hi! ive never read the carrie novel, could you explain how stephen makes her out to be an avenging angel? im just curious ^^
Hi, anon! I'd be happy to explain how King alludes to the idea of her being an angel. So in the beginning of the novel, as Carrie is walking home from school, she thinks bitterly on how horribly she's treated by her peers and how she'd like to punish them all. She recognizes that her mother would remind her of "savior Jesus, meek and mild," and that vengeance is not hers to take. But Carrie is not content with that. Her mother doesn't go through hell every day.
"That was good for Momma. All right for her. She didn't have to go among the wolves every day of every year, put into a carnival of laughters, joke tellers, pointers, snickerers. And didn't mama say there would be a day of judgment? And an angel with a fiery sword?
If only it would be today, and Jesus would come with a boulder in each hand to crush the laughers and the snickerers. To root out the evil and destroy it screaming. And if only she could be His sword and His Arm."
This is a piece of foreshadowing that, once you have read the novel once, and are familiar with the ending, hits you in the face like a fucking truck. A day of judgment *did* come, and it came along side her wrath. Now with this, Stephen King, through Carrie's internal thought, has set up the student body as a body of evil. Carrie sees them all as evil, and she wants the lord to stop them, and she wants to help him to stop them. Now, keep the angel with a fiery sword thing in mind, this comes back at the end of the novel.
Now, the rain of stones. That piece in regard to Carrie being an angel of vengeance, is a bit more subtle, though I don't think it is unintentional. When Carrie is three years old, she is caught talking to the "whore of Babylon" next door. The "whore" in question is a teenage girl named Estelle innocently sun bathing in her back yard. Margaret is livid when she finds Carrie talking to Estelle, and accused her, a three year old, of looking upon the girl in lust. As a result, she decides the best course of action is to gauge out the toddler's eyes. Yep. You read that right. Now in the scripture, Jesus says that all children go to him. They are pure souls and should not be harmed. So when Margaret tries to gauge out Carrie's eyes this causes Carrie, a three year old, with very undeveloped powers, to freak out and bring down a destructive rain of stones on to the property. Just the White Bungalow. No where else. In the novel, Carrie has to work really hard to build up her power once she's rediscovered it, and it is quite the strain on her heart. So how does Carrie at three years old, with undeveloped powers, rain down a storm of that proportion on her house with boulders that did not exist before she brought them down? Perhaps heavenly interference working through the girl. Later in life, Estelle is interviewed, and in her account of the day she says this:
"...He left the house insured too, but she never got a penny of that. The damage was caused by an act of God. Poetic justice, huh?" In a super natural novel, rife with religious imagery, I would be very hesitant to say that in writing this line King meant "An act of God" in purely a sense of insurance terminology. There is certainly a deeper meaning there.
Later in the novel, as Carrie summons the courage to tell her mother that she is going to prom, she reflects on that day from when she was three, and this is what she remembers:
"and something flexed. Not flex, but FLEX. Something huge, and well formed, and titanic. A well of power that was not hers and never would be again."
Again, this suggests that the rain of stones was an act of heavenly intervention, not solely Carrie and her (at the time) weak telekinesis.
Carrie is then summoned to dinner, and in writing this scene, King includes a detail that seems very minute and makes one wonder why he bothered to write it. Now, King kind of has a tendency to add unnecessary details, so this may perhaps be me reaching, but I'm not too sure. This is what he wrote:
"She got up and fixed her hair with a dark with a dark blue head band, and then she went down stairs."
I remember reading this, and being perplexed, because, why is she putting on a head band to go eat dinner? Well, in writing this response, I decided it might be worth something to find the Christian meaning of the color. I found that in the faith, it is a colour that represents God's healing, hope, and good health. The scene that we've arrived at in the novel is a huge turning point. Carrie has finally taken charge of her own life, and for the first time, she is hopeful that things may change for the better. That she might heal from all of this. She is willing to move on and forget, so long as her mother and Them (her peers) remembers that things are going to change. They, of course, do not let her move forward, and they are punished for that. Maybe don't disrespect the color blue and the angel who adorns her hair with it.
Now, after Carrie has left for prom, Margaret is left alone in the house and she is. Well. Flipping her shit. Getting ready to murder her only child. You know. Nurturing motherly stuff. Now Margaret has been wrong about just about everything she's said up to this point. She believes that the period is a curse, that sexual fantasies are a work of the devil (rather than plain old human horniness), that her pregnancy with Carrie was a cancer, that sex in all forms is a sin (How could this be true, if God encourages us to reproduce and share the gift of life with our children? To bring more people into the world to uphold his values?) Now she believes that Carrie's power is the work of the devil, when at this point, the readers know quite well that TK is a result of genetics. It is my opinion, that Margaret's declaration of Carrie's power being a work of Satan, is enough to discourage any argument that her power came from satan and that she was evil. Because it is well established that Margaret is wrong. about. everything.
