating them at their own game and winning the Prom Queen's crown. Yet, the film surrounds such "familiar" issues

with an aura of terror, grafting onto this plot a story of supernatural horror dealing with Carrie's telekinetic powers. Con flating questions of femininity and the su pernatural, the film renders Carrie's pu berty not simply in the hyperbolic language of melodrama, but in the violent terms of horror, where unarticulated ex cess is not so much displaced onto the mise-en-sc?ne, as it is written on her body.

Wood sees the film as altogether consis tent with his view of contemporary horror, arguing that Carrie's supernatural talents are a displaced eruption of the sexual repression enforced by her mother ("Yet Another"; "Brian De Palma" 154). Read ing the film as progressive, Wood main tains that in bringing its world to cata clysm in the end, Carrie refuses any hope of a positive resolution to the problems it has introduced around female sexuality. Gregory Waller concurs, including Carrie among recent horror films which, he says, offer "a thorough-going critique of Amer ican institutions and values" (4). In a similar vein, Vivian Sobchack paints Car rie as a pitiable victim of American cul ture, "as much generated by familial inco herence and paternal weakness as the cause of it" (183). Such accounts stress Carrie's victimization at the hands of a repressive society, rather than the ways in which Carrie herself is presented as mon strous in the course of the film.4 While few critics fail to see Carrie as a monster in some sense, most view the havoc she

wreaks as a positive rebellion against op pression. They believe she represents nothing truly terrifying, and only threatens a repressive society we would all rather do away with anyway.

My argument is precisely the opposite. By mapping the supernatural onto female ad olescence and engaging the language of the fantastic, Carrie presents a masculine

fantasy in which the feminine is consti tuted as horrific. In charting Carrie's path to mature womanhood, the film presents female sexuality as monstrous and con structs femininity as a subject position impossible to occupy. Above all, I be lieve, we must consider what most critics have glossed over?the role gender plays in the articulation of horror?since the film

repeatedly insists on Carrie's gender and the specific development of feminine sub jectivity. Through a rereading of Carrie I hope to suggest ways in which horrific family dramas might be opened up to considerations of gender by investigating the particular mix of horror, melodrama, and the supernatural that they engage.

Appropriately, Carrie begins in the all female world of a girl's high school gym class. The camera glides confidently through a locker room of girls frolicking in various stages of undress, apparently oblivious to the camera's eye registering their every bounce and bend in exquisite slow motion. Diegetic sound is replaced by a lyrical musical theme and slowed, steam-filled images sever connections

with temporality and materiality : these are ethereal creatures, nymphs at the water pond. Tracking right across banks of lock ers, then down an aisle past several girls, the camera finally settles on Carrie, linger ing in the shower after others have left, enjoying a moment of solitary pleasure soaping and caressing her breasts and thighs. Amidst streams of soap and water, blood suddenly appears between her legs. Failing to comprehend her first menstrual period, and believing she is wounded, Carrie screams in panic, her voice and the roar of the shower abruptly invading the soundtrack. The other girls, gleeful at her terror, begin pelting her with tampons and sanitary pads, taunting "plug it up, plug it up." We next see the girls in reverse angle from Carrie's position with full motion and diegetic sound restored; no longer nymphs, they now appear as demons hurl ing tampons and abuse in a swirl of close-up fury. The onset of Carrie's pu

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berty is depicted as a violent departure from the self-sufficient auto-eroticism of

prepubescence she experiences in the shower, as female sexuality announces itself with a particular violence.

Violence and sexuality are further con fused in this sequence through overt par allels to Psycho's shower scene, which evoke associations manifest in Hitch cock's film but so far tacit in Carrie.5 After

the camera finds Carrie in a single tracking movement, the scene breaks down into multiple shots, several of which mimic the Psycho scene directly?side views of the showerhead spraying water and of Car rie's face up-turned in the stream offer particularly direct quotations. Subsequent shots fragment Carrie's body as torso, legs, breasts, in much the same way that

Marion Crane's body is "dissected" in the Psycho attack. These intertextual refer ences prompt us to read the sight of blood trickling down Carrie's legs as she herself does; we associate Carrie's menstruation with a bloody attack, with blood flowing from an inflicted wound. However, whereas the violence in Psycho is split between victim and attacker, between Marion and Norman Bates, here no such division exists: Carrie's adolescent body becomes the site upon which monster and victim converge, and we are encouraged to postulate that a monster resides within her.

