![]() ![]() And of course, Carrie’s actions on prom night obviously ensure Sue’s life will never be the same. ![]() It’s Carrie who inspires Sue’s first transgressions against the social order: Sue rebels against the cruel, popular Chris Hargensen by accepting her share of the punishment for abusing Carrie and flouts the expectations of her peers by sending Carrie to prom in her place. Ironically, despite her own desperate desire to fit in, it is Carrie who frees Sue from a life of stifling conformity. Sue is disdainful of the future she very easily sees for herself, the same future as so many other girls like her: marrying her high school boyfriend, never leaving town, and joining the local country club. But even as she does this, Sue acknowledges her “sacrifice” is also a means of assuaging her guilt and exercising her power over Tommy. To atone for her part in the bullying and to give Carrie at least one good memory of high school Sue gives her prom night with her boyfriend, Tommy, for Carrie, and risks provoking her classmates’ ire in the process. She is complicit in bullying Carrie in the infamous shower scene and continues to think about Carrie in sometimes uncharitable terms (“she could take better care of herself she does look just like a GODDAMN TOAD”). Her motives are frequently mixed but she interrogates them more than any other character in King’s novel. Sue is alternately hostile and generous, and conformist and defiant but always acutely self-aware. Sue Snell, Carrie’s sometime-bully, sometimes-ally, is also a complex character. Instead she very deliberately and maliciously destroys her town’s water supplies before dousing as much of it as possible it in gasoline and setting it on fire. When she is pushed to her breaking point, she doesn’t (as many film adaptations often suggest) go into a “trance” or react instinctively and without intention. King also ensures that Carrie isn’t an angel. And King is careful to show how much easier that makes it for people (and potentially even the reader) to marginalize her and to accept the brutal, dehumanizing treatment of her. King crafts a lean, chilling, and insightful story that has at its heart a pair of complicated teenage girls who resist easy characterization.Ĭarrie White is, famously, a victim of bullying and abuse, but in King’s hands she isn’t a “perfect” victim. But King’s novel is more than just a pair of bloody bookends. Mentioning Stephen King’s classic 1974 horror novel likely calls to mind one of two iconic scenes: Carrie getting her period for the first time in the school shower and being pelted with tampons as her classmates scream “Plug it up!” or Carrie wreaking fatal havoc on a gym full of students after being drenched in pig’s blood just as she was crowned prom queen. ![]()
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