I’m pulling this quote from the livejournal feminist community’s discussion of Dolores Claiborne:
I appreciate that King puts thought into his descriptions of women. Except for that one who turned into an alien and her vagina became a bunch of tentacles. I forget her name – the lead in The Tommyknockers.
Ursula? Freudie? Dentata?
Stephen King helped me fill the void between young-adult novels and adult novels, which was especially wide ten-fifteen years ago. Weetzie Bat was…about it, really, in terms of interesting and literary books tailored towards young teenagers. My high school teachers figured that since there was no chance of my reading below my grade level, there was no point in helping me find more interesting books, or pulling some adult titles that a young teenager could tackle. So I was left to my own devices. I read approximately eight thousand interchangeable RL Stein and Christopher Pike books , some horrible romance novels, and some really disturbing and age-inappropriate fantasy and sci-fi. And Stephen King, whose books were nice and thick. They were the literary equivalent of the food we cook at Project Open Hand: filling, standard, and easy to digest. I never embarked on the Tower umptilogy, or The Stand, or Salem’s Lot, and I have not read The Tommyknockers. I did, however, read Carrie, The Eye of the Dragon, Gerald’s Game, Different Seasons, Rose Madder, Dolores Claiborne, The Shining, any number of short-story collections, The Green Mile (which could be a whole nother post, given Coffey’s treatment in the novel and the near-complete absence of characters of color in King books), Cujo, It, The Dark Half, The Dead Zone, Needful Things, and, well, you get the idea.
I’m curious as to what you all think of his relationship with women. I was struck by one common thread in The Shining and Rose Madder: misogyny was directly connected to the villain’s tendency towards evil. Jack’s anxious masculinity was the flaw that allowed the evil hotel to worm its way in, and Rose’s husband’s hatred of women was set up in the story as a monstrously destructive and hateful thing, not jealousy or anger taken a little too far. Nor was it something that happened to them, something outside of them. King also didn’t seem to have any problem linking their thought processes with misogyny in its more mundane forms, or with making it clear that they survived because they were allowed to.
Dolores Claiborne’s husband (SPOILER!) was not possessed or demented, but King did present him as an evil fuck whose behavior towards his wife and family was wrong. He also had no problem linking marital rape and abuse with the willingness to injure and abuse one’s child. It also set him up as an evil man to be destroyed and driven out, not as a potentially loving husband. It’s a rudimentary understanding of intimate violence, and one that perhaps makes it too easy to ignore subtler forms of abuse, but it’s impressively anti-apologist. Compared to The Maiden and the Visigoth, it was progressive.
At any rate, it’s been a long time and I don’t see myself going back to Stephen any time soon. Thoughts?
The Tommyknockers was a huge waste of time. Otherwise, I think Stephen King is wonderful.
My take is that in several of his books published in the early 90s, King was clearly doing a lot of thinking about the lives of women, specifically women who had been abused. Rose Madder was, for me, the pinnacle of this phase in his writing. I think that his later works are informed by the thinking he did in the early 90s, but the lives of women are no longer such a central focus for him (although in fairness I haven’t read any of his work since Bag of Bones). I’m not going to criticize him for depictions of women in The Tommyknockers, since I think it predates some of his most serious grappling with women’s issues.
Not to mention the very thorough take on the abortion issue in Insomnia, which IMO makes the hatred of women inherent in the anti-choice movement very explicit, and even has the local movement’s leader portrayed as a literal tool of the Devil (or his analogue).
I do hope you mean that RL Stein books all sound alike and Christopher Pike books all sound alike, not that the two authors are interchangeable with each other.
Because I spent a significant amount of my pre-teen and teen years in thrall of Christopher Pike: the teens with their convoluted murder plans that usually work EXCEPT for one bit, the main characters who actually have sex unlike those in OTHER teen novels, the female characters who always end up kicking ass… and, gradually, his growing obsession with Hinduism that would permeate every story: vampires, aliens, ancient pre-Biblical vampire-lizard-aliens from Mars, ghosts, it’s all there. Plus the demon pregnancies that sometimes turn out to not be demons but actually gods: Kali, Jesus, Pan, and others! And the lizard obsession, which is present in pretty much all of those, too.
RL Stein just had talking dummies or something. That’s not life-changing brilliance.
Pretty much. Although a lot of the subject matter–supernatural teen horror/romance–was similar. I preferred Pike too, and did like that his female characters had a tendency to turn into goddesses. The Hinduism stuff was weird–I think I outgrew him during the transitional period, when he was pulling an Anne Rice with the, “My religious obsession is totally relevant to my vampire stories and does not confuse the narrative at all!”
