#i went looking for feminist criticism and immediately found freudian criticism instead. well alright i'll take this too

[sleepymarmot]

Surely, Paul Sheldon’s nightmarish experiences involve his fear of a mother-figure, Annie Wilkes, the crazed female fan who rescues him from a car crash and then holds him hostage, progressively infantilizing him and threatening to castrate him if he does not use his pen to keep writing about the Gothic romance character, Misery, with whom she has identified. What might be less obvious and more interesting is the fact that Paul’s matriphobic fear of Annie may disguise a desire to return to the mother, to regress to a pleasurable state of total dependency and reliance upon the mother to fulfill his every need. The attraction-repulsion Paul feels for Annie reflects his own ambivalence toward a state of dependency, which he both desires as a relief from the burden of independence and fears as a challenge to his hard-won autonomy. Paul’s misery is Stephen King’s masochistic fantasy, a nightmare of the male body emasculated, the male psyche stripped of its independence. And yet not quite, for all of Paul’s suffering—and there is an extraordinary amount of it, shockingly detailed, excruciatingly drawn out, and just a chop away from fatal—all this male masochism merely leads to the triumphant assertion of masculinity in the end. As feminist critics have not failed to note, the “violence and bodily invasions in Misery begin with Annie’s oral ‘rape’ of Paul,” but they “end as Paul shoves burning manuscript-bond down Annie’s throat, thinking ‘I’m gonna rape you all right, Annie’” (Bosky 1992, 154). “In order to reassert the gender identity necessary for creativity in Stephen King’s metaphorical universe, Annie must be raped... Thus Annie’s orifices must be filled—especially her demanding mouth—her power overthrown, and her sexual creative passivity re-imposed” (Lant 1997, 110). The scene in which Paul forces Annie to eat his manuscript may have been inspired by the one in Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien, where the android Ash (Ian Holm) attempts to shove a rolled-up porno mag down the throat of the troublesomely empowered female Ripley (Sigourney Weaver). Scott’s film, however, ends with its female hero triumphant, whereas the climax of King’s novel involves the reassertion of male force.

To get a better understanding of how the male masochism of Misery contains within it a wish-fulfillment fantasy of sadistic male triumph, we might compare the ending of King’s novel with another film that closely resembles it, but which, like Alien, ends very differently. [...] In Smith’s view, the lesson to be learned from this movie’s failure is “that the masochistic stage of such narratives cannot be presented as a complete castration and that the possibility of transcendence must always be kept available. The masochistic trope in this sense must be no more than a temporary test of the male body” (162). Smith is describing the action-adventure genre in which male bodies succumb to punishment as proof that they can take it like a man. This “near destruction” is thus merely a prelude to the “final hypostatization of the male body” (161); the physical display that makes the body appear vulnerable, the violation of that body’s integrity, is a test of manhood, passed when the “demonstration of masculine destructibility” turns into proof of “recuperability” (156); “the two-stage exhibitionist/masochist process must always be followed by a narrative revindication of the phallic law and by the hero’s accession to the paternal and patronizing function of the third stage of the orthodox action movie codes” (159). Carol J. Clover (1992) has argued that this narrative turn from masochism to sadism, from vulnerability to invincibility, holds true for horror too: “Although the odd horror movie does follow a masochistic scenario to its annihilatory end point (The Incredible Shrinking Man, for example), most undo the dream or fantasy through an eleventh-hour reversal, longer or shorter and more or less sadistic” (222). We can now describe Misery as a masochistic wish-fulfillment fantasy in which a man flirts with the idea of total dependency and vulnerability only to master his fear of weakness and to prove his manhood in an act of sadistic triumph over a female body. If we look closely at the scenes in which Paul suffers, we can see how his frightening ordeal is constantly being reimagined as a test of strength: the more horrible the pain, the stronger the proof of his indestructibility and macho omnipotence.

“Your Legs Must Be Singing Grand Opera”: Masculinity, Masochism, and Stephen King’s Misery by Douglas Keesey