#i've spent a whole week trying to write a four-page paper why is this the way my brain works

[necromancer-nonbinary]

God has no power to stop my hand, subtitled: apparently I can write 7-page papers no problem, just not about anything I actually need to write about.

Carrie: The Musical. Notorious in its 1980’s rendition as one of the biggest flops in Broadway history (right up there with the disastrous Spider-Man musical), it had a small resurgence in a 2012 off-Broadway rewrite. This rewrite changed a number of details, though I’m only familiar with the ones at the very beginning and very end, as I physically could not bring myself to watch more than five minutes of the recording my castmates found on YouTube. A community theatre on a military base in Stuttgart, Germany, put on a production of the revival version in 2014, which I was a part of. It was a very fun show to do, especially as my first in any sort of major role, and even now, I occasionally go back to it via the video recording we definitely did not make and the shitty cast album I ripped from the audio of that same definitely nonexistent recording. It’s fun to see what I remember from it, and how much my body and my emotional state still respond to something I did for just a few months years ago. But what really gets me more and more each time I come back to it is just how easy it is to read the title role of Carrie as trans.

           I’m biased. I’m trans myself. Two other people in the cast (that I know of) have also come out in the years since, bringing it up to three out of a cast of twenty. I can, have, and will continue to find a trans reading of almost everything I love, because why shouldn’t I? These readings almost invariably enrich the characters in question, and it’s fun to piss off cis people who clutch their pearls at the notion that people can be trans without explicit confirmation or their stories revolving around coming out. I almost hesitate with my reading of Carrie because (spoiler alert, if you haven’t either read the book or seen any of the many adaptations of the story since the 60’s), Carrie not only dies, but goes out in a burst of rage that kills almost every single other named character in the story. It’s not the world’s nicest trope. The saving grace in this case, I think, is that what sends Carrie over the edge is explicitly not a problem within her own mind; it’s the actions of people who are unjustly cruel to her. Still not a happy ending. But then again, it’s horror. What else would we expect?

[cut for length. this thing is seven fucking pages long according to microsoft word.]

           This reading is going to take into account the aspects of the revival musical which support my reading, address those which don’t (not necessarily in a way that resolves them! Just admitting that I know they are there before anyone starts arguing “well she had a period blah blah” I know this. I memorized that whole script. I ran out onstage screaming that I was bleeding and dying at least 4 dozen times. I know), and possibly something else which I can’t remember right now because it was a tangent I got on in the shower this morning and was probably still more related to gender than anything else.

           The biggest thing I want to discuss is Carrie’s own language about herself in the show. She speaks very little in comparison to the other teenagers in the show; most of her vocalization is either in song or dialogue contained within a song. Her first words in the play are not her own; she’s repeating the Lord’s Prayer, trying to calm herself down (something I want to come back to later when I discuss religion). Her next are almost incoherent, when she runs out of the shower after realizing she’s bleeding and begs the other girls for help. “It hurts,” she says to Ms. Gardner when she comes in to see what’s happening. “My stomach.” Carrie is not eloquent in standard speech, which also probably contributes to the teasing she suffers (in our production, she was played by me, which also means she definitely came across as autistic – another strike against her, but that’s not my point right now). But what elicits her first powerful verbal expression is right before the song “Carrie”: overhearing Chris tell Sue about the various nicknames people at school have for Carrie, in particular “Scary White,” which is followed by a chorus of students – implied, I think, to be in her own head (which comes back later!) whispering, then chanting, then shouting the nicknames. “Scary White,” they croon, and more generic insults such as “Weirdo!” “Loser!” “Freak!” and “Dumb bitch,” until Carrie screams, “That’s not my name!”

           The first coherent words of her own in the play: the insistence upon being called her own name. This entire song is alternately her repeating her own name and lamenting that the other students are so cruel to her: “I will not cry. I’m okay/I try so hard to play their way/Why do they find it so hard to say/Carrie?” This is a feeling that any trans person with a new name can relate to, especially when the people in their life are less than thrilled about respecting it. As she moves through the song, repeating her name, though, she grows more confident in it, until she reaches the final lines and exclaims, “But someday/Oh my, someday/Someone will know my name!”

