Carrie

The story of Sue Snell’s coming-of-age stands in marked contrast to Carrie’s, yet it is impossible without Carrie. Sue’s moral rehabilitation gives structure to the novel, in which she moves from one amongst a mob to a self-individuated woman capable of atonement. Yet Sue is not defined simply by her redemption arc: She is alternately hostile and generous, conformist and defiant, her oscillating personality reflecting her inner turmoil.

Sue receives a visceral look at the meaning and consequence of conformity when she participates in the locker-room assault on Carrie, unleashing her character on its defining path. Once Sue discards the future she had always imagined she’d have, she must establish her own values and goals. By imagining Carrie’s life, she concludes a girl so isolated would crave acceptance, so she manufactures the opportunity for her. While Sue colors a prom banner with a friend (132), she recognizes herself as different: a person who stands for something and is capable of action. In an inversion of Carrie’s hated isolation, Sue finds her true self in isolation from her peers.

When Sue turns Carrie over to see the stars, her journey of change comes to its conclusion. Sue is now in a place where she can communicate with Carrie on a fundamental level. She reveals her humanity to Carrie: her childhood hurt and embarrassment, and her feelings of jealousy, self-hatred, and even disgust with Carrie. She provides Carrie with a final comfort, perhaps the only comfort in her life, and proves to Carrie that at least one person meant her no harm. Her lasting concern for Carrie characterizes her life after the prom. She advocates for Carrie’s humanity and writes a book stressing that Carrie is not the supernatural monster she is regularly depicted to be. Sue’s compassion for Carrie endures beyond her feelings for Tommy, and the task of reminding the world of Carrie’s worth is one that she undertakes before she will allow herself to rest.

Margaret, Carrie’s mother, is one of the primary antagonists in the novel. Margaret embodies the malevolent power of patriarchy’s oppression of women. Margaret is a large, physically imposing woman, and she uses her physical presence to subdue Carrie and force her to practice Margaret’s fundamentalist take on Christianity.

Margaret, however, is also a victim of her own religion. She has internalized the misogynistic shame her patriarchal Christian beliefs promote—particularly the idea of Eve as the original sinner and the cause of humanity’s fallen stature. Her biggest fear is female sexuality, which her religion wholly denies, and she constantly acts as an agent of suppression, physically abusing herself and Carrie to mitigate what she sees as an essential sinfulness of the female body. Carrie is an inescapable reminder of Margaret’s own sexuality—specifically, of her enjoyment of marital rape—and is therefore inextricably intertwined with sex and violence. Much like Carrie, Margaret uses biblical imagery to justify her violence, at the end of the novel comparing herself to Abraham, whom God tasked with sacrificing his child.

Chris is the other primary antagonist in the novel. She represents the malevolent power of conventional femininity under patriarchy. She embodies the idealized woman—pretty, popular, and sexually attractive—and she utilizes all of these aspects of her personality to gain power over others. She uses both her father and Billy as weapons when she herself cannot exercise power directly, but she is the agitating agent. It is Chris’s bullying that first calls forth Carrie’s power and later focuses its destruction After the locker-room assault, Chris becomes representative of the “They” that haunts Carrie—the general malevolence of the crowd or inside group. A prototypical bully, Chris has picked on outsiders throughout her entire schooling career, once even placing a firecracker in a girl’s shoe and almost causing her to lose her toes.

Tommy is a complex character who, while seemingly manipulated by Sue, exercises much agency and arguably displays the most kindness toward Carrie. He is not as conflicted as Sue and represents a middle ground in the emotional sphere of the novel. He bears no ill will toward anyone, and his placidity suggests that Carrie’s polarized, Christian view of the world as divided into good and evil is overly simplistic. Tommy is neither perfect nor sinful; he is kind, but not because of a divine imperative. His presence suggests that Carrie could actually find acceptance in the wider world, but her thinking is too warped by her mother and the torment of others to recognize this.

Billy is Chris’s boyfriend, and his outright violence juxtaposes her emotional and social violence. Billy is comfortable with physical aggression and is an agent of masculine power. He is domineering, violent, and misogynistic, even referring to his girlfriend by slang for her genitalia. Only when keyed up for violence does he display any feeling for Chris, and he can only articulate this through the notion of perpetuating more violence.