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merry-melody · 2 years

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from ‘imagining the worst: stephen king and the representation of women’

It, A Sexual Fantasy by Karen Thoens

Smells of dirt and wet and long-gone vegetables would merge into one unmistakable ineluctable smell, the smell of the monster, the apotheosis of all monsters. It was the smell of something for which he had no name... . A creature which would eat anything but which was especially hungry for boymeat. Stephen King It (7)

It, Stephen King’s epic gender fantasy, commemorates the androcentric world order of the 1950s. Nostalgia, a wistful yearning for past glory, validates the pursuit of male mastery over a menacing female sexuality. Rooted in half forgotten memories of childhood conquests, It exploits male longing for lost hierarchical power structures, a hunger for the authority of master narratives.

Interwoven within the narrative, the myth of female ascendance is symbolically supported by twenty-seven year cycles of bloody violence, cycles that correlate with female menstrual patterns. In 1958, the novel’s heroes, social outcasts united in a ritual male bonding ceremony, unearth the evil that spawns the violence. Their childhood adventures remain unnoticed, forgotten even by themselves, until the cycle of terror recurs.

In the summer of 1958, during the last reign of It, seven children attacked and wounded the monster. Brought together by their status as “Losers” and as victims of the bullying tyranny of Henry Bowers, Belch Huggins, and Victor Criss, each of them was marked in a physical, identifiable sense as an outsider in the social hierarchy of the 1950s. Bill Denbrough, unofficial leader of the group and brother of the first victim, was marked by his stutter; Ben Hanscom, by his obesity; Eddie Kaspbrak, by his asthma and his hovering mother; Richie Tozier, by the glasses he wore and his “trashmouth” (318); Mike Hanlon, by his race; Stan Uris, physically marked as a fastidious bird watcher, less obviously marked but clearly recognized in the closed world of Derry as Jewish; and Beverly Marsh, by the marker indicating the greatest difference, being female. Intentionally united by a power beyond their comprehension, they heroically battled the monster and vowed to return if It resurfaced. In 1984, the terror returns.

Hanlon, who had in the interim become the town librarian, compiled a history of Derry’s violent anomalies. It, the Loser’s name for the monster, awakened and stalked Derry every twenty-seven years, give or take a year; its reign marked by gory murders. The victims, usually children, were frequently bloodied and mutilated. In 1958, the first victim was six-year-old George Denbrough, whose arm was ripped from his body. In 1984, it was Adrian Mellon, a gay man, beaten and thrown off a bridge by the current generation of Derry bullies. It was waiting under the bridge to feast on him.

This change in victims, from a young, innocent child to a gay man, is a signifier of social change, indicating deterioration in a place already inhabited by evil. Mellon, like his boyfriend Hagarty, is marked and judged by voices carefully distanced from the author. Presented in opposition to violent homophobic voices, reasonable statements of male heterosexist privilege attain a central position. The graffiti in Bassey Park, “STICK NAILS IN EYES OF ALL FAGOTS (FOR GOD)!” and the violence of the queer bashers toward Mellon locate the statements of the investigating officers centrally, marginalizing the victim’s voice (29). To Officer Gardener, a fair, decent man, Hagarty is a subspecies: “This man—if you want to call him a man—was wearing lipstick and satin pants so tight you could almost read the wrinkles in his cock” (17). Pronouncing social judgment on Hagarty and his dead companion, Adrian Mellon, Gardner’ concludes that, “he was, after all, just a queer” (17).

The positioning in the narrative of the 1985 murder of Adrian Mellon immediately after that of little Georgie Denbrough serves to graphically illustrate social change read as deterioration. References to AIDS’ and to Mellon as a “little queer,” “fruit,” “a fucking faggot,” a “bum puncher,” position sexuality as defined in contemporary terms in opposition to nostalgic versions of clearly defined sex roles. Linking male homosexuality with being female, and by oppositional definition less than male, Hagarty and Mellon are belittled for their resemblance to females: “Garton saw the two of them, Mellon and Hagarty, mincing along with their arms about each other’s waists and giggling like a couple of girls. At first he actually thought they were a couple of girls” (21). The subtext of It links male homosexuality to female sexuality in a hierarchical structure privileging the heterosexual male.

In 1958, there was no recognizable gay community in Derry; the Falcon, a gay bar, opened in 1973. In 1977, the clientele shifted to gay men, a fact that the owner, Elmer Cutrie, failed to notice until 1981. As did the Black Spot, the Negro nightclub that burned down during the reign of It in 1930, the existence of the Falcon marked a change in the social order in Derry, a reflection of a change in America, a change that was also, perhaps, not noticed at first. In the world of It, change is frightening. Resistance to a confusing, demanding present is evidenced by a glorification of a simpler past.

