Stephen King: Homophobia? Repressed and Sublimated Homosexuality? We Report; You Decide

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Note: In this and a few subsequent posts, I summarize and comment upon essays concerning horror fiction that appear in Gender, Language, and Myth, edited by Glenwood Irons (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). Although some of the claims in these essays seem far-fetched (to me, at least), others appear to have some validity and even some practical application. In any case, readers of Chillers and Thrillers are likely to find that these synopses offer unusual takes on the theory and practice of writing horror fiction.


“The horrors of [Stephen] King’s world,” Robin Woods writes in “Cat and Dog: Teague’s Stephen King Movies,” “are the horrors of our culture writ large, made visible and inescapable” (Gender, Language, and Myth: Essays on Popular Narrative, edited by Glenwood Irons, 310). If this insight is true (and King’s enormous popularity suggests that it may be), the implications are likely to be horrifying, indeed, for many, for Woods sees, in the horror maestro’s works, four “culturally specific disturbances” that take the forms of “ambivalence about marriage and the family,” “male aggression and masochism,” “homophobia,” and “repressed and sublimated homosexuality” (304-311), the latter two of which are the concerns of this post.

According to Woods, King’s fiction discloses the author’s homophobic attitude, both in the author’s occasional “derogatory reference” to homosexuals or homosexuality (in Firtestarter, a male character “who exactly parallels the little girl’s strange, dangerous and defiantly anti-establishment abilities” is referred to as a “faggot” [306]), but, more often, by way of “association”:

The corruptible pimply fat man in The Stand. . . has been afraid that he might be homosexual; Stillson, the monstrous future president of The Dead Zone who may bring about the end of the world, never goes out with women and has a constant male companion; one of the supreme horrors witnessed by the little boy (in Kubrick’s film by the mother) in The Shining is. . . [a] homosexual [act]; the vampire and his assistant in ‘Salem’s Lot. . . are rumored to be a gay couple (306).

Those who have read King’s novels are apt to agree with Woods’ assessment; King does seem to give vent to homophobic biases in his work, just as he champions his own causes, interests, and beliefs (CNN and liberal politics, for example, in Under the Dome and abortion and feminism in Insomnia), and he isn’t shy about damning organizations, institutions, agencies, and individuals which or whom he finds objectionable, whether they are homosexual men, lesbians, or others. If King is homophobic, as Woods (and King’s own work) suggests, Woods’ insights concerning the causes of homophobia are all the more interesting, although Woods himself is careful to indicate that he is interested, in “Cat and Dog” “in psychoanalyzing a group of texts (and through those texts the tensions and struggles within our culture), not the author as a person” (304).

Sigmund Freud, Woods believes, has conclusively demonstrated that men and women are, from birth (that is, “innately”) capable of responding to, and perhaps enjoying, sex with either their own or the opposite sex (that is, are “bisexual”). However, society demands “that the homosexual side of that bisexuality” be “repressed in order to construct the successfully ‘socialized’ adult.” However, as Freud points out, repressed tendencies are apt to resurface, and the “homosexuality” that adults repress may, meanwhile, be “experienced as a constant, if unconscious threat”--or, in horror fiction, as an inner demon or monster. Woods believes that homophobia arises from an individual’s failure to adequately repress his or her (mostly his) “own bisexuality,” which causes him to act out in violence against either other men or women: “Masculine violence in our culture. . . must be read as the result of the repression of bisexuality. Violence against women: the woman represents the threat of the man’s repressed femininity. Violence against other men: the man represents the threat of the arousal of homosexual desire” (307).

Woods’ definition (or redefinition) of homophobia and his association of it with male violence against both other men and women as representations of the homophobe’s own threatened sense of heterosexual masculinity on the one and his own threatened sense of the feminine aspects of his nature on the other hand are certainly astute; perhaps they are even true. If they are accurate, his hypotheses provide critics of literature in general, and horror fiction in particular, with useful tools of analysis. He applies these observations to King’s fiction, suggesting that “the ‘beautiful [that is “non-sexual”] friendship’ of a man and an adolescent boy” in ‘Salem’s Lot is the means by which “the vampires are finally (though ambiguously) destroyed” in “an extraordinarily precise account of the enactment of repression.” Likewise, Woods argues, “Thinner. . . Can easily be read as a paranoid fantasy about AIDS” (308).

