Female Puberty In Stephen King’s “Carrie” And “IT”

The British feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey introduced the theory of the “male gaze” in her 1975 essay Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema. In the essay, Mulvey sets forth that in a society that is ruled by “sexual imbalance,” media is constructed with the pleasure of a male audience in mind, allowing men to play an active role in narrative while women are forced to accept the role of passive object. This phenomenon is referred to as the male gaze because for the most part, the camera or the pen is controlled by a man, creating for a predominantly male target audience, and thus female characters are constructed to be desirable to a heterosexual male viewer. It is by this act of objectifying women through the male gaze in narrative that they are robbed of their agency. It is imperative that before taking a more in-depth look at the depiction of female adolescence in Carrie and IT, King’s position as a male writer and the implications that may have in his work are considered fully.

In relation to Carrie, King said that he wanted to avoid the “stereotyping that goes on in so much male fiction,” and while King has devoted great effort in his career to improving the way he writes female characters, it has been argued that even though he tries to portray women as sensitively and thoughtfully as possible, his insensitivity surrounding gendered language displays his struggle with such an endeavour. Dymond argues that King repeatedly utilises “overtly masculine images” in reference to his female characters, and that these “discordant comparisons” undermine the text’s most crucial moments and masculinise his purportedly genderless narrators. Regardless of this, however, King still manages an overall representation of adolescent girls in his work that is sensitive and perceptive, successfully tackling the theme of puberty both when it is a key theme and when it is not.

In a discussion about female puberty, it is vital to consider the impact of gendered language and attempt to avoid a problematic use of the word “woman.” It is important to acknowledge the widely accepted fact that there exists a difference between gender identity and biological sex, and thus it is also important to recognise that not all people with vaginas identify as women, and conversely, not all those who identify as women have vaginas. However, because so much of King’s presentation of adolescent girls focuses on the physical and bodily aspects of puberty, this dissertation will employ the words “woman” or “girl” in order to describe people of the homogametic sex, or people with XX chromosomes, and who experience puberty in a way typically expected for someone who is biologically female (menarche, breast development and the widening of hips being the most basic elements of this experience.)

Menarche is the term used to describe the onset of menstruation and a girl’s first menstrual bleeding, and is a subject of which people’s views and experiences vary widely depending on cultural background and upbringing, the age at which menarche occurred, how prepared the individual girl felt for her first period, and the resources she had at her disposal at the time. M.L. Stubbs refers to the “Jekyll and Hyde phenomenon” of the attitudes surrounding menstruation, with these attitudes varying from the incredibly positive view of menstruation as being a natural process that links women and bonds them with each other to the overwhelmingly negative views of menstruation as being dirty and taboo, something to be hidden at all costs. While many women look back on their first period as being “inevitable” and “no big deal,” and others recall being genuinely excited to begin what they see as real womanhood, for some women, menarche was an intense experience that affected how they viewed their bodies and the manner in which they experienced the world and how the role they played in it had now changed. Research into women’s experience of menarche and the psychological impact it had on them has taken many different approaches to the subject, but Janet Lane’s analysis of narrative data submitted by women telling their stories of menarche focuses on the themes of shame and concealment, both of which come up in Stephen King’s treatment of the topic. These narrative analyses are a useful framework for an analysis of the depiction of menstruation both in Carrie and in IT.

In Carrie, the symbolism of blood plays a significant role in the plot, and lends King’s narrative its circularity. From the scene in which Carrie bleeds visibly in the shower, to the scene in which she is doused in pig’s blood at the prom, blood is a powerful catalyst in the novel, and King acknowledges the potency of menstruation and its powerful symbolism.

The first chapter of Carrie sees the eponymous character experience her menarche in a way that exemplifies the sense of a girl’s first period as potentially being a traumatic experience, and then takes it to the extreme. While showering in the locker room after a PE class, Carrie begins her first menstrual bleed in front of her peers who already take a great deal of pleasure in teasing and tormenting her. Carrie, a sixteen-year-old girl, has been so sheltered from the world by her puritanical mother that she has no concept or understanding of what a period is, and so falsely assumes that she is bleeding to death. It is widely accepted that the shared experience of menstruation aids in building a community among girls, and Carrie’s ignorance serves to further the mob mentality held against her as it now involves the pre-existing community of menstrual women. Carrie’s classmates, united against her, begin to throw sanitary products at her, with cries of the demeaning phrase “plug it up!” It is only when her PE teacher, Miss Desjardin, after slapping Carrie in an attempt to remedy her hysteria, realises that Carrie is ignorant of the facts of her own anatomy, that she softens in her approach to her student and helps her by explaining the realities of menstruation.