In It, the past is not irretrievable. As Eddie Kaspbrak travels north toward Derry in 1985, he remembers the summer of 1958: “Not going north. Because it’s not a train; it’s a time machine. Not north; back. Back in time” (102). According to Stephen King, It represents an attempt to “reenter the world of childhood” (Magistrale, 5). He describes the return to childhood by the adult as the completion of a wheel. Intended as journey backward in time, according to King, this quest has the power to heal: “The idea is to go back and confront your childhood, in a sense relive it if you can, so that you can be whole” (Winter, 185). King proposes recapturing a “mythic power” that connects childhood to adult imagination (Magistrale, 5). This mythic power derives from the strategies used by Stephen King as a nostalgic writer.

In Nostalgia and Sexual Difference, Janice Doane and Devon Hodges examine nostalgia as a “rhetorical practice” (3), which they define as “a retreat to the past in the face of what a number of writers—most of them male— perceive to be the degeneracy of American culture brought about by the rise of feminist authority” (xiii). Nostalgic writers describe reality as a “system of oppositions that is at the same time a system of dominance and subordination” (8). These oppositions are hierarchical by nature: “[O]ne term is degraded, the other is exalted” (9). Past and present become oppositions in which past is privileged. In the male/female opposition, male is the privileged term.’

“Nostalgic writers are entrapped by the illusion that their strategy of opposition creates: their mythic pasts become real” (9).

Analyzing modern male texts, Ellen Friedman notes a yearning for the influence of the master narratives evidenced in “the profoundly nostalgic conviction that the past has explanatory or redemptive powers” (241). She proposes that this notion is revealed in “the futile desire to stop time or to understand, recoup or recreate the past, summoning it into the present” (241).

Nostalgia forms the subtext of It, in which the past wields power over the present, merging inseparably with it at some points. The overwhelming celebration of the past—its music, lost youth and innocence—combines with the fear of a monster that lurks in the past, a monster that has not been vanquished, a female monster. It resists the forces that have propelled society into the present, seeking out the glory days of the past, hoping to reestablish the lost paternal order. King uses Bruce Springstein’s lyrics to suggest a connection between lost youth and women, a significant theme of It. “Glory days . . . gone in the wink of a young girl’s eye” (63). For Stephen King, change is unpredictable, uncomfortable, undesirable. “Our lesson for today, boys and girls, is the more things change, the more things change. Whoever said the more things change the more things stay the same was obviously suffering severe mental retardation” (1003). The Losers travel back in time to their own childhoods, but, as adults,

they all remain childless, symbolically castrated. It is not about childhood, it is about longing for the past, going back and finding that it is still inhabited by the same demons. In It, Stephen King’s focus is clearly “frozen in the oedipal backward glance” (Friedman, 241). Stephen King’s glance is revisionary; however, his authorial power allows him mastery over the bullies of his youth and over the ravages of time.

In “Creative Writers and Daydreaming,” Freud describes fantasies as wish-fulfilling day dreams that are ambitious, erotic, or a combination of both. “A strong experience in the present awakens in the creative writer a memory of an earlier experience (usually belonging to his childhood) from which there now proceeds a wish which finds its fulfillment in the creative work” (Freud, 655).

For King, It satisfies both ambitious and erotic fantasies. Bill, the horror fiction writer, goes back in time to champion King’s childhood memories, rescuing “the Losers” from identification as intimidated victims and outcasts to those who dared to challenge evil incarnate. King re-creates the past and summons it into the present.’ Significantly, Bill, an obvious substitute for the author, relives his youthful triumph only to surpass it, potent wish fulfillment for a middle aged author who must himself be experiencing the effects of time and age.

Within the nostalgic framework of It, mothers play a significant role. In “Women, Danger, and Death: The Perversion of the Female Principle in Stephen King’s Fiction,” Gail Burns and Melinda Kanner note that “Female reproductive potential, sexuality and death are forged by King in a manner that invariably locks his female characters into particular sexually defined roles’ (160). Observing that King links female sexuality with death rather than life, Burns and Kanner conclude, “Women who do manage to give birth generally fail their children in the most fundamental ways” (161). This maternal failure is evident in It; the members of the Losers’ Club are losers in many cases because of their mothers. Even the relatively benign mothers in It function as limiting and controlling agents in relation to their male children.