In King’s fiction, Woods argues, “the repressed and its inexorable return” is dramatically set forth in specific, well-defined places or is embodied in particular individuals such as “the Marsten House of ‘Salem’s Lot, the Overlook Hotel of The Shining, the possessed car of Christine, the Micmac burying-ground of Pet Sematary, the gypsies of Thinner,” and, he adds, “the fascination of the novels is clearly the fascination of these potent evocations of the repressed, to which the protagonists and the reader are irresistibly drawn” (311). It is as if these locations and individuals, set off from mainstream society’s arena of affairs and participants, are profane places and impious persons, condemned places and damned people, our inner demons, or shadows (to employ the Jungian term), which we, unable to disown completely, incarcerate in places we mark as off limits or embody in persons we identify as pariahs. When we stumble across such a place or encounter such a person, we meet the inner demons whom we have banished; the repressed returns, but, even then, we recognize these repressed urges and desires as monstrous. They are to be resisted, banished anew, exiled, or destroyed, never embraced. By confining them to places or persons possessed, as it were, we both identify these tendencies and instincts as other than ourselves and as urges that are rightly to be avoided when possible and banished or destroyed when they can no longer be ignored. Had we not cast these parts of our own unconscious into the outer limits of our existence as human beings, we would become our inner demons, and our society would change, perhaps irrevocably.

Woods even offers a picture of the hell that would result should we embrace the monsters in our looking-glasses:

Centrally, it would involve the full recognition and acceptance of constitutional bisexuality, with all the implications and consequences of such an acceptance: the transformation of male and female roles and heterosexual relations, the rethinking of the family, the positive acceptance of homosexual love as natural rather than aberrant, the overthrow of socially constructed norms of masculinity and femininity, the recognition of infantile eroticism (310).

In a word, the consequence of the acceptance of the other within us, of the shadow that is both male and female without being either sex exclusively, would be the chaos of social and cultural nihilism. It is to the brink of this abyss, Woods suggests, that King’s “homophobic” fiction brings his readers, but it is an abyss from which the horror maestro himself balks, unable, at last, to give rein to his inner demons which are, likewise, “the horrors of our culture writ large”:

Yet in the novels, as in the Gothic generally, the energies that give the world its potency can only [sic] be depicted as monstrous: they threaten that normality to which the books believe themselves to be committed. The impasse of the novels is the impasse of our culture. There are roads beyond it, but they lie necessarily outside the Gothic. To travel them would require a total rethinking of the ‘return of the repressed’ in positive terms. Firestarter, the most positive of all King’s novels and the least related to the Gothic genre, suggested that he was about to engage on just such an undertaking, though the subsequent novels have conspicuously withdrawn from it (310).

There are some places too deep and dark, it seems, for even King, and, if his fears are those of “our culture,” too deep and dark for the rest of us, too, which may be just as well, since only the fools among us would be likely to rush in where King fears to tread.

Note: Recently, I discovered a Tumbler blog devoted to citing instances of King's references, in his fiction, to penile erections. There are far too many, it seems, to attribute them to mere coincidence. King appears to be fascinated by phalli--in his fiction, at least. Often, critics have contended, homophobic individuals are secretly fascinated by such matters. Is King homophobic? We report; you decide.

The Final Girl: Transsexual? Homoerotic? We Report; You Decide

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Note: In this and a few subsequent posts, I summarize and comment upon essays concerning horror fiction that appear in Gender, Language, and Myth, edited by Glenwood Irons (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1992). Although some of the claims in these essays seem far-fetched (to me, at least), others appear to have some validity and even some practical application. In any case, readers of Chillers and Thrillers are likely to find that these synopses offer unusual takes on the theory and practice of writing horror fiction.

Transgender, especially transsexual, images disturb many because such pictures suggest that not only one’s sexual orientation, but also his or her very gender--and, therefore, a person’s identity as an individual--may be more fluid and flexible than people generally suppose.

Horror fiction plays with notions of both gender and sexual orientation. For example, traditionally, women, not men, have been the victims of the monster’s or the madman’s misogynistic rage, in part as Edgar Allan Poe implied, decades ago, because “the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world” (“The Philosophy of Composition”).