Lee notes that an important factor in the development of a girl’s bodily agency is the amount of power and choice she has in her menstrual management. She also emphasises that nearly a third of those participating in the study discussed the “necessity” of hiding their first period from others; the presence of such a high number of these very specific stories of concealment demonstrates the fact that clandestinity surrounding menarche remains a prominent part of the experience of many young women’s first period. These internalised ideas about the requirement of concealment and the consequent actions taken by young women to hide their periods are referred to as being a part of “concealment etiquette.” By experiencing her menarche in the way that she does, Carrie is robbed of the opportunity to engage in this concealment etiquette; she is robbed of her agency and her privacy. This is part of what makes Carrie’s menarche so traumatising – she has to experience it with an audience, and a hostile one at that. This hellish experience is vital to the plot of the novel, as it is acknowledged that Carrie’s “exceptionally late and traumatic commencement of the menstrual cycle” was in fact the trigger for her unrealised telekinetic abilities which she will later use to wreak havoc upon her peers and her town. In this way, King perceives and conveys the immense power of menstruation and its potential to completely change a young woman’s life.

Furthermore, it has been proven that the less prepared a girl is for her first period, the higher the likelihood that she will experience a greater degree of fear, shame and attachment to the taboos of menstruation. This is clearly depicted in Carrie, and is highlighted in the contrast between Carrie’s menarche and the way in which Miss Desjardin remembers her own first period. While Carrie experiences her first period in a hostile and public space, with no prior knowledge of this natural function of her body, Desjardin recalls beginning menstruation and shouting down the stairs to her mother that she was “on the rag.” This incredibly short and simple memory underlines the difference that a sense of preparedness and a level of open communication and support can make for a girl experiencing menarche. Indeed, it has been noted that mothers who are emotionally supportive and provide accurate information about menstruation play an incredibly important role in creating a healthy environment in which to experience menarche – they are a vital source of advice on how to “negotiate cultural norms about concealment,” and can even help to prevent menarche from being a taboo or secret event. From her recollection, it is obvious that Desjardin had clearly encountered this support, while Carrie’s mother subjected her to verbal and physical abuse and failed to teach her daughter the most basic facts of female puberty, raising her daughter not only in ignorance but also in fear. In fact, Desjardin serves a de facto maternal replacement for Carrie’s inadequate mother, providing a “maternal care” previously denied to the teenager.

When Carrie reproaches her mother for not fulfilling her maternal duty and preparing her for the reality of menses, her mother begins to beat her daughter and attempts to force her to pray. While it has been documented by several researchers that “girls who start their period early are often viewed with suspicion as promiscuous,” Margaret White takes this to the absolute extreme; Carrie is statistically a very late bloomer, experiencing her first period at sixteen years old, when the average menarcheal age is between twelve and thirteen. Therefore, it isn’t the time of the onset of Carrie’s menstruation that raises Margaret White’s suspicions, but rather the fact that it occurred at all. She suggests that the “Curse of Blood” was finally visited upon Carrie as a punishment from a “kind and vengeful” God as a response to a supposed sin committed by Carrie – according to her mother, this sin could have been anything from having “lustful thoughts” to listening to rock music to being “tempted by the Antichrist.’ This attitude feeds into what is known as the “poison theory of menstruation,” which puts forth the belief that sexual practices, thought to be sinful, cause the production of poison in the body, and that menstruation is a means to eliminate this contamination from the body as well as serving as a punishment and a means to purge any guilt. It is clear that Margaret White believes this to be true, that the presence of menstruation is an indication of sin.

Studies into attitudes about menstruation have revealed the shame surrounding periods is often founded in the sense that menstrual blood is a contaminant or pollutant, and this is an idea that is conveyed successfully several times in Carrie. The pig’s blood is described as smelling “sick and rotted,” and Carrie links this “awful wet, coppery stink” with the image of menstrual blood “running thickly” down her legs. However, for the most part Carrie renounces her mother’s assertions about the implications of being a menstruating woman – she rejects the idea that she is inherently sinful and refuses to participate in self-shaming. Carrie accepts menstruation as natural, “logical and inevitable,” with her sense that the knowledge of menstruation had “always been there, blocked but waiting.” In this way, King conveys the sense of a woman‘s intuition being indestructible regardless of how traumatic her experiences are. For Carrie, blood does not equate to sin, it is a symbol of her innate power; it‘s the beginning of her journey into exploring and understanding her powers and discovering her individual identity.

