Does Stephen King write abused women or does he abuse women? This question has been posed before and has definitely been discussed far more eloquently. For something more academic then personal, I advise you look elsewhere. Carrie is famously a story of an abused and bullied teenager getting her revenge and I have heard horror stories about a weird scene in It. However, in this piece, I am going to exclusively refer to my own King reading journey.
I had noticed that King’s stories tend to include women who are being abused by men and for the most part I never thought this was an issue in his writing. I strongly believe that the horror in The Shining (both the novel and the film) is the patriarchy.
At university, I wrote an entire 5,000 word essay arguing my case. If you don’t want to be spoiled for a nearly 50 year old story that very much deserves its place as a cult classic, skip this paragraph. All the villains in the story represent the patriarchy in various ways and the heroes of the narrative (who save the day for themselves) are all children, women, and minorities. As the novel ends with them forming an alternative family outside of the patriarchal system, the violence the characters face allows for King to create a non-conformist message.
Yet, King writes abused women again and again and again. In fact, I don’t think I have read a King novel that does not include a woman being abused (even in novels you would not expect it in). When does writing abuse go to far? To answer this question I present to you Gerald’s Game.
I have been reading this novel on and off for the past few weeks and I have to say I have never had such a hard time reading a book. Normally, I am okay with reading difficult scenes (I proudly read American Psycho on a busy public train) but the abuse scenes here were beyond too much. The last time I skipped so many pages in a novel was when I read George Orwell’s 1984 and then that was only because everyone skips the government manifesto section. The experience of reading Gerald’s Game was entirely different. I literally could not read it. It was brutal and brutally it never ended (I feel uncomfortable even thinking about it). This novel abuses women in two ways: it goes into far too much detail and it does so for far too long. In this novel, King proves that he takes abuse too far. Much too far.
Words and Dragons 