Wow, really? I remember some pretty awesome critique of sexist attitudes towards childbirth in The Breathing Method, but I don’t remember that one. Short story?
Ummm. R.L. Stein’s Goosebumps series (which came out much later than his Fear St series and was written for a slightly younger audience) had a story about a killer dummy in one of them, I think… I don’t know my sister read those, not me. I read Fear St series and they were definately all the same. They all had a heroine-an evil girl-and superstitous paranoia… oh and the girl always got the boy in the end.
I think that’s what drew me most to the Fear St series. It was mostly centered around teenage girls. They were the heros, the villians, the focus…. boys were just a sidenote.
Same with Pike. At least, in terms of the heroines.
I LOVE Christopher Pike. I *would* do my PhD on him (if I wanted a PhD at this point).
Another interesting book by Stephen King that people might want to check out is The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon. It completely debunks the myth of the helpless little girl, lost in the wilderness, saved by a heroic carpenter. Not to mention how well-written and poignant it is.
The main character in “Tommyknockers” was Bobbie Anderson. I thought Bobbie was a great, well-rounded character– independent, creative, someone who escaped an emotionally abusive environment.
Yes, she eventually turns into an alien monster-creature, but I think Stephen King has made reference to the fact that Bobbie’s struggle against being “taken over” by the aliens parallels the struggle with addiction he was undergoing in his personal life at the time. (Even before I found out this piece of background information, I thought it was interesting that SK uses Bobbie as sort of a disguised version of himself– she is a Maine writer of genre fiction, although Bobbie writes Westerns, not horror.)
But my favorite female character in “The Tommyknockers” is Ruth Causland, the sheriff.
His latest book, Lisey’s Story, should be interesting, as the main character is the widow of a famous novelist, and written entirely from her point of view, if I recall correctly. Kind of a return to his 90s themes, it seems.
(Which will be a nice change from The Cell, which I thought was a pointless read.)
Piny, I’m surprised with all of those Stephen King books you read back in the day, you never read The Stand. I’m not nearly the King fan I used to be, but I (and many of his fans) consider it his best. Although I hated that in his re-release of it – the director’s cut, I guess – he updated it to take place in the 90s. I thought it worked wonderfully as a period piece of the 70s.
I agree The Stand was his best (haven’t read anything new by him in maybe 15 years), but it was pretty sexist.
I am so glad you posted this here for us to discuss! I watch a couple of the LJ feminist communities, but my application for membership was declined (I know I could e-mail the owners and probably have no trouble getting in… but meh), and I’m a huge Stephen King addict, so much so that a lot of his books kinda mush together in my head.
Anyway, I’ve found that Stephen King’s material offends me much less than other horror/thriller authors I’ve read. I know, I know, that’s damning with faint praise, but it’ll get better. Early on in the LJ thread, someone said that King writes a lot of useless victim/stupid wife characters, but that’s not something I’ve regularly picked up on (though it does happen). To the contrary, I’ve seen a lot of strong, smart women who are necessary to the ultimate defeat of the Big Bad. I can see my copy of It from here, and it’s no exception.
Other people here have mentioned Rose Madder and a couple others, so I won’t restate what they’ve said. Most of his viewpoint characters are men, but rarely does he shunt aside women. As you noted, misogyny often translates to downright evil in villains. In general, a theme that I’ve noticed frequently in King’s work is the hero’s need for help to defeat whatever he’s – it usually is a he – fighting, help in the form of diverse people, including women. That sounds a little like a throwback to the woman-as-helpmate sexism, and maybe there is some of that. Sorry I don’t have any concrete example besides It off the top of my head… as I said, his books run together in my mind (one his weaknesses).
I certainly wouldn’t say that Stephen King is a feminist writer, but I think he makes a conscious effort to portray all sorts of men and women in all sorts of different roles and often equates sexism and racism with human, if not demonic, evil.
Oh, I thought of a novel with a female protagonist: Gerald’s Game. Ugh, that story creeped me the hell out. Anyway, she’s a survivor of sexual assault, and her husband is attempting to rape her when she accidentally kills him. She’s a strong and complex character – and there’s mention of her feminist roommate and some kind of women’s group she attended, both of which affected her profoundly, and the voice of roommate in her head helps her survive her ordeal.
But as I said, I’m more than little addicted to Stephen King and way biased.
I love that description! Except I would add ‘crack-infused’ for myself.
