3.2. Imagination, Children, and Human Evil
King’s interest in a psychological investigation of human evil does not only show in his
redesigned stories of werewolves, vampires, and Frankenstein’s creature. His concerns about the darkness of the human mind are also observed in his fascination with childhood. Children in King’s fiction are closely related to imagination. Since imagination for Gothic writers is often mired in the inexplicable horrors of the world, children in King’s fiction are often surrounded by darkness. In some stories they are victims of adults’ cruelty, irrationality, or insanity whereas in others they are the embodiment of evil. King’s contradictory representations of children might result from his belief in human evil. Both children with malignant nature and those who are mistreated underscore the horror of the human mind.
King has entrusted children in his stories with the important tasks of saving their families, other people, or the community. For instance, the Bradbury children in “The House on Maple Street” are careful enough to know that something is wrong with their summer house. Their mother’s emaciation resulting from a loveless marriage to their unfeeling, abusive stepfather does not escape their notice, either. Carefully studying the cracks suddenly appearing on the walls of the house and following their traces to the wine cellar, they discover a timer and conjecture that the house is unnoticeably taken over by the aliens and is about to take off. They figure that to save their mother, it is not enough to get her out of the house; she also needs to be separated from her husband. They at last decide to kill two birds with one stone—leaving their unknowing stepfather in the space-bound house. Children in King’s stories sometimes save people other than their family. In “The Langoliers” the blind girl Dinah Bellman saves the surviving passengers on the American Pride L1011, which has accidentally flied through a crack in time and arrives in the past. Aside from being infested with the appalling Langoliers, little black ball-shaped things which feed on everything in the past, the passengers are troubled by one of their fellow passengers, Craig Toomy, who turns dangerously crazy. It might be wise to kill him lest their plan to go back to the present should be sabotaged. Nevertheless, Dinah insists that her vision tells her it is better not to kill him.
146
Dinah’s intuition proves to be right when they are about to take off and the Langoliers are at their heels. Trying to get onboard, Toomy does not succeed but ends up being devoured by the omnivorous creatures. The accident slows down the Langoliers and enables the plane to leave intact. Moreover, the Losers in It work together to defeat the monster that preys on innocent kids and save the children of Derry. Even those children who fail to save others at least manage to keep themselves alive. In Firestarter Charlene McGee, a girl with
pyrokinetic power, cannot save her father from being mercilessly pursued by government-agents. However, she makes good use of her extraordinary gift escaping from the agents and exposing a secret government experiment which is ultimately responsible for her unusual talent. Mark Petrie in ’Salem’s Lot manages to survive when all of the other people of the small town of Jerusalem’s Lot have been turned into vampires. Though running away from the vampire-infested town safe and sound, he and his adult friend Ben Mears decide to go back and destroy all the vampires. Citing ’Salem’s Lot, The Shining, Firestarter, and The
Talisman as examples, Mary Pharr advances that for King in a world that keeps deteriorating
morally children in their pre-corruptive state are the only bulwark against adult wickedness and depravity: “All children have a central, saving grace in King’s novels . . .” (“Dream”121).
Some of the young characters in King’s stories are contrasted with adult characters to highlight the malignant influences of civilization on people. Comparing children in King’s fiction with Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Magistrale argues that King reiterates a recurrent theme in American literature of individuality threatened by the pressure of conformity. The problem with conformism, as far as King is concerned, arises from the corruptibility of social institutions and moral principles as civilization advances. People and society do not progress morally as they become civilized. Contrarily, they drift further and further from the original goodness characteristic of children. Victimized as a result of adult
vices or finding adult values problematic, children in King’s fiction, like Huck, gradually realize that the key to survival and moral integrity is to reject the twisted rules laid down by amoral adults and instead, to try to think independently and intuitively. King’s suspicion about sociability and constant linking of adulthood with moral deterioration lead Magistrale to believe that he endorses Rousseau’s idea of noble savages: “Arguing a thesis closely aligned to Rousseau’s in The Social Contract, King clearly believes that we are born ‘noble savages,’ but as we enter into ever-expanding social contracts, what ever our degree of inherent nobility weakens into corruption . . . [T]he more extensive the social contract, the greater the potential for acts of evil” (Landscape 96). However, Magistrale also observes that King is sometimes indecisive about the cause of man’s wrongdoings. On the one hand, adults find it hard to persevere morally as they are exposed to the harmful influences of civilization.
