It is Annie’s sex, instead of her feminine virtues, that qualifies her as a metaphor for the opposing force in Paul’s creative process. Mary Pharr’s critique of King’s female characters is of special interest here. King is observed to fail in representing women in a convincingly complicated way—most of them are not realistic enough to be believable: “King’s female characters are plenty enough, but they tend to lack substance” (Pharr, “Partners” 20).38 Pharr attributes the lack of realism to his portrayal of women based on the judgment of their success or failure in playing their social roles as wife and mother. Besides, she reveals that the rules King applies to characterize his heroines are not different from those “rules that
37 Lant bases her criticism of King’s conflation of creativity and sexuality on Laura Mulvey’s idea, in “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” about different places men and women occupy in the symbolic order: “Woman then stands in patriarchal culture as signifier for the male other, bound by a symbolic order in which man can live out his phantasies and obsessions through linguistic command by imposing them on the silent image of woman still tied to her place as bearer of meaning, not maker of meaning” (qtd. in Lant, “Partners” 104).
38 Pharr’s exploration of King’s female characters is developed from Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s seminal criticism of King’s fictive women: “it is disheartening when a writer with so much talent and strength of vision is not able to develop a believable woman character between the ages of seventeen and sixty” (qtd. in Magistrale, America’s 131). King admits to the shortcoming in an interview in Playboy: “I think it is probably the most justifiable of all those leveled at me” (96).
determine the fitness of romance-novel heroines” (“Partners” 22). Female characters, in either romance novels or King’s fiction, usually suffer from oversimplification and are cast, according to their ability to care for others and the degree of their self-control especially when it comes to sex, as either “the Pale Maiden” or “the Dark Lady” (Pharr, “Partners” 21).
There is no better candidate than Annie for the dark lady in the male myth.39 No single trace of any feminine virtue can be found in her; she is anything but a nurturing female—the only thing she nurtures is her desire: “the dark ladies lack the ability to nurture for other beings. . . . Obsessed with self-gratification, King’s female monsters are unable to respond to either individuals or society” (Pharr, “Partners” 23). If stereotyping leads to the lack of substance, in Annie’s case, there might be no better way than typing her as a female monster to deprive her of associations with femininity, and thus to employ her as a metaphor for something other than a woman, a reader, or a female reader. In Paul’s eyes, Annie is anything but feminine from head to toe—the body parts that are signs of her femininity are either invisible or radiating no sexual appeal at all: “She was a big woman who, other than the large but unwelcoming swell of her bosom under the gray cardigan sweater she always wore, seemed to have no feminine curves at all—there was no defined roundness of hip or buttock or even calf below the endless succession of wool skirts. . . . Her body was big but not generous”
(King, Misery 7).
What is more appalling about Annie than her rejection of traditional social roles for women lies in the unaccountability of her monstrous perversity. Throughout the story, readers are never provided with any explanations for Annie’s notorious murders of terminal patients and children born with physical defects: “King does not try to rationalize Annie’s
39 Following Fiedler, Pharr notes that it has been prevalent among male writers in America to type women, a practice that King finds quite problematic but does not succeed in avoiding in his own writing: “King does type women. Despite his best efforts, King’s women are reflective of American stereotypes, just as their author is himself reflective of the male American perspective [of women as either bitches or zeroes] explored in Fiedler”
(“Partners” 21).
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psychopathology. He chooses not to delve into the physical defects, psychological stress, and social restrictions that create serial killers” (Pharr, “Partners” 25). Besides, Annie’s behaviors and personality are highly unpredictable—she plays the roles of nurse and tormenter alternately and switches from one to the other randomly. Annie’s disregard for moral codes and her ungraspable, inconsistent behaviors are suggestive of monstrosity that exceeds the bounds of humanity. Pharr discovers a goddess-like quality in Annie’s unfathomable psyche, which cannot be construed as associated with any imaginable mundane crimes or perversity;
rather, her monstrosity finds parallel only in the inexplicable destructive power of the deity:
“she burns and mutilates and murders, not at random nor even for pleasure, but as the duty of the divine handmaiden of death” (“Partners” 24). While Annie is hardly considered feminine by her victim in Misery, she is constantly likened to an African goddess, the Bourka Bee-Goddess: “The image of Annie Wilkes as an African idol out of She and King Solomon’s
Mimes is more than apt” (King, Misery 7). The solidity that summarizes Annie’s physique
reminds Paul of an African idol which is carved out of stone and accordingly impenetrable:“There was a feeling about her of clots and roadblocks rather than welcoming orifices or even open spaces, areas of hiatus. Most of all she gave him a disturbing sense of solidity, as if she might not have an blood vessels of even internal organs . . .” (King, Misery 7-8).