In “Her Body, Himself,” Carol J. Clover summarizes a number of loosely related “figurative readings” (283) of “slasher films,” which “present. . . a world in which male and female are at desperate odds with one another but in which, at the same time, masculine and feminine are more states of mind than body” (Gender, Language, and Myth: Essays on Popular Narrative, 252).

When directors film death scenes from the perspective of the monster or the madman, the moviegoer sees what the antagonist sees; arguably, to some degree, the audience also thinks and feels as the monster or the madman thinks and feels. Such a perspective certainly invites the viewer to identify with the killer, but, according to Clover, it also invites the viewer to identify with the killer’s victim: “Just as attacker and attacked are expressions of the same self in nightmares, so they are expressions of the same viewer in horror films. . . . We are both Red Riding Hood and the Wolf; the force of the experience, the horror, comes from ‘knowing’ both sides of the story” (258).

In slasher films, defined by Clover as movies in which “a psycho-killer. . . slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is himself subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived” (252), the antagonist himself is often a victim of “gender confusion” and arrested development, or “infantile fury” (260-261), and “even killers whose childhood is not immediately at issue and who display no overt gender confusion are often sexually disturbed” (261). It is with this confusion, this arrested development, and this disturbance that horror films are concerned, Clover suggests.

The “gender confusion” that is often at the heart of male slashers is an effect and a reflection, perhaps, of the psychologically, socially, and, indeed, politically plastic, even protean, nature of culture itself, of culture’s own accidental (as opposed to necessary) and constructed (as opposed to given) character. Just as gender, if not sexuality, is not biologically determined but is culturally shaped, so are the other elements of civilization, such as its psychology, social communities and nations, and political structures and institutions.

The protean, variable, mutable, and, above all, synthetic nature of culture allows horror not only to exist but to shift its shape and to take on new forms--in a word, to transform. The transformative nature of culture benefits the fantastic as it is represented in cinema, too: “If the fantastic depends for its effect on an uncertainty of vision, a profusion of perspectives, and a confusion of subjective and objective,” Clover contends, “cinema is pre-eminently suited to the fantastic” (256). The transgender themes discernable in horror fiction, both printed and filmed, dovetail with the transformative nature of culture and fantastic art. Moreover, either sex is able to identify with itself or its opposite because both males and females share the “threat function and the victim function,” which “coexist in the same unconscious, regardless of anatomical sex” (276). Regardless of an individual’s sex, transgender perception, like “gender confusion,” is rooted, it seems, as much in nature as it is in the individual’s nurturing..

With the introduction of the “Final Girl,” who “alone looks death in the face. . . [and] finds the strength either to stay the killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B)” (266), Clover sees a transformation, rather than a mere development, of the formula that Alfred Hitchcock established in his 1960 movie Psycho, a forerunner, of sorts, to the slasher genre:

With the introduction of the Final Girl. . . the Psycho formula is radically altered. It is not merely a question of enlarging the figure of Lila [Marion Crane’s sister] but of absorbing into her role, in varying degrees, the functions of Arbogast (investigator) and Sam (the rescuer) and restructuring the narrative action from beginning to end around her progress in relation to the killer. In other words, Psycho’s detective plot, revolving around a revelation, yields in the modern slasher film, to a hero plot, revolving around the main character’s struggle with eventual triumph over evil (270-271).

Like the monster or the madman, the “final girl” is also apt to blend gender. She is, Clover says, “a “boyish” figure (266), and “lest we miss the points,” she adds, “it [her masculinity] is spelled out in her name: Stevie, Marti, Terry. . . Stretch, Will” (270). If the viewer is invited to see him- or herself as both the “attacker and [the] attacked,” as both “Red Riding Hood and the Wolf,” then he or she is also invited to see him- or herself as both masculine and feminine, as both male and female, or, in a word, as transgender. In short, Clover says, “filmmakers seems [sic] to know better than film critics that gender is less a wall than a permeable membrane” (275).

Clover sees a Freudian dynamic at work in the cross-gendering of the final girl. This character, she contends, is a stand-in for the adolescent male who is progressing, via the Oedipal complex, from the latent to the phallic stage of his psychosexual development. The killer represents the father, the final girl the son who fights for both his own life and his emerging manhood:

It is the male killer’s tragedy that his incipient femininity is not reversed but completed (castration) and the Final Girl’s victory that her incipient masculinity is not thwarted but realized (phallicization). . . . The moment at which the Final Girl is effectively phallicized is the moment that the plot halts and the horror ceases. Day breaks, and the community returns to its normal order (279).