King also acknowledges the fear of a missed period, especially for sexually active teenage girls for whom an unplanned pregnancy can be, or at least seem, catastrophic.

Sue Snell, one of Carrie‘s peers who partakes in the shower incident at the beginning of the book but later feels guilty about it, is shown to be anxious about her period being a “week late“ when she is used to being totally “regular.“ This anxiety is subtly intertwined with the anxiety that while she is at home, her boyfriend is at the prom falling in love with Carrie. Sue is afraid that her boyfriend will abandon her; the implication is that it will be Sue who is left to deal with the consequences of an unplanned pregnancy, with the man having the choice of whether to stay and help or not.

It has been suggested that the miscarriage that Sue experiences is a blood sacrifice that is necessary for her to atone for her part in the evil that takes place. Monstrous female characters often commit acts of violence as a means of revenging past abuse inflicted upon them while they were powerless, and this is indeed what Carrie does; she kills the people who abused and tormented her. Carrie uses her powers to search Sue’s mind, and while she finds Sue’s selfishness and disgust for Carrie, she discovers that there is no ill-will or cruel intentions, nor was there any fore-knowledge of what was going to happen at the prom. While Carrie sees Sue as being just as much to blame as the other perpetrators of abuse because she didn’t intervene or help Carrie in any meaningful way, she is spared from Carrie’s revenge. Reparations must still be made, however, and as Carrie is dying, Sue feels that she is “dying herself.” She then starts her period, feeling the “course of menstrual blood down her thighs signaling her miscarriage and mirroring Carrie’s traumatic experience of menarche in the shower. It’s difficult to ascertain how Sue feels about her miscarriage because while she was anxious and afraid about her possible pregnancy, referring to the birth control pill as being necessary to prevent against the “intrusion of repulsive little strangers who shat in their pants and screamed for help at two in the morning,” as she realises her period has come she lets out a “howling cheated scream,” clearly feeling some kind of loss. This displays the complicated relationship adolescent girls and even adult women have with their bodies and reproductive faculties.While King doesn’t capture the full spectrum of adolescent girls’ experience of menarche and menstruation, to do so would be nearly impossible as no two women experience puberty in the exact same way. What he does manage to do, however, is utilise a very specific and exaggerated version of this experience to explore the effect that traumatic puberty could have on a young woman.

The representation of menstruation in IT differs greatly from that in Carrie for several reasons. Beverly, while an important character in IT, isn’t the main character or even the primary focus of the novel. Furthermore, while her experience of puberty is the focus of her character, it isn’t the focus of the plot in the same manner that Carrie’s experience is. Bev is also far younger than Carrie and thus experiences different issues surrounding menstruation.

Blood is a recurring image in IT, although it normally indicates or represents fear, evil and pain. When in relation to Beverly, blood imagery reflects her anxieties about the changes her body is going through, and the impending experience of menarche. The entity known as it physically manifests itself as an individual’s greatest fear, such as a werewolf from a scary film. In Beverly’s case, it appears to her as a tidal wave of blood in her bathroom at home, an undeniable clue to the unease Bev feels about menstruation.

We don’t see Bev experience her menarche in the novel, but it seems to be something that she is aware of and anticipating. Her attitudes towards puberty are not totally negative however – she is excited about developing breasts, but when she remembers the blood in the bathroom she is struck by the reality of her situation and becomes fearful. In a sense, this reveals the sense that menstruation is an unavoidable and often scary part of puberty; for Beverly, it’s a fear of the unknown, as although she is ostensibly cognisant of menstruation, she hasn’t experienced it yet and can’t be sure exactly what to expect.

Janet Lee notes that sexual maturation often affects young girls’ relationships with their fathers, with menarche and other pubescent changes often leading to emotional distance and a loss of physical affection between adolescent girls and their paternal figures. There is also a noted increase in attempts to implement concealment etiquette when it relates to hiding menstruation from men. This is displayed by the interaction between Bev and her father in the bathroom – he is unable to see anything untoward, while from Beverly’s perspective, she is surrounded by blood. For her, it is something that is impossible to ignore and is so clearly at the forefront of Bev’s psyche but is hidden from her father in the same way that menarche and menstruation are often concealed.