Voyeurism is crucial to both shower scenes as well, as the private pleasure both Marion and Carrie enjoy is framed within a voyeuristic gaze. However, whereas in Psycho the viewer's eye is clearly aligned with Norman's inquisitive stare, in Carrie no character's look inter venes with the voyeuristic spectacle. Our identification lies directly with the omni scient, roving camera, whose movements are detached from patterns of looking within the diegesis. The scrutiny of Carrie, the vision of horror glimpsed, originates beyond the diegesis in a position of autho rial power, as the absence of natural mo

tion and diegetic sound situate the on looker outside diegetic space.

This position of visual mastery is immedi ately relinquished following the sight of blood between Carrie's legs, when our identification shifts from the disembodied

voyeur gliding boldly through the locker room to an abrupt reverse angle of the other teenagers terrorizing Carrie in a sud den burst of diegetic sound and motion. These two views of the locker room ask us

to look twice at the girls, to consider them first as nymphs, then demons. Here in the reverse angle we begin to see a monstrous ness lurking beneath the cheesecake curves. So, while Carrie's menstrual blood signals her own monstrosity, the entire locker room of girls is implicated in this horror as well. Indeed, the reverse angle becomes emblematic of the film's final project: to shift the particular horror associated with Carrie onto a larger female population, and ultimately to foist a mas culine fantasy of femininity onto the fe male subject. Carrie's opening scene de picts the horrors of voyeurism, the horror of what might be seen when the penetrat ing camera glimpses the sight of sexual difference the male voyeur cannot ac knowledge. As Laura Mulvey has so suc cinctly phrased it, "the look, pleasurable in form, may be threatening in content" (62).

The horror that the female body generates in the male onlooker is familiar to feminist

critics of the slasher film, who read the excessive mutilation of women's bodies in these films as a kind of symbolic castration (Creed; Dika; Linda Williams). The hor ror, as often noted, arises not from wom an's "castration," but from the fact that she is not castrated.6 In order to account

for this puzzling phenomenon of sexual difference, the male subject constructs a fantasy of female castration, perversely enacted by the slasher. Woman and mon ster are posed as analogous terms in hor ror films, Linda Williams notes, because of their shared (and threatening) anatomi

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cal difference. "The monster as double for

the woman" (87) suggests "a horror ver sion of her own body" (89). Stephen

Neale also finds that the problem of sexual difference underlies the horror genre's at tempts to negotiate distinctions between the human and the non-human or mon strous (Genre 21, 60). Monsters typically disrupt and challenge the presumed homo geneity of human identity by confusing or transgressing boundaries between the hu man and non-human.

Like sexual difference then, the monster introduces a threatening heterogeneity into the category of the human. Non human and non-male are confused as equivalent threats to human identity ; bod ily difference becomes, in both cases, the locus of the non-human. Constructions of the monstrous, Neale suggests, may thus be read "as the product of the displace ment of the one instance of heterogeneity [sexual difference] onto the other" (60).

Williams adds that in slasher or stalker films, where the monster remains largely off-screen, affinity between woman and monster "gives way to pure identity: she is the monster, her mutilated body is the only visible horror" (96).

While questions of sexuality have domi nated discussions of "familial and famil iar" horror films (in particular, the way repressed sexuality erupts as violence in the family), considerations of gender are largely confined to the discourse on slasher films, where misogynistic dread of the female body is much more apparent.7 Gender and gendered sexuality, however, play key roles in Carrie's articulation of the monstrous. Tacit connections between woman and monster, which Williams and Neale find at the core of horror, come to the fore in Carrie. Not only is Carrie a

female monster, but sexual difference is integral to the horror she generates; mon strosity is explicitly associated with men struation and female sexuality. In the shower scene, where victim and attacker converge on Carrie's body, menstruation

and castration are fused in a fantasy of sexual difference permitted by the generic confusion of horror, melodrama, and the supernatural.

The shower scene parallel only hints at monstrous aspects of female sexuality which are soon made explicit, when, as a by-product of her first period, Carrie gains telekinetic powers. Hysterical and incon solable in the shower room, she bursts an overhead light bulb through the sheer force of rage. Michael Bliss unwittingly hits upon the significance of the simulta neous onset of Carrie's supernatural abil ity and her sexuality when he compares the shower scene to "the significant scenes in The Werewolf involving the transfer of the curse" (52). Carrie is in deed the victim of a horror film curse, not quite the curse of Dracula, nor even the "mummy's curse," but a menstrual "curse" passed down from woman to woman. Menstruation and female sexual ity here are inseparable from the "curse" of supernatural power, more properly the domain of horror films.