Although Clover’s tone, as she summarizes these “figurative readings” of slasher films is objective to the point that the reader may assume that she herself shares these interpretations, she makes it clear, toward the end of her essay, that she finds fault with some of their assertions. She questions whether the basically “homoerotic” interpretation that views the final girl as a surrogate male adolescent struggling to realize her--or his--phallic promise in the Oedipal murder of the killer (father) can account for the enjoyment of these films by female moviegoers. Perhaps some other dynamic accounts for young women’s pleasure in witnessing “a psycho-killer. . . [as he] slashes to death a string of mostly female victims, one by one, until he is himself subdued or killed, usually by the one girl who has survived.” However, Clover’s questions suggest that “gender confusion” is certainly an element of such movies and, probably, among such moviegoers:

Some such notion of differential understanding underlines the homoerotic reading. The silent presupposition is that reading is that there can be no male identification with the female as female, and that the male viewer/reader who adjoins feminine experience does so only by homosexual conversion. But does female identification with male experience then similarly indicate as lesbian conversion? Or are the processes of patriarchy so one-way that the female can identify with the male directly, but the male can identify with the female only by transsexualizing her? Does the Final Girl mean ‘girl’ to her female viewers and ‘boy’ to her male viewers? If her masculine features qualify him as a transformed woman (in which case the homoerotic reading can be maintained only by defining that ‘woman’ as phallic and retransforming her into defining that ‘woman’ as phallic and retransforming her into a male)? (283)

Nevertheless, Clover agrees that slasher films are basically about “gender confusion”: “The gender-identity game. . . is too patterned and too pervasive in the slasher film to be dismissed as supervenient. It seems instead to be an integral element of the particular brand of bodily sensation in which the genre trades” (286). Instead of the transsexual or homoerotic readings that are typical among Freudian film critics in their discussions of slasher films, Clover simply suggests that the final girl’s feminine-masculine characterization reflects the contemporary understanding of sex as being both fixed and determined (“a less-than interesting given,” Clover says) but gender as fluid and flexible (“theater,” Clover says):

Abject fear is still ‘gendered’ feminine. . . . By 1980, however, the male rescuer is either marginal or dispensed with altogether. . . . At the moment that the Final Girl becomes her own saviour, she becomes a hero. . . . [and] the willingness of one immensely popular genre to re-represent the hero as an anatomical female seems to suggest that at least one of the traditional marks of heroism, triumphant self-rescue, is no longer strictly ‘gendered’
masculine . . . .(298)

. . . The fact that we have in the killer a feminine male and in the main character a masculine female--parent and Everyteen, respectively--seems, especially in the latter case, to suggest a loosening of the categories, or at least of the equation ‘sex = gender’ (292).

Moreover, Clover believes that she knows what sociopolitical upheaval has caused the phenomenon of the hermaphroditic final girl; she is the product of the feminism of the 1960s and the societal changes that this movement effected:

The fact that the typical patrons of these films are the sons of marriages contracted in the 1960s or even the early 1970s leads us to speculate that the dire claims of that era--that the women’s movement, the entry of women into the workplace, and the rise of divorce and woman-headed families would yield massive gender confusion in the next generation (292).

What’s in a Name?: More (and Less) Than One Might Think

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

Anyone who has entered his or her name in an Internet image browser is likely, unless he or she has a truly unique appellation, to have had the rather disconcerting experience of having come face to face, so to speak, with a stranger who shares the same name. This experience is all the more unsettling if the other person is of a different race or ethnic group or (if one bears a unisex name) the opposite sex. Social utility websites allow the same distressing experience.

Sometimes, other media provide the same result. In Las Vegas, a billboard advertises George Wallace, an African American comedian who appears at the Flamingo Hotel and Casino in Las Vegas, Nevada. Younger folks often miss the irony of the entertainer’s name’s being identical to that of the racist former Alabama governor who resisted the initiation of segregation during the early years of the Civil Rights movement, standing in the doorway of the University of Alabama’s Foster Auditorium to bar the 1963 enrollment of the school’s first black students, Vivian Malone and James Hood (“George Wallace,” Wikipedia).