Mothers and Monsters

When six-year-old Georgie Denbrough went out to play in the rain with the newspaper boat his brother Bill had helped him make, the terror began again. Something lurking in the sewer lured Georgie over, grabbed him and ripped off his arm. While little Georgie was being murdered, his mother was inside, playing Fiir Elise on the piano. The piano playing, significant due to the frequency of references to it, is linked forever in Bill’s memory to his brother’s death. Their mother, a former Juilliard piano student, detested rock and roll: “She didn’t merely dislike it; she abominated it” (9). Rock and roll signifies the 1950s era to King in a deeply nostalgic way; it is significant that Bill’s mother along with several other of the Losers’ mothers opposes it. Restrictions placed upon rock and roll music exemplify the limits imposed upon the boys by their mothers. Bill’s mother is symbolically linked with rigid, formal classical music. Her piano playing implies a negligent participation in her son’s murder.

Before Georgie’s death, Bill and George are careful not to disturb their mother. Even so, she stops long enough to scold George from her seat at the piano for slamming a door. Then, when the piano stops again, the brothers are “listening for the piano bench to scrape back, listening for their mother’s impatient footsteps,” but she resumes playing (10). As they work on the boat, Bill warns George that if he gets any paraffin on the blanket “Mom’II kill you,” and if he doesn’t put everything away, “Mom’ll have a bird” (11). Never portrayed as nurturing, their mother is at best distant and restrictive, possibly negligent and perhaps worse.

At the age of three, Bill was “knocked into the side of a building” by a car (10). According to Bill’s mother, the accident, which left him unconscious for seven hours, caused his stutter. “George sometimes got the feeling that his dad—and Bill himself—was not so sure” (10). What did they think caused the stutter? An ambiguous link exists between Bill’s mother and the stutter that marked him as a Loser. Both Bill and George Denbrough were involved in life-threatening situations as young children, one of which was fatal. King’s strategy of insistent repetition emphasizes their mother’s piano playing on the day George was killed. This repetition shifts the interpretation from “he was killed while she played the piano,” to “he was killed because she played the piano.”

Locating the stutter/car accident story in the middle of this chapter tends to substantiate charges of careless mothering that King is careful never to utter. Their mother bears the burden of guilt for pursuing her own interests and, by implication, neglecting her children without ever being explicitly accused.

Eddie Kaspbrak’s weakness is his asthma; this physical infirmity marks Eddie for membership in the Losers’ club. Mr. Keene, the druggist, tells Eddie that his aspirator contains a placebo. The druggist insists that Eddie does not have asthma and that Sonia, Eddie’s mother, is the real problem: “Your mother is determined you are ill” (776). Eddie’s throat tightens. He knows it isn’t in his head; he isn’t crazy: “Your asthma is the result of a nervous tightening of the diaphragm that is ordered by your mind . . . or your mother” (777).

The dynamics of their relationship becomes evident later, in the clash over Eddie’s friends. Eddie, aware of his mother’s manipulation of him, explains to his friends: “She had a way, a way of working on a guy” (766). Sonia feels uncertain, almost fearful when Eddie confronts her about sending his friends away. Picturing herself as a self-sacrificing, devoted mother, she refuses to acknowledge other motives. Eddie sees through her: “You’re not going to steal my friends just because you’re scared of being alone” (797). Sonia, adept in the use of emotional weapons, rationalizes her control of Eddie by calling it protection: “She felt safer in her tears. Usually when she cried Eddie cried, too. A low weapon, some might say but were there really any low weapons when it came to protecting her son?” (797). The emotional turmoil concerning the Losers continues until Eddie proposes a compromise; he will not question his asthma if she doesn’t interfere with his friends. As Sonia carefully hugs Eddie sealing their agreement, she thinks, “What mother would kill her son with love?” (802). Emotionally devouring Eddie, Sonia’s mothering creates an invalid.

Sonia’s carnivorous love synthesizes the mother/monster, monster/mother opposition. During his stay at the hospital as he was slipping out of consciousness, Eddie confuses Sonia Kaspbrak and the monster. He thinks he has told the nurse, “She’s not the leper, please don’t think that, she’s only eating me because she loves me” (790). The leper, the form of It that appears to Eddie, represents his maternally induced asthma. In a dream, when Sonia chases his friends away, Eddie sees the monster in many of its forms; the last form is his own mother: “But just before the clown washed out completely, he saw the most terrible thing of all: his ma’s face” (792). In It, mothers are often monsters.

Sonia Kaspbrak consumes Eddie as It devours children. Sonia Kaspbrak is a widow. Arlene Hanscom is a single mother: “[R]aising a boy by herself had put a mark on her” (183). Like the Kaspbraks, the Hanscoms are portrayed by feeding imagery. Whereas Sonia feeds on Eddie emotionally, Arlene overfeeds Ben physically: “[W]hen there were leftovers from supper she would often bring them to him while he was watching TV and he would eat them, although some dim part of him hated himself for doing so” (185). Ben could not bring himself to acknowledge his mother’s ulterior motives. “Ben’s deeper thoughts—suspected her motives in this constant feeding. Was it just love? Could it be anything else? Surely not” (186).