Prohibitions surrounding first menstrua tion and menstruating women exist in many cultures and are grounded in fears that during menses a woman is polluted or possessed by dangerous spirits. Hovering on the edge of the supernatural, such women are deemed especially treacherous and subject to taboo (Delaney, et al. 28 36). "Exceptional states" like menstrua tion and puberty foster taboos, Freud be lieves, because they elicit contradictory, yet equally acute, sensations of veneration and dread (18). Poised between natural and supernatural realms, then, the men struating adolescent girl occupies a liminal state, an object of both aversion and de sire. Equating Carrie's burgeoning sexual ity with her new-found telekinetic power, the film hyperbolizes this connection. In Carrie what is conventionally uncanny about menstruation and puberty is literal ized by the film as a whole, which takes place in the transitory register of the fan tastic.

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Traits associated with Carrie's menses? explicitly, the onset of sexuality, and im plicitly, violence and danger?are dis placed onto the telekinetic powers through which she brutally destroys objects out side her body. Her telekinesis signifies the threat that unchecked female desire may pose to society. When Carrie cannot con trol her rage in the school principal's office, she sends his ashtray into a tailspin; angered by a taunting boy, she sidewinds his bicycle; in her mother's house, she slams windows and breaks a mirror. Ulti

mately, her supernatural powers grow to such magnitude that she is able to torch her entire Senior Prom.8 The escalating forcefulness of Carrie's telekinetic ability is matched by her increasingly ardent at traction to Tommy Ross, another by product of her emerging sexuality. As Carrie's eroticism moves to objects out side her body, so do her acts of violence, as the aggressive nature of her sexuality is displaced on to destructive telekinetic acts. Telekinesis thus clearly marks Car rie's sexuality as monstrous by acting as a literal inscription of the violence of her desire. Yet although the female body?its fluids, its sexuality, its reproductive pow er?is clearly the source of horror here, the metaphor of telekinesis represents an attempt to deny the body and its actions. Presented as the ability to move objects with one's mind without physical inter vention, telekinesis effectively circum vents the body's agency in the material world.

Following the simultaneous onset of her mature sexuality and supernatural pow ers, Carrie's subsequent path to woman hood is presented as a treacherous course which must be cautiously navigated by either of the two possible routes she is offered: the sexual repression demanded by her mother, or the promise of feminin ity volunteered by her gym teacher, Miss Collins. Ostensibly, the film undercuts the repressive asceticism celebrated by Mrs.

White, while championing the liberating vision of femininity offered by Miss Col

lins. Indeed, the film goes to great lengths to situate Mrs. White's views in the con text of the archaic and horrific. Her dark

cape, severe black stockings, and cascad ing hair mark her Gothic appearance.

Against the ranch-style bungalows of the suburban community, her home is a veri table mausoleum lit only by candles and proverbial lightning flashes outside. Miss Collins, on the other hand, braless, phys ically active, and dressed in shorts arid tee-shirts, presents the perfect foil to Mrs.

White's deliberately witch-like visage. Promising Carrie a femininity achieved through good posture, lip-gloss, and curls, the gym teacher offers the teenager a route to mature womanhood apparently free from the repression enforced by the girl's mother.

Despite these apparent differences, how ever, the film ultimately endorses Mrs.

White's position by equating the two wo men's aims. Both women are obsessed with physical punishment and the body, a fact made apparent when the scene of Mrs. White punishing Carrie in the prayer closet is juxtaposed with the scene in which Miss Collins subjects the other girls to a gruelling workout as punishment for their treatment of Carrie in the locker room. The association of these two scenes correlates the sexual sin Mrs. White finds

in Carrie (which we are initially encour aged to believe is mistaken), with the blame placed on the other girls. It estab lishes an analogy early in the film between Carrie's "transgression" and the deviance of a wider female population. Inside the gymnasium, as Miss Collins rants and paces in front of the girls, parallel tracking shots across their faces underscore the universality of their guilt. Outside on the track field the camera again tracks back and forth in front of the girls as they perform calisthenics. Dressed in identical gym clothes and framed at hip and thigh level, the girls are reduced to undifferen tiated, anonymous torsos. Early in the film, then, women's deviance is empha sized by establishing a contiguous rela

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tionship between Carrie's prayer closet scene and the gym class detention. Al though apparently contrasted, Miss Col lins and Mrs. White work together in these two scenes to insist upon women's culpa bility and to establish the female body as site of transgression.