On the other hand, civilization is sometimes regarded by King as a force to control man’s inherent penchant for evil. King likens adults to werewolves to indicate that there is something naturally evil behind the civilized facade of a person: “the werewolf’s cycle of bestial transformation reconfirms King’s attitude toward the adult male’s innate viciousness and propensity for capricious violence” (Landscape 98).
The claims that civilization contributes to man’s evil and that human beings are evil by nature cease to contradict each other when civilization is thought to exasperate people’s natural tendency towards evil. Davis asserts that horror writers tend to believe that as people become mature their malignant nature also grows: “Horror fiction argues that the growth process does not necessarily lead to moral advancement but rather to the deterioration of morality as one gains a larger exposure to the inherent evil of human beings” (17). As people become more civilized, their brutality does not decrease. Rather, they learn to indulge their beastial impulses in a more sophisticated way. In Carrie Susan Snell, one of the girls that threw tampons at Carrie, is very sorry about the awful prank that she was involved in against
148
Carrie in the shower room. The more she thinks about the scene, the more she is shuddered at people’s insensitivity to others’ suffering and how their unfeelingness gets worse as they learn to embellish their cruelty with nicely-fabricated excuses: “But hardly anybody ever finds out that their actions really, actually, hurt other people! People don’t get better, they just get smarter. When you get smarter you don’t stop pulling the wings off flies, you just think of better reasons for doing it” (King, Carrie 86). Civilization and its associate rationalism become the accomplices of human evil for teaching people how to rationalize their impulsive deeds. Moreover, the rationalistic assumption that man is motivated by reason and rationality leads to blindness to the influence of impulse over human action.
In light of this, it is possible that King opposes victimized children against wicked adults not to propose that human beings are naturally virtuous and that it is the corruptive influences of society and civilization that contribute to the inevitable moral degeneration.
Rather, he portrays children enduring undeserved suffering inflicted on them by merciless grownups to foreground man’s unfathomable penchant for evil, manifest especially in those who are too cruel to spare the weakest and most defenseless members in the human society.
In addition, children’s distance from civilization is often closely associated with their imagination and intuition, unobstructed by rational thinking and untainted by materialism:
“Unless one returns to those years of innocence when the sky seemed to have no end, where nature contained endless wonders, when money was just something to buy a soda with, one’s existence will be a sorrowful one” (Davis 17). King does not pit childhood against adulthood simply to highlight adult vices and the corruptive influences of society. In Casebeer’s view, by offering children as a contrast, King tries to reveal how rationalism and materialism deprive adults of imagination and narrow their horizons: “King adheres to the romantic belief that the child is the father of the man. It may be that children are superior in wisdom and psychological talents to adults simply because the latter are corrupted by psyches shrunken
by materialism and rationalism . . .” (49). Clinging to the tenets of rationalism and materialism, most adults construct a reality by excluding what their belief cannot accommodate and then forget that the line separating reality from unreality is made up by their worldview. When the bulwark of rational thinking cannot withstand the onrush of chaos and insanity, they are overwhelmed: “Because evil in itself is intangible and cannot be reasonably rationalized, it is often both adults’ adherence to their belief in reason and their insistency on literalizing reality and unreality that often result in a catastrophe in King’s fiction” (Davis 49). Equipped with the ability to imagine, which is not confined by reason and logic, children are superior to adults when it comes to grasping the underside of human nature since the dark urges of people are incompatible with the rationalistic beliefs that life is sane and that man is rational.