Embarrassed by his size, Ben wore baggy sweatshirts to hide his body when he was in fifth grade in Derry. His mother spoke of his size euphemistically. “She never called him ‘fat,’ she called him ‘big’” (185).’ Later, he recalls, when he was in high school, he was changing after gym when the other guys “fat paddled” him, chasing him and slapping his naked body. This incident led to his determination to diet. His greatest obstacle was his mother: “And nights when I went home and would only eat half of the stuff on my plate my mother would burst into tears and say that I was starving myself, killing myself, and that I didn’t love her anymore, that I didn’t care how hard she worked for me” (496).

Being fat made Ben a Loser; like Eddie Kaspbrak, Ben’s physical problem originates with his mother. Like Sonia Kaspbrak, Arlene Hanscom engulfs her son within a dangerous devouring motherhood.

In response to the murders in Derry, Ben’s mother gives him a new Timex watch and tells him to be home by six o’clock every night during the summer. She warns him that if he is late she’ll call the police and report him missing immediately. Emphasizing the need for caution, Arlene explains that she understands how boys like to spend their time. During their conversation, Ben realizes that his mother doesn’t know that he has no friends: “If she didn’t know he had no friends, she probably didn’t know anywhere near as much about his boyhood as she thought she did” (184). Ben is touched by the concern that the Timex signifies because “She could be hard, his mama. She could be a boss” (185). Ben’s mother is unaware of the essential facts of his life, assuming friendships where there are none.

Setting limits on Ben with the watch and the curfew, Ben’s mother assumes that she has protected him. Did she really imagine that being home by six was sufficient protection from a murderer? Was warning Ben to come home early and go places accompanied by his friends a serious defense? Arlene Hanscom, like the other Losers’ mothers, acts to set limits for her son but remains essentially uninvolved with him. Ben, astute enough to question her motives, struggles with ambivalent feelings for his mother. “Ben Hanscom would not have dared to hate his mama” (185). The chasm in their communication causes Ben’s silence regarding the murders in Derry: “‘the thing which he hadn’t quite been able to tell his mother’’ (208). The protection that the watch signifies is undermined by her disinterest in his life.

Richie Tozier’s flaw, the mark of the Loser, is wearing glasses. Richie’s mother’s association with his glasses is established when a bully pushes Richie into the gutter breaking his glasses: “[H]is mother was furious with him about it, lending very little credence to Richie’s explanations” (662). His mother’s anger over the broken glasses compounded by her lack of sympathy over Richie’s pounding by a bigger boy wounds Richie less than the knowledge that she didn’t believe his story. “This failure to make his mother understand hurt much worse than being slammed into the gutter” (662). Conjuring up pictures of Richie’s father working late, she suggests Richie’s guilt in incurring the cost to replace the glasses. “You think about it... . Her voice was curt and final—worse, it was near tears” (663). Her lack of compassion and manipulation of Rich with guilt mark her as a mediocre mother, but even more deadly, at least in Stephen King’s hierarchy, she didn’t approve of rock and roll: “Like Bill Denbrough’s mother, she was death on rock and roll” (582). Still, to the other Losers, Richie’s parents seemed the most normal. When the Losers werelooking for an adult to confide in, they asked Richie about his parents. Although Richie rated them as okay, he knew “‘they’d never believe something like this” (663). His mother’s inability to believe Richie about the glasses isolates him and the other losers in dealing with It.

Stan Uris, who encountered It as the corpses of drowned children in the Standpipe, believed in an orderly universe, a universe of natural laws. “God had given the earth a final tilt on its axis... . He had done that and He then had said, in effect: ‘Okay, if you can figure out the tilt you can figure out any damn thing you choose’” (429). Stan signifies nostalgia for those reliable master narratives, a past you could trust, the Great Chain of Being, a hierarchy in which God was on top and God was male. Before going out that night, the night he almost died, the night that preordained his suicidal death twenty-seven years later, “His mother made him promise to keep the hood of his slicker up,” certainly a valid precaution when there are murderers about (418). Stan is an outcast in Derry because he is Jewish. Marginalized even in the novel, he commits suicide, rather than return to Derry with the others to face It again.