Carrie's teenage contemporaries, Sue and Chris, offer paths through adolescence which parallel the lives of the two older women. Although both girls participate in the locker room assault on Carrie, they are contrasted through the different reactions each has to Miss Collins's detention. Mas ochistic, Sue is ready to accept her guilt and punishment, while Chris, possessed of excessive sexuality, refuses to concede guilt or suffer punishment and so receives the ultimate retribution?school suspen sion and loss of her "prom privileges." Chaste and dutiful, Sue reins in her desire so uncompromisingly that she is able to share her boyfriend with Carrie when stricken by a guilty conscience. Chris, whose lip-smacking lust for vengeance is explicitly connected to her sexual appe tite, does not allow desire to be overrun by any such ethical sense. If Sue represents a young woman attempting to contain the violent libido Carrie suddenly finds herself in possession of, then Chris, ruled by desire and impulse, represents precisely the opposite.9 Pushed outside the commu nity after her suspension, Chris eventually unleashes the full force of her lawlessness

through a tangled revenge scheme.

Chris, an excessive character prowling the fringes of society, obsessed with sexuality and punishment, is a neat inversion of Mrs. White, while Sue promises to repeat Miss Collins's renunciation of sexuality and the teacher's aggressive do-gooder's instinct. Indeed, although Miss Collins initially resists Sue's plan to allow Carrie to take her place at the prom, it provides the culmination of the teacher's tutoring. At the same time, Chris's vengeance ful fills all of Mrs. White's most dire prophe sies. These apparent dichotomies are de

ceptive, however, since the restraint proscribed by Mrs. White is consistently upheld, whether through the "positive" repression practiced by Sue and Miss Col lins, or by the menace posed by Chris's volatile sexuality. The bodily repression demanded by Mrs. White is ultimately analogous to the physical make-over pro moted by Miss Collins. The culturally sanctioned femininity proffered by the girl's teacher is as repressive as her moth er's fundamentalism.

The route to mature femininity Miss Col lins offers Carrie, pictured as the road to the Senior Prom, consists of tactful grooming tips on make-up, hair styling, dress, and posture, which eventually al low Carrie to assume Sue's place along side Tommy on prom night. Carrie's fem ininity is a posture she assumes by dressing up, putting on, adding to her body. The feminine position Miss Collins holds out, and which Carrie eagerly tries to adopt, stresses her body's external sur face, her image. Indeed, all of the scenes associated with the girl's physical trans formation are played in front of mirrors so that we do not see Carrie herself, but her reflected image. In the initial scene with Miss Collins in the school washroom, where Carrie is encouraged to scrutinize those aspects of her body which might be enhanced through the addition of color and curl, the teacher says, "See that? That's a pretty girl." Speaking in the third person, she distances Carrie from her own image.

Scenes where Carrie tests shades of lip stick in a drugstore and applies make-up the night of the prom are similarly framed through the girl's mirror reflection, alert ing us to the fact that Carrie's "feminini ty" is a surface alteration designed to mask the true horror of her body. The separation of visual image from physical body that the mirror reflection creates is akin to the effect Carrie achieves by mak ing up. Through the blush, eye-shadow, lipstick, and curls she dons, Carrie builds

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up the surface of her body, as if to cover over what lurks beneath.

Joan Rivi?re and Mich?le Montrelay have described a masquerade of femininity that consists of an exaggerated build-up of the body's surface through make-up, shim mering fabrics, jewels, enhanced color, and elaborate coiffures which catch the eye but ultimately reflect the gaze away from the woman's interior. Accumulating excessive signifiers of femininity, they say, a woman turns herself into a fetish object in order to conceal those aspects of her body disturbing to the male onlook er.10 The costume Carrie dons on prom night?reflective satin gown, translucent shawl, corsage, loosely curled hair, and face make-up?evokes the array of "so many silent insignias" Montrelay de scribes at the heart of masquerade (93). Extending even beyond such physical al terations to her body, Carrie's "perfor mance" includes assuming Sue's role alongside Tommy at the prom and ulti mately appearing on stage as Prom Queen in a drama carefully orchestrated by Chris.