For Bev, menarche is also linked with the fear of the inevitability of becoming a woman, being constrained and losing the freedom of her childhood. When considering her developing body, Bev inwardly acknowledges the truth that “childhood would end and she would be a woman.” These fears may be exacerbated by the fact that she is the only girl in an otherwise all-male group of friends – she is afraid that when her body matures, she will be completely distinct from the friends who provide her with immense comfort and escape. Adolescent girls can also feel “disempowered” by the transition from childhood to womanhood and the “sexual and reproductive baggage” that this transition entails.

Sexual feeling and attraction are included as a normal part of adolescence, but most research clearly delineates the difference between adolescent an adult sexuality, with adolescent sexuality being seen as immature and “qualitatively distinct” from the sexuality of adults. Many aspects of adult sexual experience are deemed to be inappropriate for adolescents, even though the “essential elements of adult sexuality are identifiable in early adolescence” and the period of puberty and adolescence shows the most significant developmental impact on sexuality. It has also been noted that boys and girls experience sexuality in puberty in difference ways, not due to biological or physiological reasons; these “gender differentiated experiences” are caused by “gendered cultural meanings” that young boys and girls consume and apply to their first sexual feelings and experiences. These first sexual experiences can often lead young women to feel badly about themselves, and while it’s true that it isn’t “easy” for young boys to navigate these experiences either, their “selves emerge more intact.”

Sexuality is a key component of the manner in which King presents female puberty. In IT, sexual attraction is presented as a largely innocent part of pre-puberty and puberty. Because Bev is the only female out of all the protagonists, most if not all of the sexual feeling described is directed towards her. Ben Hascomb and Bill Denborough both notice Bev’s developing breasts and become aware of her sexually. Even Bev’s mother notes her changing body; not in a sexual way, but merely as a way of noting her development. Beverly’s relationship with her father, however, is fraught and filled with abuse. When he demands that she strips so that he can see if he is intact” meaning he wants to see if she is still a virgin, she refuses, speaking back and standing up to him for the first time. She runs away even as he chases after her, threatening to “whip the skin off” her. Bev notes when she looks in her father’s eyes that she doesn’t see him, she only sees it and believes it has taken control of her father. However, it can be argued that It doesn’t persuade people to do things that they haven’t already thought about – consider Henry Bowers murdering his father; it was something he had wanted to do, and finally carries out the act when goaded on by It. Beverly’s father was already physically abusive, emotionally manipulative and controlling, and so it is not an unreasonable leap to think he may have progressed to sexually abusing is daughter, especially given that when one form of abuse is present, it is statistically more likely that other forms of abuse will occur concurrently.

When Beverly returns to her childhood home as an adult, she is confronted by is posing as an elderly woman living in Bev’s old apartment. The old woman refers to Pennywise the Dancing Clown, a frequent manifestation of It, as her father51, before transforming into a witch and then finally into Beverly’s dead father, Alvin Marsh. It is important to remember here that it presents itself as what will be most terrifying to the individual, and this embodiment of Alvin tells the adult Beverly in a short and graphic monologue that he has wanted to rape and “eat” her. This is very telling of Beverly’s deepest terror – that the one man she should have been able to trust wanted to commit one of the worst abuses against her, and speaks to the anxieties that sexual maturation can bring up.

The most extreme example of sexuality in IT is the chapter in which an eleven-year-old Beverly has sex with each of her friends, one by one. This is a very controversial scene, putting many off King as a writer altogether. When examined properly and closely, it is a fascinating study of the link between adolescent and adult sexuality.

King uses sex as a “pure and ennobling” act, which forms a “preventative bond” against evil. Beverly has sex with her friends in order to secure their identity as a group and to forge an “essential human link” between them all. Up until this point, Bev has just been ’one of the boys,’ but must now serve as a conduit between childhood and adulthood, providing her friends a “symbolic advent of manhood through the act of sex.” This is potentially problematic because it’s hard to see how her function extends beyond being a means for her friends to enter manhood.

In King, the completed circle personifies friendship and love as the “only lasting defense against evil.” By failing to ejaculate inside Beverly, Stanley Uris doesn’t complete “the circle,” therefore forfeiting the protection and safeguard from it that the other boys receive. 

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