Like Ben Hanscom’s mother, Mike’s mother rationalizes that Derry is safe until dinner time, so when Mike was late for dinner one day, she was angry, “she had been nearly hysterical. She took after him with a dishrag, whopping him with it. Don’t you ever scare me like that!” (274). Mike was surprised that his father didn’t intervene and control her “wildcat anger” (274). But, now Mike knew his limits, his mother had made them clear: “Home before dark. Yes ma’am, right-o” (274). Mike’s father, Will Hanlon is the benign patriarch in It, suggesting places for Mike to visit, telling him about the past. When Mike Hanlon eventually recovers and writes Derry’s history, he is searching for a master narrative, the events that led into his father’s story. Mike is an outcast in Derry because he is black, and Beverly Marsh is even on the margin within the Losers Club: She is the only girl.

When Al Marsh beat Beverly, he justified it as his duty as a parent to correct her behavior. “Daughters, Al Marsh said, need more correction than sons. He had no sons, and she felt vaguely as if that might be partly her fault as well” (398). Elfrida Marsh routinely dismissed her husband’s physical abuse of Beverly. “Did you get your dad angry at you last night, Bevvie?” Then, voicing her true concern, she asked “Bevvie, does he ever touch you?” (403). Aware of an incestuous undercurrent to Al’s violence, Elfrida Marsh neither confronted him nor protected Beverly. Warning Beverly to be home before dark, her mother implies concern about Beverly’s safety, masking her crucial failure to protect Beverly at home.Beverly’s mother’s failure was the inability to control her father. In It, mothers limit and control their sons. Limits were justified by male behaviors that were labeled risky. Richie’s mother forbade him to ride double on Bill’s bike, but even safety conscious Eddie recognized that life cannot be lived risk free. “Some stuff has to be done even if there is a risk. That’s the first important thing I ever found out I didn’t find out from my mother” (723). Some mothers in It are monstrous; others are negligent, distracted, incapable. Burns and Kanner conclude that in King’s fiction “Mothers fail their children, witness their abuse, and stand helpless to prevent their deaths” (Burns and Kanner, 171). The failure of the mothers in It is so basic, they mirror the monsters their children combat.

Gender Myths

Victimized by her father’s battering, Beverly Marsh substantiates myths about violence against women. Her father’s rage is fueled by incestuous desire for her as Beverly’s visit with It in the guise of the witch from Hansel and Gretel confirms. “I beat you because I wanted to FUCK you, Bevvie, that’s all I wanted to do” (572). Surviving her father, Beverly intentionally chooses men like him for lovers, men who hit women. Tom Rogan recognizes this in Beverly from the start, he knows that she wants to be hurt, “And it might even be possible that some antelopes—and some women—want to be brought down” (105). Testing his theory, Tom smashes Bey across the face noting her reaction with interest. “Then the pain. Then the (nostalgia) look of a memory . . . of some memory” (108). He tells her he hit her for smoking in front of him. As a stunned Bev struggles to absorb the blow, her reaction—tearful and hurt, confirms his initial evaluation of her. “She was trying to find a tone, an adult rhythm of speech, and failing. He had regressed her. He was in this car with a child” (108). Before it was over, he intended to humiliate her, to make her apologize to him. Her eyes seemed to plead with him to stop, but he knew to persist “because that was not the bottom of her wanting, and both of them knew it” (109). Tom Rogan had established himself in Beverly Marsh’s life.

This episode plays to myths about abused women, confirming that they intentionally choose violent men and stay with them, implying that the battering is really the victim’s fault. She wants it. This unfortunate stereotype degrades the only female character who could have been noble. Significantly, though Beverly has the same kind of financial success as the other adult Losers, she is the only one who remains emotionally battered as an adult.King does not present Tom Rogan as a model of male behavior. Tom’s drinking and Beverly’s ultimate violent resistance to the beatings do not serve to excuse his behavior, only to amplify it. Even his childhood is no excuse. Tom came from a violent family where he was the victim of an abusive mother: “Tom, you been bad! his mother had sometimes said—well, ‘sometimes’ wasmaybe not such a good word; maybe ‘often’ would have been a better one. You come here, Tommy! I got to give you a whuppin” (112). When his father, Ralph Rogan killed himself with a lye and gin cocktail, Tom was burdened with the care of the other three children and frequently beaten. “His life as a child had been punctuated by whuppins” (112). He decided that it was “Better to be the whupper than the whupped” (112). Describing Bev’s feelings toward Tom, King corroborates myths that support violence: “But that did not preclude her fear of him. . . her hate of him . . and her contempt of herself for choosing him for dim reasons buried in the times that should be over” (118, 119). When Tom used the belt on Beverly, she knew that she wanted it: “[W]hat hurt worse was knowing that part of her craved the hurt. Craved the humiliation” (120). As Beverly searches her motives for marrying Tom, she wonders: “Why would a person go back into the nightmare of her own accord?” (930). She acknowledges her guilt to Bill admitting: “He hits and he hurts. I married him because . . . because my father always worried about me, I guess. .. . And as long as someone was worrying about me I’d be safe. More than safe. Real’ (929). She wanted to be beaten, it made her feel loved. In this statement, Beverly accepts the blame for her own victimization, supporting an unfortunate stereotype of battered women.