Besides Carrie, Chris is the character most associated with masquerade in the film. Riding in Billy's car before proposing her revenge scheme, she obsessively ap plies and re-applies make-up, then repeat edly brushes her hair, precisely at the moment when her lawlessness has placed her on the perimeter of society. Through this parody of Carrie's own transforma tion, it becomes apparent that both girls share a need to cover over and conceal aspects of their sexuality marked exces sive.

Responding to Miss Collins's initial com mand to "take care of yourself and the girls' taunt to "plug it up," Carrie at tempts to cover over the monstrosity she believes to be at her core through perfor mance and masquerade. Yet, while these demands are voiced by female characters in the fiction, they satisfy needs of the

masculine voyeur who initially glimpsed the horrific sight of sexual difference in the opening shower sequence. As Sarah Kof man puts it, "the good reasons women have for 'veiling' themselves ... all cor respond to men's need for a certain fetish ism" (50). Both masquerade and telekine sis perform a similar function in the film, denying Carrie's body, the initial source of horror, and leaving nothing in its place. Just as telekinesis severs the body from physical action, displacing the violence associated with Carrie's desire on to ex ternal objects, masquerade separates body from image, interior from exterior. Both strategies attempt to substitute the mon strous female body with a void.

The film's presentation of mature feminin ity as masquerade and performance insists the feminine position Carrie tries to adopt is ultimately untenable. Her "innate" femininity, drawn through telekinesis as monstrous and destructive, cannot be sup pressed by the culturally sanctioned fem ininity proffered by Miss Collins, which is explicitly marked as a hopeless charade intended to cover over the natural horror.

Eventually Carrie's masquerade is de stroyed when Chris unleashes a bucket of pig's blood perched above the prom stage, enacting a perverse inversion of the initial shower scene and returning us to the onset of Carrie's sexuality just at the moment when she seems to have successfully nav igated adolescence. Echoes of the earlier shower scene begin as soon as Carrie ascends the stage as Prom Queen. Again, the action is slowed and filmed with a

moving camera, while diegetic sound is replaced by the now familiar lyrical theme. For a brief instant Carrie seems to

have recaptured the moment of ecstasy witnessed in the shower. Then, suddenly drenched in blood, her interior made ex terior, Carrie bleeds from every surface of her body. Equating pig's blood with Car rie's menstrual blood, this inverted shower scene explicitly associates female sexuality with violence, contagion, and

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death. Her inner monstrosity finally ex posed for all to see, and ultimately unable to "plug it up," Carrie becomes an out right monster, unleashing her consummate telekinetic fury on the prom guests.

While Carrie's apocalyptic devastation of the prom is often read as the spectacular (and healthy) return of her repressed sex uality, I believe the sequence demands another reading. In fact, the film maintains that Carrie has not repressed her sexual ity, having defied her mother's demands and accepted Miss Collins's tutoring, along with Tommy's invitation to the prom. What Carrie has attempted to re press is an intrinsic female sexuality as sociated with the supernatural and the monstrous; the culturally-sanctioned "femininity" she adopts is thus marked as a hopelessly failed masquerade. What erupts on prom night in a monumental telekinetic display is not a wholesome sexuality unfairly repressed by the girl's mother, but an absolute monstrousness the film finds lurking at the heart of female sexuality. Carrie is not about liberation from sexual repression, but about the fail ure of repression to contain the monstrous feminine.

Carrie's telekinetic wrath is portrayed through split-screen compositions which juxtapose close-ups of her fierce teleki netic gaze on one side of the screen with images of her destructive acts on the other. Ironically, the scene returns to Car rie the gaze which had been granted to the masculine voyeur at the beginning of the film. But it does so in order to suggest the dangers of such a reversal, rather than to celebrate Carrie's supernatural empower ment. As Linda Williams notes, the wom an's look plays a key role in the traditional construction of horror. It becomes the means by which the female victim regis ters the monster's threat in the same in

stant that she recognizes her affinity with the monster as "other." The look?also the means by which the masculine subject initially recognizes sexual difference?is

granted to the female subject in order that she might recognize her own monstrosity reflected in the body of the monster. The conflation of woman and monster together on Carrie's body reproduces the woman's look as telekinetic destruction. And de spite the emphasis it places on Carrie's sightline, the split-screen process refuses us access to her optical point of view, since both seer and seen are represented on screen at once. She is rendered only an object of specularity. As in the opening shower scene, where the spectator is as signed a position of visual mastery outside the diegetic space, here the split-screen separates us from Carrie's subjectivity and resigns her to a hopelessly fragmented state. The split-screen presentation of Carrie's vengeance also literally enacts the split between body and action implied by her telekinetic power. Just as telekine sis has functioned from the beginning of the film, this strategy attempts to deny that Carrie's body is the source of horror.