Nevertheless, when the solidity cracks, Paul finds it even more disturbing—it occurs when Annie is somehow exacerbated and her mundane face turns into inexplicable emptiness, which is so blank that he does not know how to react: “Paul was frightened by what he saw on her face, because what he saw was nothing; the black nothing of a crevasse folded into an alpine meadow, a blackness where no flowers grew and into which the drop might be long”
(King, Misery 12). This terrible crevasse is paradoxically associated with “the hole in the paper” through which Paul stares when he is writing about a world that never had been and never would be (King, Misery 256). Paul is able to write whenever the hole is open in the
paper. At the end of Misery, after several failed attempts to start over, Paul eventually finds the hole open before him as he tries to imagine Annie sneaking into his apartment, trying to kill him:
He heard a noise behind him and turned from the blank screen to see Annie coming out of the kitchen dressed in jeans and a red flannel logger’s shirt, the chainsaw in her hands. He closed his eyes, opened them, saw the same old nothing, and was suddenly angry. He turned back to the word processor and wrote fast, almost bludgeoning the keys. (King, Misery 337)
As far as Paul is concerned, Annie is needed no less than she is feared. Annie, with her capriciousness and monstrosity, is suggestive of the abyss every artist needs to face before he or she is able to create something: “The very skills required to be a real artist are also what is necessary to endure the Nietzschian abyss” (“Art” 276). Magistrale believes that King’s reference to Nietzsche about the abyss in the prologue to Part I corroborates the connection between Annie and the abyss: “When you look into the abyss, the abyss also looks into you”
(qtd. in King, Misery 1). Paul’s brave confrontation with Annie is symbolic of the courage of the artist to confront the abyss and turns it into art. Magistrale’s reading highlights the clashing of opposing forces in the creative process, which are symbolized by Paul’s fear of Annie and his final triumph over her. However, I notice that while the artist’s fear of the abyss is stressed to foreground the artist as a means to impose meaning on nothingness, the abyss as a contributing force—though in a way as passive as the way Annie contributed to
Misery’s Return—to the creation of art is paid less attention than it deserves.
King’s reference to the Nietzchian abyss serves as the rationale behind his joining of the archaic, the feminine, and the visceral to create an inexplicably deranged, grossly bulimic, mercilessly brutal female monster. According to Mary Russo’s reading of Nietzsche in The
Female Grotesque, the abyss finds woman its counterpart—both stand in opposition to words
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and are resistant to any act of interpreting: “In Nietzsche, woman is literalized in the manner of the famous grotesque alphabets, to be cruelly observed in intricate detail but never allowed to make words. . . . Nietzsche’s image for the hermeneutical impasse is the grotesque figure of Baubô, the obscene crone impudently displaying her genitals like an ironic smile” (6).
Tracing the conception of the female grotesque, Russo stresses that the linking among the archaic, the feminine, and the visceral is by no means “natural or elemental” but “historic”
and “cultural (3). Etymologically speaking, the word, grotesque, is reminiscent of the cave.