I tried to do a midterm paper on him 11th grade and my teacher shot it down. I was forced to write about Salinger instead, who doesn’t – you may not believe this – have a SINGLE demon pregnancy in all his works. sigh. I was like “but he has narrative themes!” I forget what they were, though.
There are at least five.
Wow. I found all this fascinating, mostly because my own literary trajectory was pretty much the same – children’s books to point horror stuff to Stephen King to the rest of the adult library. I think most of the posters here are pretty spot on – I remember reading Insomnia and Madder Rose in quick succession and being struck by the pro-feminist stance in both. Also, one no one’s mentioned so far: the Regulators, where the central character is a woman caring for an autistic child who gets possessed by a demon or something (it’s been a while since I’ve read it).
Still, having said that, the things that came to mind first for me were the grizzly scenes base around women, like the brutal description of menstruation that opens Carrie, or the bit in IT where the girl in the group has sex with the five guys, one after another or yes, the bit in the Tommyknockers, although that was probably tongue-in-cheek more than anything.
But maybe that’s just me.
Okay, I’ve heard that IT scene referenced all over the place. What happens and why? I am always eager to learn more things that will gross me out.
I just skipped down here because I’m so excited by seeing other people who had a youth Christopher Pike obsession. It’s what got me through grades 4-6. As much as his books are just teen horror with crazy mythology thrown in, they changed my life, honestly. I don’t know where I’d be if The Last Vampire, The Immortal, The Scavenger Hunt and Remember Me hadn’t dropped into my life. I’m lucky my parents were so negligent when it came to checking up on what I was reading at such a young age, because these books opened my mind to the existence of something outside of my white-middle-class-uber-Catholic world. I’d never even heard there was such a religion other than Catholocism before I read The Last Vampire. I didn’t know what Greek myth was until I read The Immortal. Hell, I think these books were when I figured out teh sex. As much as they’re cheesy usage of the myths and religions that they have in them, I really found his books were what opened up my mind to the world.
Ooooh, a Stephen King thread!
I agree that he isn’t a feminist writer, per se. However, I always got the sense that he didn’t view women as a single mass entity but as individual characters who happened to be women. Lots of people fall into the habit of making blanket assumptions about one sex or the other, when we’re all really just people. Bobbie Anderson, she of the vagina tentacles, is a smart, independent, successful woman, but remember her sister Anne? Whooo.
What, the sex scene?
SPOILER ALERT
The kids are lost in the gigantic maze of tunnels under Derry, where they’re on their way to defeating IT, and are freaking out, turning on each other and losing their cohesion as a group, which is apparently their best chance at success. Bev, the only girl, comes up with the idea of using sex to bond them back together.
I also noticed the abused woman theme present in many of his books (Bev’s husband Tom) and wondered why that issue seems to be one of his buttons.
Oh yeah, and
I always put that down to most of the books being set in Maine. Anyone ever been to Maine? It’s where white people go to die.
I wouldn’t say there is a “near-complete” absence of characters of color in his books. Granted, the majority of characters are white so it definitely feels like these characters are token. But a couple of my favorite King characters were Susannah, a black woman who lost her legs in a subway train accident (a central character in The Dark Tower series) and Dick Halloran of The Shining–although he isn’t in the book very long. He does appear later in “It,” for all of you King nerds out there.
King does kind of fall back on the “mystical negro” stereotype that I believe I’ve seen discussed either on Pandagon or maybe Shakespeare’s Sister. That of course is the old trope of the single black character in a book or movie being the fount of earthy, homespun mystical knowledge.
But it does seem that any non-white characters in his books are black. I can’t think of an Asian or Latino character off the top of my head.
I think King’s stance on women is very progressive, especially when compared to other authors his age. I think it has a lot to do with the fact that he’s married to a feminist woman.
Yup! Coffey and a woman in the DV shelter Rose flees to are the ones I remember.
Frankly, I think King should stick with writing white people until he actually spends time with people of color. I can’t stand when white writers suddenly realize their characters are all white and start “putting on” a voice they don’t know and can’t replicate without sounding like a caricature. Suzannah in The Dark Tower books starts out as just such a caricature, although she eventually becomes an interesting and well-rounded person.
(Add Mother Abigail to his mystical Negroes, by the way. The Stand is his best book, but she’s hard to miss.)
Of the ones I’ve read, The Tommyknockers is by far the worst King novel, nauseating, really, and I can’t recall specifics about the characters in it, but I do think he generally writes excellent women; women with a lot of agency. Whatshername in The Stand (Molly Ringwald) (Elaine? Eileen?), was smart and self-possessed. Even his evil women aren’t evil because they’re women. Dolores is a great hero, but Annie Wilkes is a great villain, she’s not just a bad yucky woman; she’s complex.