Tom Rogan, the batterer, meanwhile, performs the same function that the homophobic bullies serve in the Adrian Mellon incident. Tom’s extreme cruelty, his manipulation of Beverly, becomes a border marker, centering and elevating the other men in the novel.

The battering serves another nostalgic function. It warns women that other women cannot, or will not, protect them from male aggression. After the fight that precedes her trip to Derry, Beverly goes to her friend Kay McCall for help. King, again distancing himself from applying the label, carefully marks Kay as feminist when Tom refers to her as “that titsy women’s-lib bitch” (111).

Later, Kay withstands a battering by Tom until he threatens to cut up her face. Terrified by the threat of mutilation, Kay tells Tom where Beverly has gone. Not only does the “women’s-lib bitch” fail Beverly as a protector, she betrays her when threatened with loss of her own beauty. Kay’s failure, significant in terms of the nostalgic world view of male/female, dominance/submission, serves to warn women that other women are not to be trusted.

Blood and Sex

Beverly Marsh first experienced It as blood gurgling out of the drain in the bathroom, splashing up around the room, blood that her father did not see. Beverly’s impending puberty, the blood, the bathroom, and Al’s anger masking his barely controlled incestuous desire are conveyed in sexually laden imagery.

The evening ends with Beverly listening as her parents “did their sex-act thing” (399). When Al questioned Bev about her scream, she lied: “There was a spider. A big fat black spider. It . . . it crawled out of the drain” (397). Ironically, instinctively, Beverly knew what It really was, the form beneath the disguises; because Beverly is female, she knows what the boys must risk their lives to uncover and confront. It is about sexuality, bloody female sexuality, female sexuality as imagined by a male.

Woman as Object

In It, Beverly is Stephen King’s ideal woman; as a child her courage facing the monster and surviving her father’s abuse suggests that she will mature into a self-reliant, assured woman. Disappointingly, her marriage to Tom Rogan—his battering, her masochism—describe a different Beverly. When Beverly comes home to Derry, she is a woman who needs to be rescued. In Stephen King’s nostalgic gender scenario, a strong male must save the beautiful but frightened female from the dangers of the world and threats posed by aggressive, perverted men.* Bill, the successful horror novel writer (read as Stephen King), chivalrously emerges from his male quest/adventure plot to rescue the damsel in distress. In King’s outrageous erotic fantasy, he modestly describes Beverly’s sexual response to Bill: “She became aware that this wasn’t going to be just a come; it was going to be a tactical nuke. She became a little afraid” (931).

In an interview with Tony Magistrale, Stephen King describes Beverly as “the symbolic conduit between adulthood and childhood for the boys in the Losers’ Club. It’s a role that women have played again and again in the lives of boys: the symbolic advent of manhood through the act of sex” (6). In his objectification of woman, female sexuality functions as a male rite of passage.

The subtext of It is sexual. The pronoun it—genderless, vague— vacillates as a significator but remains sex-linked throughout the novel. It can be read as sexual intercourse. Stephen King describes it: “[S]ex must be some unrealized undefined monster; they refer to the act as It. Would you do It, do your sister and her boyfriend do It, do your mom and dad still do IT, and how they never intend to do It’ (1085). It can also be read as repulsive female sexuality, the genesis of all depravity, the wickedness that turns innocent boys into men, forcing them to abandon bicycles named Silver with baseball cards flipping innocently across the spokes, to become bound to mundane, compromising jobs, to grow old and fat and bald and die. Sexual maturity is the evil these misfit boys fear, flee, and surmount for the first time in their secret sexual initiation by Beverly. This initial sexual experience for each of them coincides with end of the groups’ first encounter with It and is followed by protracted amnesia.

Monsters and Heroes

It could be sexual intercourse. It could be repulsive female sexuality. But, mostly, It is actually She. It, the monster, is not really androgynous, a point raised at the beginning of the novel when George looked into the sewer and saw Pennywise the Dancing Clown, the principal manifestation of It. George was reminded of “Clarabell, who talked by honking his (or was it her?—-George was never really sure of the gender) horn” (13). The question of the clown’s gender was restated by Richie when Mike described Its appearance at the parade on Main Street “‘But then he turned around and waved to me again and I knew it was him. It was the same man.’ ‘He’s not a man,’ Richie said” (712). As a clown using greasepaint to disguise its identity, and in Its other shapes, It exploits a female characteristic, the ability to alter appearance, to change outfits, to use makeup; It has an aptitude for becoming unclear and ambiguous rather than concrete and definable.