The idea of the cave leads to the association with the female body, which is anatomically cave-like. When the feminine is associated with the primal and the archaic, the resultant image, the “earth mother” for example, is usually suggestive of a close connection with the mystique of nature, inaccessible and awe-inspiring:
[The grotesque] evokes the cave—the grotto-esque. Low, hidden, earthly, dark, material, immanent, visceral. As bodily metaphor, the grotesque cave tends to look like (and in the most gross metaphorical sense be identified with) the cavernous anatomical female body. These associations of the female and the earthly, material, and the archaic grotesque have suggested a positive and
powerful figuration of culture and womanhood to many male and female writers and artists. (Russo 1)
When Annie is imagined as an African goddess, her inaccessibility terrifies as well as fascinates Paul, as the legendary queen of the giant albino bees in the Bourka country, “a jellylike monstrosity of infinite poison . . . and infinite magic” (King, Misery 203).40
40 Paul sets part of the new Misery novel he is writing for Annie in Africa. The main characters’ African adventure is composed of the African goddess, the Bee-People, and the giant albino bees living inside the statue of the goddess:
For a hundred and fifty miles inland from Lawstown, a tiny British-Dutch settlement on the northernmost tip of the Barbary Coast’s dangerous crescent, lived the Bourkas, Africa’s most dangerous natives. The Bourkas were sometimes known as the Bee-People. Few of the whites who dared to venture into the Bourka country had ever returned, but those who did had brought back fabulous tales of a woman’s face jutting from the side of a tall, crumbling mesa, a merciless face
The archaic tropes of the grotesque lose their positive import when they are immersed in misogyny: “the misogyny . . . identifies this hidden inner space with the visceral. Blood, tears, vomit, excrement—all the detritus of the body that is separated out and placed with horror and revulsion . . . on the side of the feminine—are down there in the cave of abjection”
(Russo 2). Throughout the story, Annie makes sounds that are hardly qualified as words. She is implicitly linked with a series of incomprehensible sounds at the beginning of Paul’s recollection of her: “umber whunnnn yerrnnn umber whunnn fayunnnn” (King, Misery 3).
Sometimes, she sounds like animals: “She made a pig-sound: ‘Whoink! Whoink!
Whun-Whun-WHOINK!’” (Misery 13). When she tries to defend herself against the
accusations of killing patients and babies with seemingly rational remarks, the effect is even more chilling: “Did they make me feel sad? Of course they make me feel sad, considering the world we live in. I have nothing to be ashamed of. I am never ashamed. What I do, that’s final, I never look back on that type of thing” (King, Misery 199). While Annie is irrational and incomprehensible when she is made to speak, what she does is displayed in highly visual details. When Annie is out on errands, Paul sneaks into the living room and finds it in a mess, which speaks tellingly of her untidiness and bulimia:Dishes and bowls and plates, but no cutlery. He saw drying drips and
splashes—again, mostly of ice-cream—on the rug and couch. That was what I
saw on her housecoat. The stuff she was eating. And what was on her breath. His
image of Annie as Piltdown woman recurred. He saw her sitting in here and scooping ice-cream into her mouth, or maybe handfuls of half-congealed chicken gravy with a Pepsi chaser, simply eating and drinking in a deep depressed daze. (King, Misery 178)
with a gaping mouth and a huge ruby set in her stone forehead. There was another story . . . that within the caves which honeycombed the stone behind the idol’s bejeweled forehead there lived a hive of giant albino bees . . .” (King, Misery 203).
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As if the bulimic image of Annie were not disgusting enough, Paul supplies his portrayal with something visceral. Paul has seen Annie squeezing a rat to death in her fist and this bloody image is mixed with gluttony: “He kept seeing her fingers as they sank into the rat’s body.
The red smears of her fingers on the sheet. He kept seeing her licking blood from her fingers, doing it as absently as she must have eaten the ice-cream and Jell-O and soft black jellyroll cake” (King, Misery 178). Moreover, Annie’s derangement found no better depiction than the extremely gruesome birthday cake she prepares for Paul; “there were candles all over the cake and sitting in the exact center pushed into the frosting like an extra big candle had been his thumb his gray dead thumb the nail slightly ragged because he sometimes chewed it when he was stuck for a word . . .” (King, Misery 254). In King’s characterization of Annie, every possible element that is related to the female grotesque is intricately linked to each other to make sure that she stood in contrast to language and order in every respect.