Carrie!

Reading Summary

In the reading “Horror, Femininity, and Carrie’s Monstrous Puberty” by Shelley Stamp, she takes almost an alternative view to how the movie Carrie is perceived. In the text, Shelley says that Carrie isn’t about a girl rebelling against her mother and embracing her femininity, but how that same femininity makes her the monster in her own story. When Carrie gets her first period is when her telekinetic powers start to manifest, showing how her entering womanhood is accompanied by the monster within. In many cultures, menstruation was thought to show that someone was being possessed or polluted by demons and evil spirits, which Carrie’s mother believes, and she punishes Carrie when she arrives home, further demonstrating the idea that maturity is monstrous. With her increasing embrace of femininity, her telekinetic powers grow too. The more she gives in to her feminine desires, like the growing crush she has on Tommy Ross, The more powerful her abilities become, which circumvent the body’s need to physically do anything. Senior Prom is the cumulation of all the femininity Carrie has developed throughout the movie, using makeup and curled hair as a mask to hide the monster hiding underneath. When she is drenched with the pigs blood, the outside matches the monster within, which causes her to unleash her rage onto her classmates and teachers.

Analysis of Carrie

There are many different ways Carrie hides herself by masquerading throughout the film. Once Miss Collins pulls Carrie aside, she gets a new way to hide herself and fit in all at once. Miss Collins tells Carrie that if she curls her hair, and wears some lipstick and a little makeup, she can look very pretty and look like she belongs with the other girls at prom. Shelley says how, “Carrie builds up the surface of her body, as if to cover over what lurks beneath.” This demonstrates how that when she embraced her femininity with makeup and doing her hair, she hid more and more of the monster within, or her telekinetic powers. While putting on the makeup and ignoring what her mother told her about going to prom, she embraced her femininity, which inevitably leads to her becoming monstrous.

    Carrie is very conflicted throughout the entire film. She switches back and forth from believing that her femininity makes her pretty and mature, to that same femininity makes her monstrous and ashamed. This is well shown in the two almost mother figures she has, her actual mother, and Miss Collins. Her mother tells her to cover up, and that her femininity is a sin and that she must be sinning because she got her first period. Miss Collins is the exact opposite. She convinces Carrie to go against what her mother wants for the first time, and to embrace her femininity by using makeup, curling her hair, and wearing a pretty dress to the prom. Carrie’s mother wears dark, out-dated clothes, while Miss Collins is, “braless, physically active, and dressed in shorts and a T-shirt.” This further contrasts the two women, and demonstrates their two different outlooks in regards to femininity and womanhood. Miss Collins embraces hers and wishes for Carrie to do the same, while her mother wants for it to all be repressed and hidden away. 

    Carrie’s monstrous femininity wins out in the end. Almost as a punishment for accepting her femininity and going against her mother’s sexual oppression, Senior Prom is destroyed in a fiery inferno created by her telekinesis. While some people think that this scene just the healthy expression of her repressed sexuality, Shelley sees it as, “the failure of repression to contain the monstrous femine.” This would explain even more how her femininity was the monster the entire film. Carrie embraced and owned her femininity, even making her own dress for the prom, and it didn’t change how anyone at school thought of her. She was still a freak even with the makeup and the pretty dress, and the monster finally took the vengeance Carrie was afraid to.