Sexual mutilations with a phallic focus are clearly the work of IT/HER.

When they found the crew of lumberjacks who were snowed in during the winter of 1979: “All nine hacked to pieces. Heads rolled . . . not to mention arms ...a foot or two... and a man’s penis had been nailed to one wall of the cabin” (157). And in 1931, the corpse of the flood victim had a sexual flavor. “The fish had eaten this unfortunate gentleman’s eyes, three of his fingers, his penis and most of his left foot” (4).

It. Evil. Unfathomable evil. Mutating, hiding anywhere, everywhere. It could be anyone. It could be your mother. And, the really frightening suggestion in this novel, It is your mother. It, nameless terror. It is bloody, filthy, horrible. It lurks in dark, wet underground caverns. In hidden, secret places. The boy-men heroes have returned to Derry to face IT again, HER, the bitch, the force that is really responsible for their lost youth.

Female sexual imagery intensifies as Its essence is stalked in the sewers under Derry. “The tunnel progressed steadily downward, and that smell—that low, wild stench—grew steadily stronger” (1028). In Stephen King’s creation myth, the ultimate evil is repulsive, spiderlike; significantly, It is a pregnant female. “It’s always been here, since the beginning of time . . . since before there were men anywhere” (763). As the origin of evil on earth, the egg-bearing female spider must be conquered, her evil spawn destroyed to prevent unthinkable consequences. To destroy the ultimate female evil, Bill must symbolically rape and dominate her:

It lunged clumsily forward, trying to bite him, and instead of retreating, Bill drove forward, using not just his fists now but his whole body, making himself into a torpedo. He ran into Its gut like a sprinting fullback who lowers his shoulders and simply drives straight ahead. For a moment he felt Its stinking flesh simply give, as if it would rebound and send him flying. With an inarticulate scream he drove harder, pushing forward and upward with his legs, digging at it with his hands. And he broke through; was inundated with Its hot fluids. They ran across his face, in his ears. he snuffed them up his nose in thin squirming streams. He was in the black again, up to his shoulders in Its convulsing body. And in his clogged ears he could hear a sound like the steady whack—WHACK—whack— WHACK of a big bass drum, the one that leads the parade when the circus comes to town with its compliment of freaks and strutting capering clowns. . . He plunged his hands into It, ripping tearing, parting, seeking the source of the sound; rupturing organs, his slimed fingers opening and closing. . .Whack—W HACK—whack—W HACK— . . .Yes! Try this you bitch! TRY THIS ONE OUT! DO YOU LIKE IT? DO YOU LOVE IT? Bill felt Its body clench around him suddenly, like a fist in a slick glove. Then everything loosened .. . At the same time he began pulling back, his consciousness leaving him. (1093-94)

It, the noble quest to rid the world of evil, is the playing out of oedipal male fantasies, sexual intercourse with the monster/mother. Significantly, the final battle with It/Her, is clearly a sexual attack. In “The Laugh of the Medusa,” Héléne Cixous locates patriarchal definitions of sexuality: “Men still have everything to say about their sexuality, and everything to write. For what they have said so far stems, for the most part, from the opposition activity/passivity, from the power relation between a fantasized obligatory virility meant to invade, to colonize, and the consequential phantasm of woman as a ‘dark continent’ to penetrate and to ‘pacify’” (1091). In the final battle with It/Her, she is indeed a “dark continent” to be “penetrated” and “pacified.” For Stephen King, female sexuality remains terrifying, an evil to be subdued, kept in its rightful place.

Burns and Kanner locate female sexuality in the King canon: “Menstruation, mothering, and female sexual desire function as bad omens, prescient clues that something will soon be badly awry” (160).

The Denouement—Back to the Past

Bill survived the odyssey into the depths of sinister, powerful female sexuality and emerged victorious, reborn. Unfortunately, Audra, his wife, is now catatonic. Bill, of course, rescues her too. He knows exactly what to do. Bill pulls a relic of his youth out of a convenient garage, his old bike, and proves that pure male courage can fix anything, even “a corpse-like wife.” She recovers fully due entirely to Bill’s courageous, dangerous bike ride; she is happily terrified. All is well. We know this because of Bill’s “huge and cheerful erection” (1137).