           I am not going to spend much time on “And Eve Was Weak,” in part because it still freaks me the fuck out five years after the end of the show, and in part because its focus rests on Carrie’s period and the deeply upsetting relationship between her and her mother. All I will say about it is that it ends with Carrie being hurled into a closet. Which, really, is all the proof I need to decide that she is trans. Also bi, but that’s not really the focus of this essay.

           Time and time again, we also hear Carrie referring to the “other” in a way that indicates that she has only recently been able to insert herself into the category of “girl.” In the end-of-the-act confrontation song “I Remember How Those Boys Could Dance,” she tells her mother that “I know I’m not like all the others/Sometimes I dream in color” and that “nobody feels the things that I do.” This is an easy surface reading that of course she doesn’t feel like anyone she knows; she is isolated from other people her age by their cruelty and from any adult other than her mother by the town’s distaste for her mother. But trans people almost invariably feel separated from the people around them, especially before they realize they’re trans: they feel alienated from their AGAB but as if they couldn’t possibly belong with people of their actual gender, no matter how untrue that feeling may be. Notable here is that at no point does Carrie refer to that feeling that she’s unlike others as an explicitly negative one. “Sometimes I dream in color” is a kind of nonsense line, one I never could puzzle out while I was actually in the show, but it isn’t negative; she senses there is something more to her because of her difference, and it’s good. In at least two other songs, she talks about other girls specifically: “I bet other girls already know/the ways to get their skin to glow/but I can learn./I’m not sure how all these colors mix/those other girls, they’ve got their tricks/but I can learn/It’s my turn/on Saturday night!” (from “A Night We’ll Never Forget”) and the repetition of a formulaic “if other girls (X)” than I can too in “Why Not Me?” – “if other girls can do this, why can’t I?”, “and if other girls get through this why not me?”, “I know I may not be welcome but at least I will be there/and if other girls belong, then I do too.” What is especially interesting to me when she refers to others is the shift in the way she does so. Early on, at the end of the first act and in “Night We’ll Never Forget,” it is almost exclusively about the physical. The line I mentioned earlier, “sometimes I dream in color,” is followed immediately by the line “sometimes I even think I’m lovely,” and of course, in “Night We’ll Never Forget” she is trying to learn how to do her makeup the way that other girls do. But by the time we reach “Why Not Me?”, she has reached beyond wanting to physically look like other girls and instead is asserting that she has just as much right to belonging as every other girl at the school. There is a subtext of physicality to this song, because as she sings it, she is getting made up to go to the prom, but it isn’t just about looking like a girl anymore. It’s about being one.  

           I want to move now to things other people and the narrative as a whole say about Carrie, starting with the obvious: seventeen is incredibly late to start menstruating and, despite a general decrease in the age of onset over the last few decades, was still very late in the 60’s when the book was first written. Most people who experience periods in the US begin menstruating about the age of twelve and 90% have begun by the time they are fourteen. It is obviously intended to be linked to her telekinetic powers and her mother’s paranoia about Carrie reaching an age of sexual maturity, and it is a literal period – the stage directions and later dialogue explicitly refer to Carrie coming onstage with blood on her hands and dripping down her legs – but there are interesting implications for my reading in it being so late. Menstruation is linked in the cisgender mind to womanhood. It is not a sure sign, as any trans person could tell you, but it is one of the easiest ways to signify to a cis audience that a character is a woman. This has numerous flaws – the most obvious in relation to my topic being that not all people who menstruate are women, and not all women menstruate – but also because the onset of menstruation, even in cis women, does not mean that person is now a woman. A twelve-year-old could by no stretch of the imagination be considered an adult. It doesn’t even mean sexual maturity; from a simple biological standpoint, the child who has just begun menstruating is not biologically ready to have a child, as their body is not yet fully grown and often the first several periods a child has are nonovulatory. Despite these flaws, what Carrie’s period tells most of the audience is that she is coming to womanhood years after most of her peers. Her mother held to an unreasonable hope that she would never come to it at all.