Most important, far from being a rebellion against her mother's sexual repression, the prom night apocalypse marks the ful fillment of Mrs. White's prophesies and the beginning of Carrie's final regression to her mother's world. Accepting at last her mother's language of cleansing and purification, Carrie does not so much de stroy the high school as subject it to ritual purgation through fire and water, using the water hoses and electrical equipment at hand. Arriving home to wash off the layers of blood and make-up that mark her fem ininity, Carrie regresses further, returning to the amniotic fluid of the maternal womb

in the bath, then finally donning a child's white flannel night gown and falling into her mother's embrace. As intensely op pressive as Mrs. White's views are ini tially presented to be, it is finally her view of female sexuality which the film up holds, a view which links Carrie's period to "Eve's curse" and equates female sex uality with sin.

Yet even this maternal dyad proves pre carious. Muttering, should have killed

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you when you were born," Mrs. White flails out with a butcher knife attempting to stab her daughter, breaking the union to

which Carrie has regressed. We learn here that Mrs. White, the sturdiest voice of repression in the film, is herself wracked by fermenting sexuality, as her desire ex plodes in an immensely phallic display. Assuming the function conventionally per formed by the horror film "slasher," a character missing from the initial shower scene, Mrs. White executes a familiar punishment. (Mrs. White even resembles "Mrs. Bates," holding the knife high above her head and wearing a high-necked gown.) Refusing to accept such a visible mark of her own inadequacy, Carrie drives a full kitchen's worth of blades into

her mother, then brings the house crum bling down around them.11 Carrie's re gression ill-fated, the feminine position is now entirely untenable.

In tracing Carrie's torturous path through puberty, the film presents an innate female sexuality, which Carrie experiences as a series of violent telekinetic urges, and offers her two avenues by which she may repress such monstrous desire: the bodily denial endorsed by her mother or the masquerade of femininity offered by Miss Collins. Both scenarios proffer repression and disavowal as the only alternatives to monstrous femininity and each is marked as equally impossible. Telekinesis (equat ed with Carrie's innate sexuality) and mas querade (the "solution" advanced by Miss Collins) function equivalently in the film to disavow the horror Carrie's body represents. Severing Carrie's interior from exterior, telekinesis separates body from action, just as masquerade disjoins body and image. By consistently affirming Mrs. White's denial of the body, Carrie per forms what Kaja Silverman has described as the quintessential gesture of classical film: the displacement of masculine expe riences of loss and lack onto the female body, whose anatomical difference marks it safely as "other."

Carrie presents its view of female sexual difference as aberrant and monstrous within a melodramatic context. At the same time as Carrie's body is constructed as the source of horror, the film's melo dramatic rendering of her adolescence works to elicit profound sympathy, espe cially from female viewers. We are en couraged to identify with the teenager frightened by her burgeoning sexuality and unable to sustain the rigid standards of culturally-sanctioned femininity, only to find that her attempt to foster a stable sexual identity is deemed impossible. If the feminine position with which we have been encouraged to identify is ultimately untenable, then we as female spectators are implicated in our own attempts to construct a viable subjectivity. By foster ing sympathy for Carrie's plight, the film implicates women in its own misogynistic portrait of horror at the feminine.

Following Carrie's colossal destruction of the high school and her ultimate self annihilation, the narrative shifts markedly from her point of view to Sue's, depicting the other girl's nightmare of visiting Car rie's grave. Rather than being completely destroyed in the end, Carrie is instead relegated to Sue's dream life, a figure of the female unconscious returning to ter rorize and impede the now infantile Sue.

While the problems of female sexuality have been suppressed by the narrative? Carrie herself is dead and the high school space of adolescence has been consumed in flames?the repressed returns to Sue in her unconscious. Mistakenly hoping that the repression will be complete, Sue's mother can be heard saying over the tele phone, "the doctor says she's young enough that she'll forget all about it in time." Yet the film's final image shows Sue waking terrified from a dream, as if to suggest that Carrie presents a woman's view of her own monstrosity, that retro spectively the film's fantasy belongs to Sue.