It is a feast of unfettered male fantasy. The hero subdues the greatest evil in the universe, which is, of course, a potent, fecund, sexual female. Cixous identifies repressive trends in this nostalgic form of male writing as precluding the possibility of change:

I mean it when I speak of male writing. I maintain unequivocally that there is such a thing as marked writing; that, until now, far more extensively and repressively than is ever suspected or admitted, writing that has been run by a libidinal and cultural—hence political, typically masculine—economy; that this is a locus where the repression of women has been perpetuated, over and over, more or less consciously, and in a manner that’s frightening since its often hidden or adorned with the mystifying charms of fiction; that this locus has grossly exaggerated all the signs of sexual opposition (and not sexual difference), where woman has never Her turn to speak—this being all the more serious and unpardonable in that writing is precisely the very possibility of change, the space that can serve as a springboard for subversive thought, the precursory movement of a transformation of social and cultural structures. (1092—93)

The world order at the culmination of King’s epic gender myth is nostalgic. The patriarchal hierarchy is restored; pliant, submissive females dedicate themselves to their men, who alone possess the secrets of the universe.

NOTES

1. Describing Adrian Mellon’s sobbing boyfriend, Gardener could not feel empathy, a strategy that distances, centers, and privileges “normal” male sexuality in comparison to marginalized “queer” sexuality. “Harold Gardener recognized the reality of Don Hagarty’s grief and pain, and at the same time found it impossible to take seriously” (17).

2. Thomaston, angry over the murder, hopes for the conviction of Garton, Dubay, and Unwin. “I’m going to put them in the slam my friend, and if I hear they got their puckery little assholes cored down there at Thomaston, I’m gonna send them cards saying I hope whoever did it had AIDS” (38). Later, Richie Tozier, in an irreverent spoof, tells a joke as the character Kinky Briefcase, Sexual Accountant: “I had a fellow come in the other day who wanted to know what the worst thing was about getting AIDS . . . I told him right away—trying to explain to your mother how you picked it up from a Haitian girl” (61). King, again careful to distance himself from a judgmental position, uses references to AIDS and homosexuality as a physical marker of difference. In the implied opposition of heterosexual/homosexual, homosexual is clearly the degraded term. The first victim of the 1985 spree is a marker for social deterioration that has occurred since 958.

3. Boutillier, police officer investigating the murder accuses Chris Unwin: “You threw the little queer into the Canal” (18). Webby Garton describes Adrian Mellon as a “fucking faggot” when interrogated by the police. (21). Officer Machen tells the bullies “about the bumpunchers I’m neutral” (23). Boutillier arguing for suppression of evidence about the clown figure, offers his inferred opinion of gay men: “The guy was a fruit, but he wasn’t hurting anyone” (38).

4. According to Doane and Hodges: “‘Oppositions tend to operate on a hierarchical rather than an equal basis: one term is degraded, the other exalted. Opposition is a power game. The opposition male/female, to give another example crucial to our analysis, is also typically hierarchical. The disparaged term ‘female’ helps preserve the value and integrity of the privileged term, ‘male’” (9).

5. As noted in Ellen Friedman’s article.

6. Fiir Elise is specifically mentioned four times, George’s mother’s piano playing, three more—a total of seven references in thirteen pages.

7. “(sometimes amplified to ‘big for his age’)” (185).

8. These men include A! Marsh, the battering father whose violence masks incestuous desire and Tom Rogan whose sadistic control ranges from emotional manipulation to premeditated violence that ends in hot sex.

WORKS CITED

Burns, Gail E., and Melinda Kanner. “Women, Danger and Death: The Perversion of The Female Principle in Stephen King’s Fiction.” Sexual Politics and Popular Culture. Edited by Diane Raymond. Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1990, 158-171.

Cixous, Héléne. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” The Critical Tradition. Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Edited by David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989, 1090-1102.

Doane, Janice, and Devon Hodges. Nostalgia and Sexual Difference: The Resistance to Contemporary Feminism. New York: Methuen, 1987.

Freud, Sigmund. “Creative Writers and Daydreaming.” The Critical Tradition. Classic Texts and Contemporary Trends. Edited by David H. Richter. New York: St. Martin’s, 1989, 651-55.

Friedman, Ellen G. “Where Are the Missing Contents? (Post)Modernism, Gender, and the Canon.” PMLA 108 (1993): 240-52.

King, Stephen. It. New York: Viking, 1986.

Magistrale, Tony. Stephen King The Second Decade, “Danse Macabre” to “The Dark Half.” New York: Twayne, 1992.

Winter, Douglas E. Stephen King: The Art of Darkness. New York: Signet, 1986.

#stephen king #meta #feminism #it #karen thoens

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