The imagination of children in King’s fiction is usually entangled with a dark, intuitive sense of human evil. Children in King’s stories are lauded for their unrestrained imagination and unobstructed intuition. Nevertheless, in Magistrale’s view, when King claims that adults need to become children again in order to believe in the magic of life, he does not suggest that grownups should allow the children in them to lead them to a fantasy land. Instead, adults need to see the world from the perspective of a child in order to perceive the darkness of the world and the evil in humanity, which are gradually explained away as they come to accept the rationalistic worldview: “the imaginative faith of childhood was given to man to guide him thorough life. It can help him envision the moral constitution of the world; it can explain the nature of the human animal and its natural imperfections . . .” (Landscape 121).
The intuitive knowing of human nature is often recast in a childhood belief in myths and fairy tales in King’s fiction. Children in King’s fiction are terrified by fabulous monsters such as vampires and werewolves because they do not suspect their existence. The monsters are not otherworldly, though. Children encounter horrors in reality such as death, sickness, child
150
abuse, sexual harassment, parents’ divorce, bullies at school, etc. These real-life horrors are beyond their grasp but they sense evil and imagine it as monsters. The connection between children’s imagination and an intuitive sense of human evil conforms to King’s habit of embodying man’s evil in fabulous monsters and supernatural forces. King is in the habit of depicting children experiencing something that they intuitively perceive as evil and imagine as monstrous. Children might not know the gravity of crime. However, they feel it and interpret it in imaginary terms. The children in ’Salem’s Lot might have no idea as to the atrocities committed in the Marsten House, the local haunted house. Nonetheless, they know there is something wrong with the house and they translate the malevolence into ghostliness—they assert that the house is haunted. Ben Mears, the writer-protagonist in ’Salem’s Lot, goes back to Jerusalem’s Lot, where he spent four years as a boy. Fascinated with the Marsten House, which he explored when he was little and in which he saw a horrible ghost, he decides to write a book about the house and the town. The house used to be beautiful before its former owner Hubert Marsten shot his wife Birdie and hung himself there.
Researching on the life of Hubert, Ben discovers something hideous about the man which he intuitively sensed and interpreted as ghostly when he was a little boy. Before Hubert came to ’Salem’s Lot, he was a mobster and hit man. Nevertheless, his connections with several missing children were a lot worse than his bloody business. Before he retired, he was picked up by the police for questioning because he was suspected of the brutal murder and disembowelment of an eleven-year-old boy. After he moved to ’Salem’s Lot, four local kids disappeared and their bodies are never found.56 Some people of the town began to pin the
56 The missing children might die by misadventure: “Four children disappeared in that period. Not that unusual, not in a rural area. Kids get lost, and they sometimes die of exposure. Sometimes kids get buried in a gravel-pit slide. Not nice, but it happens” (King, ’Salem’s 174). However, if they were killed in accidents, their bodies would usually be discovered sooner or later: “But I do know that not one of those four were ever found. No hunter turning up a skeleton in 1945 or a contractor digging one up while getting a load of gravel to make cement” (King, ’Salem’s 174). What makes Hubert look suspicious is the coincidence that the children disappeared one after another during the eleven years he lived in ’Salem’s Lot: “Hubert and Birdie lived in the house for eleven years and the kids disappeared, and that’s all anyone knows” (King, ’Salem’s 174).
kids’ disappearance to Hubert, who was believed to worship demons by offering human sacrifices: “There have even been whispers that Hubert Marsten kidnapped and sacrificed small children to his infernal gods” (King, ’Salem’s 301).
In Hubert’s case evil is associated with both a child’s intuition and supernatural forces and all three are in opposition to rational thinking. When King speaks of children’s imagination and supernatural events, he usually makes use of them to explore human evil.
When Ben interviews Hubert’s sister-in-law, the woman tells him that she felt unfortunate to know the man, who was almost as evil as Hitler: “She said there are evil men in the world, truly evil men. Sometimes we hear of them, but more often they work in absolute silence.
She said she had been cursed with a knowledge of two such men in her lifetime. One was Adolf Hitler. The other was her brother-in-law, Hubert, Marsten” (King, ’Salem’s 175).