While Carrie begins as the aggressive view of the fantasized male subject, through De

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Palma's authorial camera movement and references to Hitchcock, Carrie ends as a woman's nightmare. The point of view shift which takes place abruptly in the opening locker room sequence?from the omniscient masculine eye to Carrie's re verse-angle view?becomes emblematic of the film's endeavor to shift its perspec tive from male subject to female subject. Although the film documents the dread of the female body glimpsed by that first male voyeur, it attempts to characterize this fantasy as a woman's.

Leaving us with Sue's dream, Carrie sug gests that mature femininity, if achieved at all, is a fragile state, constantly under mined by forces beneath its surface which resist containment. While focusing on Carrie's battle to contain her monstrosity, the film also suggests the precarious bal ance other women attempt to maintain. In shifting the narrative perspective from Carrie to Sue at the end, the film com pletes the transfer of Carrie's particular horror to the female population as a whole and attempts to displace its masculine fantasy of horror at the female on to the female subject herself. Carrie marshals the language of the fantastic in order to present a fantasy of its own, in order to literalize those aspects of female sexuality the male subject finds so monstrous be cause so unfamiliar. The fantasy Carrie offers is ultimately a paradoxical one: the film enforces sexual difference by equating the feminine with the monstrous, while simultaneously insisting that the feminine position is untenable precisely because of its monstrousness.

Notes

1 Thanks to Julie Clark for drawing my atten tion to this quotation.

2 In the context of domestic horror, where the figure of the child is so crucial, it is impor tant to stress that Carrie, and films like The Exorcist and Martin, do not deal with child monsters, but adolescents. While Twitchell contributes a great deal to our understanding of

horror's family romance, he tends to lump children and adolescents together in his discus sion of the "downsizing" of monsters in con temporary horror (296-301). This obscures the fact that pubescent characters necessarily raise the spector of sexuality.

3 Remarking on the conflation of horror and domestic drama, Brophy describes Amityville II as "The Exorcist meets Ordinary People" (7), while Keeler reads The Shining as Ted Kram er's nightmare.

4 Babington, Bliss (50-71), MacKinnon (121 38), Matusa, and Pirie also read the film as progressive. MacKinnon provides a summary of other critical responses to Carrie. Bathrick's is the only analysis I have found which stresses the degree to which Carrie herself is con structed as monstrous.

5 Brian De Palma's films are, of course, no torious for their allusions to Hitchcock. Several De Palma films made after Carrie contain fur ther reference to Psycho's shower murder.

Dressed to Kill (1980) begins and ends with shower attacks, both fantasized by their vic tims. Blow Out (1981) and Body Double (1984) are similarly framed by shower scenes, each part of a low-budget horror film being made within the larger narrative. Remember too that Carrie's adolescence is played out, rather obvi ously, in "Bates" High School.

6 See Lurie's illuminating discussions in "Pornography and the Dread of Women" and "The Construction of the 'Castrated' Woman."

7 Further considerations of gender in the slasher film can be found in Clover, Neale "Hallowe'en," and Wood "Beauty Bests the Beast." Dika provides a useful discussion of Carrie's relation to the stalker cycle in general, and to Prom Night (1980) in particular (Games of Terror 86-87). On the other hand, recent studies of the horror film by Carroll and Tudor take no account of gender.

8 In a musical production of Carrie staged during the 1987-88 Broadway season the teen ager channeled her telekinetic ability more playfully, using it to levitate her lipstick and compact (Rich).

9 The misogynistic portrait of unrestricted female sexuality that Chris represents (in con trast to Sue) is reproduced in Hogan's discus sion of the film: "Though [Carrie] has not mastered her sexuality, she makes a conscious effort to put it to gentle use. The bitchy Chris is Carrie's converse, almost a caricature of the high school femme fatale: blonde hair, wet lips, firm little body, and perpetual come-on atti tude?the archetypal cock tease" (270; empha sis added).

10 While Montrelay and Rivi?re both outline a similar conception of female masquerade, it is somewhat misleading to collapse their views

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together here, for each ultimately perceives the process quite differently.

11 The film's use of Christian imagery in this scene and elsewhere?in particular, Mrs.

White's peculiar conflation of baroque Catholi cism and ascetic fundamentalism?deserves more attention than I can devote to it here.

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