Frannie Goldsmith.
/King nerd
I think in “On Writing” he noted that he was really deep in his drug addiction the entire time he was writing Tommyknockers. Pretty much explains why that one was so bad. There’s no explanation for the equally atrocious Desperation and The Regulators, which are also among my least favorite King novels. He keeps claiming he’s going to retire, but then a new book will come out. I wasn’t impressed with Cell. A little too “ooooh, new technology is scary!” But he’s always been a bit of an alarmist about the hubris of humans and our advances. The Stand, etc.
I’ve always thought that King does a pretty good job of writing about female characters. I think he does a pretty good job with all of his characters, in fact, particularly his villians. Put me in the “not a feminist writer” but “not a male apologist” camp.
Firestarter and Salem’s Lot still remain my two favorite Stephen King books though.
ohhhh. i have a lot to say about King and alla this, but for now:
> It’s a rudimentary understanding of intimate violence, and one that perhaps makes it too easy to ignore subtler forms of abuse, but it’s impressively anti-apologist.>
…is about right, I’d say. Or, well, it’s probably not actually that he doesn’t get intimate violence on a more…intimate level? i’d venture? more that he’s deeply conflicted over gender and especially sex (among other things); old deeply ingrained very conservative mores clash with a sincere later-learned commitment to feminism and just “being a better person” overall. (The earlier violently awful male characters like Jack in the Shining and the even more irredeemable Tom Rogan in “It” are alcoholic; both books were written (as was Tommyknockers) while King was still a “wet” drunk himself).
per female monsters, though, or at least female -human- monsters: two words: Annie Wilkes.
also his very first book has one of the scarier “overbearing moms” in literature. Carrie White’s mom.
have you read his bio? There are…hints, I’d say, that good ol’ hardworking single-parenting “slightly nutty” Mom perhaps had a darker side. He’s pretty, well, mum about that, though.
yeah, lots to say about King; i’ve actually ruminated in an armchair analyst sort of way about him than is probably healthy.
Susie Bright had a pretty funny, blistering article on his understanding of sexuality, primarily using “Gerald’s Game.”
yeah, more later.
Bobbie Anderson, btw, started off as a male character. i am presuming he just may have changed her in part because, well, a leetle too homoerotic in the undertones for comfort, that friendship, perhaps.
anyway, the result made for one of the more interesting and complex female King characters, i’d say.
more problematic for me have been his treatment of race and homosexuality. got a bit better over the years, but…yah. problematic.
and speaking of armchair psych, can i just say right now how much i LOATHED “Library Policeman.” or well, what it turned into. i, yeah, pretty much had a whole long mental argument with King about that one. i get these odd little head-trips from time to time…
(I am one of the few people in the world, apparently, who likes Tommyknockers. otoh, i found ‘most everything from about the Dark half on damn near unreadable. the Dark Tower…just got…embarassing. and “Black House,” which pretty much sounded like all him, i wanted to throw it across the roo).
and yah, “mystical negro;” i first saw the ref somewhere on one of the Sf/fantasy boards. he does do that a lot.
The New York Times:
Regarding his ‘retirement’:
Never got into Pike or Stine when I was a teen; Poppy Z. Brite was (and still is) my favourite ‘horror’ author (Lost Souls is a perennial re-read) although she has largely moved away from the genre in recent years.
I certainly wouldn’t say that Stephen King is a feminist writer, but I think he makes a conscious effort to portray all sorts of men and women in all sorts of different roles . . .
Except for the constant sex with female children and the obvious fear of young women’s sexuality. Carrie? Firestarter? IT? These books are as terrified of girls hitting puberty as The Exorcist.
In addition, I am highly suspicious of King’s tendency to use the rape/molestation of little girls over and over as a plot point. Using rape to establish plot is understandable, but when it’s used in nearly every novel, it becomes a fetishization, especially since it’s always girls and very young women being violated.
Well, to wade in here with all you King fans, the only book of his I’ve read (that I remember) was Carrie, which I actually read in college for a women’s studies class, my professor calling it “the ultimate menstrual nightmare”. I remember being very unimpressed with it, especially the tampon-throwing bit in the locker room; it just struck me as very false, honestly, like something a guy who had no idea about women would write.
He always said his wife helped him with the bitchy teenage girl stuff in Carrie.