           Carrie’s mother is another clear roadblock to the theory of Carrie as a trans woman; such a viciously religious woman would be very unlikely to allow her child to express being trans. But I also think there’s something to be said for the fear with which she treats Carrie’s womanhood. The narrative makes it obvious she fears Carrie growing up and being able to leave her behind, and a few offhand lines in “And Eve Was Weak” indicate that she knows something about Carrie’s telekinesis: “The seed conveys the power and it’s come again/it’s come again/it’s come again/Until the seed is crushed this power never ends/it never ends/it never ends.” Margaret White does not know about Carrie’s powers until she reveals them at the end of the act, but she suspects that something will come of her maturation other than her own loss of control over her daughter’s life. But this doesn’t change the fact that she regards Carrie’s womanhood with more fear than is reasonable, and the simple fact that Margaret is not sound of mind doesn’t necessarily explain all of it.

           The treatment she receives from her peers is also interesting in the light of a transgender reading. Carrie is undeniably odd; she talks infrequently, dresses strangely, and has a mother who is the town outcast (and again, when played by yours truly, she reads very autistic), but she is not strange enough on her own to become an outcast; when she gets to the prom, Frieda and Tommy treat her very kindly, and they seem to have an easy time talking to one another. Her mother’s strangeness is meant to be the clear reason why she is treated so badly. The other students know from their parents that Margaret White is a Bible-thumping weirdo, and so assume Carrie would be too. The trouble with that is that she clearly is not. Outside of her home, she references religion twice in the play, both times in the same way: by reciting the Lord’s Prayer to calm herself down. During “The Destruction” she also repeats her mother’s admonition that “God made Eve to bear the curse/The curse of blood,” but there is a strong argument to be made that most of the events at the beginning of “The Destruction” are actually only happening inside her head. There is an abrupt switch after her line, “Oh my God oh my God oh my God” and before she begins singing where the other students and both teachers at the prom (including Tommy and Frieda, who had been nice to her all night, and Miss Gardner, who has been kind to her throughout the play) begin laughing and jeering and echoing the fragments of songs which Carrie sings, and another abrupt switch as she sings her final line in the song when everyone stops and appears to be in shock. The fact that every line of “The Destruction” is one taken from an earlier song and twisted back at her mockingly also indicates that this is an extreme panic reaction and not something actually happening or spoken aloud. What this means is that, one, the students and teachers did not actually begin mocking her as she believed, and instead were as horrified by Chris’s prank as the audience, and two, that the fragment of her mother’s kind of religion she spits is not actually her but the version of her mother that lives in her head. I think most of us have that, but for Carrie, it is a source of fear rather than common sense. On multiple occasions through the play, dialogue makes it clear that Carrie is a normal girl who happens to be outcast and also have secret telekinetic powers. People very rarely end up outcasts for no reason; bullying does not happen randomly. Her mother’s oddity may have made her a target to begin with, but it is made clear narratively that she does not share it. Thus, there must be another reason why the other students cast her out. Enter the theory that she is trans, therefore different, therefore to be mocked.

           It isn’t a happy view of transness from several angles, not least of which being that she dies and takes everyone out with her, but from outside the horror aspect, a trans reading of Carrie is almost positive. She finds support in Miss Gardner, who is heavily coded to be LGBT herself, and despite opposition is able to stand proudly in her womanhood at the prom and begin proving – rather easily, even – that she belongs there just as much as everyone else. I doubt there’s a way to actually make the angle of Carrie as a trans woman work onstage, because of the various obstacles I outlined, but I do believe that being able to take a character or story and read transness in it gives it new dimensions. There’s value in finding an understanding of media which goes outside of the standards we’ve unconsciously set as the norm; it helps expand our definition of what “normal” is and gives us insight into a part of life that many people don’t often think about.