Now. The time has come. Judgment day! Chris has just poured blood all over Carrie, and has unintentionally signed her own death certificate. Now, as someone who has never read the book, you might be surprised to learn that Carrie does not go straight to murder. She actually runs away and ends up collapsing on the school's lawn. Initially, she plans on picking up her pride and returning home to ask for forgiveness. But then she remembers her power, and she sets out to ruin the prom night for everyone. She intends to do this by turning on the sprinklers and ruining everyone's nice clothes, hair, and make-up. But when the water mixes with the electric, something inside of her snaps and she loses all conscious thought.
Much like when she was three, she kind of blanks out and unleashes this incredible, unearthly power. She kills all the sinners, and as she makes her way through town, causing havoc, she stops at a church to pray.
She is frustrated when she finds no answers to her questions, and the line that follows is this:
"God had turned his face away, and why not? This horror was just as much his doing as it was hers."
When she leaves the church, there is a crowd of people on the street and she regards them as animals. She kills them all and this line is what follows,
"Let the streets burn with the smell of their sacrifice. Let this place be called Racca, Ichobod, Wormwood."
In the bible, human sacrifice is 100% not okay. However, animal sacrifice is permissable. Carrie, in her altered state, is not sacrificing humans, but animals, and this is okay to God. Now, let's look at the meanings of Racca, Ichobod, and Wormwood.
Racca in the bible means empty headed, foolish, and vain. This is a pretty good summation of a town who allowed obvious and rampant abuse to continue in their town for years. This is fitting for a town who, upon hearing the horrible screams of a woman in labor (Margaret), turned a blind eye, and hoped that she might die. They hated that woman.
Ichobod means a place without glory. For what glory lies in a town of people who allow horrible abuse to happen to one little girl? For a town whose children, the product of adults and their apathy, commit violent assault as a joke? For a town whose entire school, including teachers, finds Carrie's ultimate undoing to be a funny spectacle?
Wormwood in the bible, is a star (or angel depending on which bible you read) that fell from heaven and turned the waters bitter. Killing the sinners of the earth.
"The third angel blew his trumpet, and a great star fell from heaven, blazing like a torch, and it fell on a third of the rivers and on the springs of water. The name of the star is Wormwood. A third of the waters became wormwood, and many died from the water, because it was made bitter."
(This is from the book of revelations, not Carrie.)
Wormwood was sent down by heaven in a trail of blazing, fiery glory, and it killed many people.
Carrie, was perhaps, sent down by heaven, and in a trail of fiery (literally) heavenly rage, she destroys the town and the sinners within it.
Now, when Carrie finally returns home, she is fully intending to kill Margaret. But when Margaret says they should pray for forgiveness, Carrie allows this, and seems to forget her plan. That is until Margaret squanders this forgiveness by bringing a knife down into her back. This turns Carrie right back to "murder mode." She begins the process of stopping Margaret's heart, and as Margaret prays the Lord's prayer one last time. She reaches the point in the prayer where it goes:
"Thy will be done on Earth as it is in Heaven"
Carrie interjects here and says "My will, Mama."
Now, this could be read as Carrie being smug and hungry with power, but seeing as she was willing to forget her plan and let Margaret live just a few moments ago, and given the other subtextual context, I'm going to say that is not the case. Instead, perhaps Carrie has finally realized who she and her power truly represents.
Now at this point, Carrie has been stabbed, and she is really putting her heart through the fucking wringer. She should be dead at this point. She should have keeled over from exhaustion and died. But nope. She continues three miles to the road house. The root of all of this abuse, and hate, and carnage. (The roadhouse is where Carrie was conceived.)
She is driven by the need to carry out one last act of God.
"There was something she was supposed to do. The Angel with the sword. The fiery sword."
And so she goes, answering the final call of the night.
At this point, miss Susan Snell is on the case and she is following Carrie's trail.
She thinks it's amazing that Carrie is still going. And it is. Home girl should be dead. Dead as a door nail.
When Sue finds Carrie, she is at Carrie's mercy. And she knows this.
"Suppose she could find her. What then? Set on fire? heart failure, controlled and forced to walk into incoming traffic?"
But Carrie doesn't kill her. Or at least, she doesn't get the chance to before Sue tells her to look inside her mind and see that she had nothing to do with any of this. And so she does. And like God who knows everyone's heart, she realizes that Sue was genuinely sorry for what had happened in the showers. That she had truly tried to repent by having Tommy take her to prom. That she held no ill will towards Carrie. Sue, a sinner who has hurt Carrie before just as the rest of the town has, has done the one thing that no one else ever thought to do.
She repented. And she was forgiven, like sinners always are when they truly yearn for it.
There was nothing in Sue's heart for Carrie to take vengeance upon. She helped her to see the stars one last time before she died. She sat with her as it happened. And later, she would go on to defend Carrie against the public.
And so here we are at the end of the novel. There's still a couple pages after Carrie dies, but there's not really anything else for me to analyze, so we'll leave it here. I hope this cleared things up for you, and I really hope you liked reading this because I've been at it for like 2 hours now. Thank YOU for the question! I've been meaning to post an analysis of the novel and the implications of Carrie's being an angel, but just hadn't gotten to it. This gave me the kick in the ass that I needed. Let me know what you think!