According to Wikipedia’s “disambiguation” list for “George Wallace,” no fewer than eleven more-or-less famous men share this name, among them the former governor; his son; the American comedian and two other such entertainers; a football player; several politicians; foreign and domestic; an actor; an army officer; and a politician. No doubt, there are several less-famous men with this name as well.
 



Occasionally, people also change their names, Norman Jean Baker becoming Marilyn Monroe and Marion Mitchell Morrison becoming John Wayne, for example, and others who would not have shared the names with such celebrities now having their names in common with such an entertainer. (One thinks of the serial killer John Wayne Gacy, for example, sharing a name with the Western film star but not with the actor previously known as Marion Mitchell Morrison.)

To most of us, our name is a representation not merely of syllables of sound but of who we are, of ourselves. We think of ourselves as unique. Indeed, we are told, in our youth, that there is no other person quite like us, that we are in a class by itself, the one and only of our kind. Discovering that we share a name with someone else or that we can change our names or that our names can come from other names, even from names that are associated with the opposite sex, is surprising; it is also a bit disconcerting, suggesting that our identities might not be as fixed and permanent as we had previously supposed them to be. If we can share our names with others, maybe we could also become other. We could become a member of the opposite sex. We could become a serial killer. We could become a bigot. We could (if we are women) lose our own identities to those whom we wed. The truth of the matter, of course, is that our identities are not as fixed and permanent as we might believe. Over time, our attitudes, our beliefs, our feelings, our tastes, our values all change; we change. Nevertheless, we believe (or hope) that, at the very core of our being, our hearts and souls remain unchanged. We trust that the essence of ourselves remains unique and incorruptible, both to time and to events. Otherwise, we fear, at some point, we would cease to exist. The loss of identity is the loss of the self to madness or to death. Eve on our gravestones, our names remain--for a time. When the elements have finally obliterated our names, it shall be as if we never existed. There will be no remnant of our identities, of our being, or ourselves.

Therefore, we are jealous of our names, and we guard them zealously, fearing identity theft as much because it is a violation of who we are as because it promotes financial disaster for us as individuals.

Prisoners abhor the loss of their names, which occurs when they are issued numbers in place of their names. They feel that they have been made less than human by being designated numerically rather than alphabetically, as if their identities have been reduced to the nomenclature of mechanical parts and assemblies. Marines also dislike drill instructors’ refusal to allow them, as recruits, to refer to themselves in the first person, as “I” or “me,” and the demand that, instead, they speak of themselves only as “the private.” They perceive the dehumanization that such attempts at resocialization have upon them as individuals.

Horror fiction plays upon our fears of transformation, of loss of identity, and of life itself. Horror writers and filmmakers know what is and is not in a name and how to translate these fears onto a printed page or onto the silver screen. Human beings undergo terrible transformations, becoming werewolves or vampires. They lose themselves to madness. They suffer agonizing deaths at the hands of others who have lost their own minds and souls.

Such films as David Cronenberg’s The Fly (1986), a remake of the 1958 version directed by Kurt Neumann; Paul Schrader’s Cat People (1982); the several versions of the Robert Louis Stevenson classic The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; Norman J. Warren’s Inseminoid (1982), John Carl Buechler’s Troll (1986), and Laurence Huntington’s The Vulture (1967) are just a few of the many, many titles of horror movies involving transformation that Buried.com lists for this category.

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories often feature protagonists who suffer a loss of themselves to madness, but this is a current theme among writers and filmmakers today as well, as is attested by such stories as John Fowles’ 1963 novel The Collector, the Friday the 13^th movie series, the 1995 John Carpenter film In the Mouth of Madness (based upon the 1936 H. P. Lovecraft novella At the Mountains of Madness), and, of course the classic 1960 Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho (based upon Robert Bloch’s 1959 novel of the same title).

