flanagan isn’t the first but the deep urge to softening margaret and vindicate her is both misogyny and abuse apologia; people can not only not fathom the abusive mother as real, pretending margaret is an extreme caricature and saying she had a point in beating her child, saying her period was a divine punishment and locking her in a closet for hours until she pissed herself. theres a benevolent misogyny is assuming women are naturally maternal, thats they are wired that way especially in relation to their girl children. margaret doesn’t want to ‘protect’ carrie, not genuinely, its control and she treats jesus as a weapon against carrie. the more we keep trying to pinpoint margaret’s religious mania to actual reason, the more we expose how little we care about abused children.
what causes carrie to snap is the idea of her having to go back to her mother, to have to stay in that house for another second but she still wants her mother to love her because that’s what children want, to be loved. that doesn’t mean margaret genuinely cared for her, she loved carrie as an object to abuse not as child to love. denying your child knowledge of their body is abuse, calling your child a whore is abuse, isolating them from people is abuse, self harming in front of your child to control her is abuse. margaret deliberately keep her daughter naive so she could only rely on her. king writes an abused child’s relationship with their abusive parent with such sympathy for the child, it’s weird seeing adaptations fall into ‘the abusive parent had a point.’
jacobvanloon
origamiaround
tangentwithtanner
gummygunk
annaxmalina
2087
blakekathryn