The Stand is extraordinarily sexist, jaw-droppingly so. And I mean aside from all the raping and so forth. A few points I remember shaking my head over, but the whole book is like this:
1. Early in the book when the female protagonist is thinking approvingly of how far women have come, she does feels a little guilty about how women are just taking advantage of all the things men have accomplished without giving them due thanks. Her thought is something like: “Thanks, guys, for inventing civilization and everything, we’ll take it from here.”
2. When the world falls apart and the little community regroups, all the women immediately assume all the household chores. There is no discussion of this, and aboslutely no shared responsibilities. The female protagonist asks her lover to find her an old-fashioned washboard so she can do the laundry.
3. The female protagonist is one of the founding members of the little saved community, and at the beginning she’s included in the guiding council meetings. But this fact quickly disappears (well, she and the other gals are busy with their washing boards), and by the end of the book nobody even remembers that she was one of the founding members.
4. When the female protagonist wants to move to another state, instead of calmly discussing it with her lover, she bursts into tears like a little kid and asks if he will let her do this.
Similar kind of unthinking drive-by sexism is in Pet Cemetary, if I recall, where for some reason the wife acts like one of the children in waiting for the husband to decide even minor things like whether they should continue on their walk or turn around. It’s bizarre.
yah, the Stand is really seriously sexist. plenty of racism in there, too; not just Mother Agatha the “magical Negro” but also there’s some minor character who’s just…total cartoon villain, i forget what his name is.
I think King’s consciousness raising or whatever it was came later; that was one of his early ones. sometimes i think his STRONG! POWERFUL!! WOMEN!!! who take on the abusers and KILL the motherfuckers DEAD (starting with Beverly Marsh, yer classic abused femmey woman who Had Enough [but still needs a Man, at the end of the day]; and cranking up through the other women mentioned here, Gerald’s Game, Dolores Claiborne, Rose Madder…
and i wonder, you know; i think there’s a lot wrapped up in those female characters, but i can’t quite get at it. on the one hand they tend to be i think maybe closer to the females -he- knew, relatives, wife and all, as opposed to Fantasy Babe (judging from the scraps of autobiographical material he’s put out there); on the other hand, i think SUPER REVENGE WOMAN is also just another take on the Final Girl, you know; and a kind of “undoing” for all the helpless victims that went before her.
sort of like, i dunno,
Scott Adams, who’s very funny if not exactly the world’s most enlightened feminist consciousness in the world;
anyway had a character called “Tina,” the “brittle tech writer.” Some people wrote in to complain that she was a stereotype; in response, he wrote a strip with a very butch looking woman called “AnTina, the Non-Stereotypical Woman” (“Hi! Anyone up for some math? I took the coffee machine apart just for fun, want to see?”)
so of course people wrote in to say that now he was mocking lesbians, looked like.
well of course what they really were objecting to was: haha, smartass, not getting it.
but then, well…Dilbert.
anyway, sometimes i think of the KILL THE MAN!! King characters as a kind of horror AnTina.
from the department of redundancy department. sheesh.
anyway, yeah, i always thought the husband in Rose Madder wasn’t a great character in that he was -so- over the top inhuman (thus making the transformation redundant) that it wasn’t at all clear why on earth she would’ve married him in the first place. I mean, hello, yes, obviously people are drawn to and even stay with all kinds of awful people for any number of reasons, but it’s like King only ever read the sort of classic so-and-so was abused in her youth and is now re-enacting the very same trauma. But it’s like, there are -people- in there, too. and even sociopathic empathy-devoid monsters are capable of switching on the charm , having a honeymoon period, you know.
whereas say Jack in the Shining was a much more interesting character because he’s got a monster as well as a decent human in him; it’s genuinely horrible when he succumbs to the outside pressure of evil (which only works because it hooks into what was already inside him, which is what genuinely good horror is all about, seems to me), and when the wife has to (attempt to) kill him.
…I mean, even, say, Tom, the abusive husband in “It,” who’s so awful that there’s just nothing but “good” when he gets it in the neck; but in the flashbacks of the relationship with Beverly, they show a few moments of gentleness, kindness, (however genuine, i mean actions), something that someone like Beverly would hook into, because, “look, see, he -does- mean well, really.” even same with the horrible husband in Dolores Claiborne; you get at least a glimmer of what might’ve been a “honeymoon” period. it’s like they get more and more cartoonlike as King goes on. i think it actually makes it -less- powerful; the only tension is exasperation with, “well, what are you waiting for already? Kill it! KILL IT!”