Fall 1995	Stephen King: Psychological Crossdresser

ASK A FEMINIST IF SHE'S READ THE LATEST STEPHEN KING NOVEL AND CHANCES ARE SHE HAS NOT. He writes horror stories and in horror stories women get hurt.

Many of us are careful about what we read; it's a form of self-defense, and when the feminist reader enters Stephen King territory, she encounters a world about which she already knows a great deal -- "normal" situations that can be terrifying and women and children who are not always safe. But the work of Stephen King does not fold, staple, or mutilate women -- that's not his literary beat.

It's true that women get hurt in his novels. Most of King's stories are set in the world we inhabit -- in the here and, for the most part, now. But as King imagines us, we always fight back. We have to or we're going to get hurt even more. His characters, like King himself, don't feel that there's a choice. It's dangerous and there are casualties. Sacrifices are sometimes made by the few for the sake of the many, and a little supernatural help is often needed. Still, the bottom line in a King novel is good triumphs, peace reigns; the tyrant must be vanquished.

On The Issues spoke to Stephen King about his work and his most recent novel, Rose Madder. He is reluctant to call himself a feminist but pushed, he will settle for calling many of his stories "feminist light fiction with no effort to be politically correct." He admits, more easily, to wanting to know women better. It fascinates him that women perceive differently from men -- color, texture, smell -- and he wants to understand that. He calls his writing about women "psychological cross-dressing in order to know the other."

But can a man "know" the experience of being a woman in this culture?

Dolores Claiborne, recently made into a movie starring Kathy Bates, is written in the voice of Dolores. How well can King know her? "She is based on my mother, a single parent," he told us. "She traveled around with me and my brother, working at menial jobs. We led a sharecropper's existence, almost. I see her. I hear her voice. I know how her hands move." Oh yes, King knows this woman as only a dependent child can -- by watching her closely for the signals that tell him whether or not he is safe. The relentless voice of Dolores, which despite Bates's fine performance is lost in the movie, tells a dynamite story that Hollywood managed to reduce to a small firecracker. The book is Dolores's confession to the sheriff that she did indeed kill her husband many years ago, although not her employer yesterday. By the end of the book, the reader understands that there will be no consequences -- no 392 consecutive life sentences to be served for defending her life and that of her daughter. For King, writing that confession and having it accepted by the sheriff was both simple and just. Dolores, he said, like most of his characters, has a life of her own: "I see how things are going. This woman has to kill this man. She has no recourse. And she can confess this because she is unafraid. She shames the sheriff into accepting her confession." Hey, we're in the world of fiction here and it doesn't get much better than this.

Why don't more women write their stories in this way? "In the world we live in," King says, "feminism is a commitment and entertainment can be a luxury. My writing is entertainment." Most of King's stories about women are inspired by what he reads in the newspapers, although he wrote Insomnia, his story of increasing violence between pro-choice and anti-abortion factions in a small Maine town, before the abortion-clinic shootings in Brookline. "I saw which side had the guns--the crazies!" says King. And it was the story of a woman shot by her husband that convinced him to write Rose Madder. The woman who was shot had a protection order against her husband. "I don't know any man who would not see a protection order as a red flag waved at a bull," says King. "Rose Madder is about the bull." Protection orders are useless unless men respect the law, and when it comes to their property -- land, women, children, animals, oh everything -- some do not. In Rose Madder King imagines a man maddened by anything that puts his wife beyond his reach and a wife who must become madder than the bull in order to survive.

Rosie's husband, Norman, is a cop and a very good one. He has the means to find someone who has disappeared and a network of brothers for whom loyalty to another cop can be more important than the law. So Rosie, married to Norman Daniels for 14 years, has no illusions about whom she can call for help.

The novel opens with Norman beating Rosie, then skips eight years to when Rosie leaves, taking nothing with her but Norman's ATM card. It is made quite clear that no battered woman just up and leaves, although if she does leave she must, at some point, up and do it. Rosie is constantly on the verge of tears as she wonders whether she is going to be challenged about why she didn't leave before she did:

She didn't know why she had stayed with him any more than she knew why, in the end, it had taken just a single drop of blood to transform her entire life. Why wasn't a question when you were living in hell. Hell was motiveless.

Rosie, her body scarred and her kidneys malfunctioning, arrives in a town 800 miles away. She is guided to a shelter for battered women where she is nurtured by the staff and other women escaping their batterers. Drawn to an antiques store, she trades in her engagement ring for a painting entitled Rose Madder. She doesn't so much see it as it sees her.

This classic King device will be comforting to his readers. Surely here is the supernatural "bit of business" that will help give Rosie the strength to withstand Norman, who is even now on his way to get her, to talk to her up close. And, indeed, the painting plays an important part in Rosie's recovery.

We switch back and forth between Rosie, whose life seems to be getting better -- she has a gentle man caller -- and Norman, whose headaches are getting worse and whose hatred of women is palpable. King has created a monster here and many of us know him. It is obvious from the promotion for this book that King's publisher is delighted the abusive husband is named Norman (as in Bates, get it?), and one of the characters in the novel also makes that connection. And Norman is over the top. But some monsters in life are far less "psycho" than Norman, confining their battering to their nearest and dearest, and they are no less terrifying for that.

But before the final confrontation between Rosie and Norman can take place, Rosie must take a journey--a mythic quest. She must "remember what she has to remember and forget what she needs to forget." The prize -- the grail -- is her "self."

Rosie is stronger than the reader might expect her to be after so many years with Norman, but for Rosie there cannot be a truly happy ending. Women who have endured years of battering don't live happily ever after no matter how idyllic their lives might become. Within Rosie there is a scarred survivor who remains a presence threatening both to Rosie and to others. Rosie's relationship with her is deeply personal. Rosie will forever be alone with her.

Stephen King may not call himself a feminist but he surely has a raised consciousness about the lives of women and children. And he'd like to see us fight back. While King's children characters often fight in groups, his women are isolated and nearly always fight alone.

Gerald's Game, a book incorrectly perceived by those who obviously didn't read it as a book about S&M, is about a woman alone. Jessie Burlingame, who is an incest survivor, has for many years played her husband's favorite sexual game. She has indulged his fantasies, mistaking them for her own, and has always believed herself to be an equal participant. She is Gerald's wife; sex is surely consensual. At their vacation home on a quiet lake in Maine, Jessie decides to stop the game. It's foolish and she feels humiliated. She doesn't want to do this anymore, only she can't convince Gerald to stop. We enter Jessie's mind as she realizes that what is really going on is rape; that since her "no" is meaningless, her "yes" is meaningless also. It has always been Gerald's game. She strikes out in panic and precipitates Gerald's fatal heart attack. Handcuffed to that bed in a house with an open front door, Jessie must find a way to escape while struggling with her demons. She relives the night she was sexually abused by her father and watches as that open door admits a stranger who may or may not be real. She is finally freed with the aid of her split-off, other "self," whom Jessie permits to surface and whose rage and will to survive is powerful enough to save her.

Hundreds of thousands of women, whether they call themselves feminists or not, read Stephen King's stories. King would like his books to speak for themselves. Rose Daniels is counseled:

Men are beasts. Should we sit by the side of the road . . . bewailing our fate? . . . Rogue beasts must be dealt with. And we must go about that task with hopeful hearts, for the next beast may always be different.

What they say is subversive as hell.