Moreover, Hubert’s evil connects to a supernatural occurrence in her memory. When her sister was shot, she experienced a sensation of being shot and subsequently lost consciousness despite the fact that she was miles away at the time it occurred. However, Ben does not find this incident of ESP stranger than what he has found out about Hubert:
“There’s a large enough body of ESP data now so that a rational man laughs it off at his own expense. The idea that Birdie transmitted the facts of her death three hundred miles over a kind of psychic telegraph isn’t half so hard for me to believe as the face of evil—the really monstrous face—that I sometimes think I can see buried in the outlines of that house ” (King, ’Salem’s 176). Besides, the Marsten House is haunted because of human evil rather than some supernatural force: “I think that house might be Hubert Marsten’s monument to evil, a kind of psychic sounding board. A supernatural beacon, if you like. Sitting there all these years, maybe holding the essence of Hubie’s evil in its old moldering bones”
(King, ’Salem’s 176).57
57 Commenting on the archetype of the Bad Place, King attributes the appearance of ghosts to the emotions the
152
The imagination of children in King’s fiction is therefore often connected with the darkness of human nature which is as unknowable as monsters and incidents in myths and fairy tales. To be children, in King’s view, is not only to be filled with fears, but also to be able to accept that there are things which can only be grasped imaginatively rather than explained rationally: King tries to “make us children again and to position us to feel things adults cannot . . . fairy tales are the perfect points of crystallization for those fears” (Curran 35). Studying the stressful relationship between parents and children in The Shining, Ronald T. Curran points out that children’s fears of their parents are intimated by King’s use of archetypes derived from fairy tales, such as “Hansel and Gretel” and “Bluebeard.” The immense kitchen of the hotel in The Shining reminds Wendy Torrance of the witch and the oven in “Hansel and Gretel” when she muses playfully that she should leave a trail of bread crumbs every time she goes in. Wendy’s allusion to the fairy tale betrays her memory of an unhappy childhood whose traumas and fears are distortedly revived by the tale that has condensed a variety of children’s fears embodied in the image of the cannibalistic witch and her horrible kitchen: the tale crystallizes the fears of “drowning, abandonment, kidnapping, enslavement, homicide, cremation, cannibalism” (Curran 36). Besides, Danny Torrance’s inarticulate dread for his father Jack found its articulation in King’s references to Alice’s
Adventures in Wonderland, where Alice is constantly under the threats of abusive adults, such
as the Red Queen, whose senseless brutality mirrors that of grownups in reality: “fairy tales helped him narrativize his amorphous sense of dread” (Curran 39).In King’s fictional landscape Children stand a better chance of beating monsters such
haunted house has absorbed and stored. The phenomenon of haunting might be supernatural, but there is nothing supernatural about its cause: “I read a speculative article which suggested that so-called ‘haunted houses’ might actually be psychic batteries, absorbing the emotions that had been spent there, absorbing them much as a car battery will store the electric charge. Thus, the article went on, the psychic phenomena we all ‘hauntings’ might really be a kind of paranormal movie show—the broadcasting back of old voices and images which might be parts of old events” (Danse 253). King makes use of the concept of haunted houses as psychic batteries in ’Salem’s Lot: “humans manufacture evil just as they manufacture snot or excrement or fingernail parings.
That it doesn’t go away. Specifically, that Marsten House may have become a kind of evil dry-cell; a malignant storage battery” (302).
as vampires and werewolves than grownups do because they believe in supernatural forces and accordingly know how to take action, unlike adults, who are usually dumbfounded in the face of the phenomena lying beyond the scope of their rational minds. The whole town of ’Salem’s Lot is infested with vampires and people are turned into vampires one by one.
as vampires and werewolves than grownups do because they believe in supernatural forces and accordingly know how to take action, unlike adults, who are usually dumbfounded in the face of the phenomena lying beyond the scope of their rational minds. The whole town of ’Salem’s Lot is infested with vampires and people are turned into vampires one by one.