Why should our sharing our names with strangers be disconcerting? I think it is because we invest symbolic value in them. Our first names are given to us by our parents. Our last names identify our families and, therefore, our lineage. Perhaps it is unsettling for those women who opt to take their husbands’ names in lieu of the surnames by which, until they marry, they have been known all their lives. Certainly, the custom alters their perspective--and that of society’s--to some degree as to married women’s identities. Women are seen as more fluid than fixed in their identities. Not only do they shift shape (during pregnancy), but they are also likely to change their very identities, Miss Emily Jones, for example, becoming Mrs. Emily Smith. In formal correspondence, married women may be stripped even of the very remnant of their personal identity and their femininity that their first, or given name, provides them, becoming the “Mrs. John Smith” whose name appears after her husband’s: “Mr. and Mrs. John Smith.” Even women who remain single often derive their identity from another person of the opposite sex: Paulette and Paula both owe their names to the masculine Paul, for instance, just as the name Denise is derived from the masculine name Dennis. It must be disconcerting, indeed, for a Samantha to realize that her feminine name is based upon a variation of the masculine Samuel.

Death is a staple of horror stories, novels, and films. Virtually every one of them alludes to or, more often, features at east one (and usually several, or even many) savage murders. However, the so-called slasher movies, wherein nubile hotties for the most part, are sliced and diced for audience members’ vicarious viewing pleasure, is perhaps the most extreme sort of this type of fare. Slasher titles include Jack Sholder’s Alone in the Dark (1982), John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978), Jim Gillespie’s I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997) (based upon the 1973 Lois Duncan novel of the same title), Victor Salva’s Jeepers Creepers (2001), Kevin Connor’s Motel Hell (1980), Robert Hiltzik’s Sleepaway Camp (1983), Rob Schmidt’s Wrong Turn (2003) (reminiscent of my own 2008 Blue Mountain Detour), and a host of others.

While writers and filmmakers are careful to disguise the fact that they are playing with readers’ and moviegoers’ identities by casting their treatments of this theme in terms of other “people’s” names (those of the characters who populate their pages or screens), make no mistake about it: a reader or a moviegoer by any other name would suffer the same existential angst as the characters who experience physical transformation, madness, or death in place of their voyeuristic audiences.

What’s in a name? More (and less) than one might think!

Isolating Your Characters

Copyright 2010 by Gary L. Pullman

In a previous post (“Horror as Image and Word”) , I spoke of the benefit that authors of horror stories can derive from physically isolating their characters. By locating the story’s action in a remote setting, a writer heightens their vulnerability. They are more helpless than they might be otherwise, had they not been cut off from the larger community, society, or nation in which they live, having no access to emergency medical services, law enforcement personnel, financial institutions, or even friends and family. They are on their own, with no one and nothing else to assist them.

There’s another way to isolate characters besides that of locating them in remote places, far from the madding crowd: separate them from others by making them shy, emotionally detached or withdrawn, or even antisocial. (I touch upon this topic in my earlier post, “Ray Bradbury’s ‘Love Potion ’: Learning from the Masters.”) Psychological or emotional isolation has similar effects to physical isolation, making it difficult for a character to share his or her true and deepest thoughts and emotions with others. A shy or socially withdrawn character is likely to be incommunicative beyond the most superficial level, and an antisocial character is apt to go so far as to lie to others, even on a routine basis.

Wikipedia describes shyness as a manifestation of such tendencies as an avoidance of “the objects of their apprehension in order to keep from feeling uncomfortable,” which initiates a vicious circle of sorts, in which “the situations remain unfamiliar and the shyness perpetuates itself.” Shyness, the article indicates, may be a temporary or a permanent condition, and it may be mild or extreme, adding:

The condition of true shyness may simply involve the discomfort of difficulty in knowing what to say in social situations, or may include crippling physical manifestations of uneasiness. Shyness usually involves a combination of both symptoms, and may be quite devastating for the sufferer, in many cases leading them to feel that they are boring, or exhibit bizarre behavior in an attempt to create interest, alienating them further. Behavioral traits in social situations such as smiling, easily producing suitable conversational topics, assuming a relaxed posture and making good eye contact, which come spontaneously for the average person. . . may not be second nature for a shy person. Such people might only effect such traits by great difficulty, or they may even be impossible to display. . . In fact, those who are shy are actually perceived more negatively because of the way they act towards others. Shy individuals are often distant during conversations, which may cause others to create poor impressions of them, simply adding to their shyness in social situations (“Shyness”).

Jack Torrance, the protagonist of The Shining isn’t shy as much as he is socially detached from the world, or socially withdrawn. He is a mystery, if not exactly a stranger, even to his own wife and son. In discussing this character in an earlier post, “Narrative and Dramatic Techniques,” I indicated how, according to literary critics, the filmmaker, Stanley Kubrick, used his motion picture camera’s photography of a mountain to characterize Torrance as emotionally cold and detached.

Extremely wide vistas of the mountainous landscape induce a cold, detached and depersonalized perspective. Humans are unimportant in this vast physical, and metaphysical, terrain. . . .

Jack undergoes a freezing of emotional warmth and empathy. His blood runs cold, both figuratively and literally, as he becomes one with the forces of winter and death (Anna Powell, Deleuze and Horror Film, 43-44).

As a result of his detachment, Torrance both becomes a monster, and his cold-heartedness becomes the death of him when, trapped inside a maze following a blizzard, he freezes to death as he pursues his young son, intent upon murdering the boy.

The antisocial personality disorder is different than shyness. Recognizing it as a mental illness of sorts, the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Manual defines this condition as “a pervasive pattern of disregard for, and violation of, the rights of others that begins in childhood or early adolescence and continues into adulthood.” (“Antisocial Personality Disorder,” Wikipedia). Serial killer Ted Bundy, among others, is said to have had such a condition. The disorder is marked by such symptoms as

[a] persistent lying or stealing; [an] apparent lack or remorse or empathy for others; cruelty to animals; poor behavioral controls. . ; a history of childhood conduct disorder; recurring difficulties with the law; [a] tendency to violate the boundaries and rights of others; substance abuse; aggressive, often violent behavior. . . [an] inability to tolerate boredom; [and a] disregard for safety” (“Antisocial Personality Disorder”).

Such additional conditions are often associated with ant personality disorder as “anxiety disorder, depressive disorder, substance-related disorders, somatization disorder, pathological risk-seeking, borderline personality disorder, histrionic personality disorder, [and] narcissistic personality disorder” (“Antisocial Personality Disorder”).

In short, those who are afflicted with the antisocial personality disorder are hard to get along with. They are dangerous not only to themselves, but to others as well. Moreover, despite the dazzling array of symptoms and associated disorders, such individuals can, and do, pass as normal among others. Bundy was not only considered sane by the team of psychiatric and psychological doctors who examined him, but by the coworker (and author of The Stranger Beside Me) Ann Rule, who worked alongside him in a Seattle crisis clinic for a year and a half. Young women often found the brutal killer attractive, and he had no problem in finding victims among the college coeds he frequently targeted. Even during his incarceration and trial, he had suitors among the female sex, one of whom, Carole Ann Boone, married him on the witness stand as Bundy cross-examined her, allegedly bearing the serial killer a daughter. During his career as a serial killer, however, Bundy killed somewhere between thirty and a hundred and thirty young women, one as young as twelve years old.

Interestingly, one critic, John E. Reilly, diagnoses the narrator of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-tale Heart” as a “paranoid schizophrenic” (“The Lesser Death-Watch and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’,” American Transcendental Quarterly, Vol. 2, Second Quarter, 1969, 3-9), a diagnosis with which another critic, Brett Zimmerman, agrees in “‘Moral Insanity’ or Paranoid Schizophrenia: Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’” Mosaic, Vol. 25, No. 2, Spring, 1992, 39-48). This storyteller’s mental illness has obviously alienated him (or, some critics recently claim, her) from both reality and his (or her) kinsman, whom he (or she) murders.

One need not suffer from either antisocial personality disorder or paranoid schizophrenia to be emotionally detached or withdrawn. Shyness will also accomplish the goal of psychologically isolating a character from his or her peers and making him or her emotionally (and, indeed, physically) vulnerable to the monster, human or otherwise, who stalks a group of men and women, and a shy person may be regarded with sympathy on the part of the reader, whereas, despite his or her mental illnesses, neither an antisocial nor a paranoid schizophrenic is likely to garner much in the way of the reader’s compassion or even understanding. The writer may want to make a character who is stalked but not killed shy, but the character who is both stalked and killed antisocial or schizophrenic--or, for that matter, make the killer him- or herself antisocial or schizophrenic. There is, of course, another option for writers who want to isolate their characters so as to cut them off from all outside support and assistance: isolate them physically, by locating the story’s action in a remote and inaccessible setting, and then further isolate them by making one or more of the characters shy, antisocial, or schizophrenic.