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Love and Death in Stephen King's
Pet Sematary
Terry Heller
Department of English
Coe College
Introduction
This essay was commissioned and
written in 1992 for a
collection on Pet Sematary that was
scheduled to join the Starmont
Press series of collections on Stephen King's horror
novels. The closing
of Starmont Press after the death of its owner
shifted the contract for
this collection to Borgo Press and a new, but
delayed production schedule.
Then in 2000, Borgo Press went out of business,
leaving the book without
a home and without another likely publisher, after 8
years of valiant work,
including final editing, by the collection's editor,
Douglas Keesey of
California Polytechnic State University.
At that
point, I decided that
I lacked the time to review the research and revise
this essay for submission
to journals, even though I believe it offers an
interesting and provocative
reading of Pet Sematary. Therefore, the
essay appears here, where
I hope readers who are interested in one of King's
more intriguing novels
will find it and enjoy it.
Copyright 1992-2001 by Terry
Heller
You have permission to download and
print this for personal
use.
I would appreciate being
informed if you
plan to print multiple copies for teaching
purposes.
You must obtain
permission for any commercial
use of this writing.
Contact: theller at coe dot
edu.
Love and
Death in Stephen King's
Pet Sematary
"So the universal thump is passed
round, and all hands
should rub each other's shoulder-blades, and be
content."
Ishmael in Herman
Melville's Moby-Dick
(97).
"But I
reckon I got
to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,
because aunt Sally she's
going to adopt me and sivilize me and I can't stand
it. I been there before"
(Twain 362). With these words, Huckleberry Finn
abandons the society that
promises him family love if he is willing to pay a
price in personal freedom
and integrity. He will flee into Indian Territory,
crossing the border
between the domestic and the wild. Leslie Fiedler
argues that this move
is archetypal in American literature. Ever since
Irving's "Rip Van Winkle,"
"the typical male protagonist of our fiction has
been a man on the run,
harried into the forest and out to sea, down the
river or into combat --
anywhere to avoid `civilization,' which is to say,
the confrontation of
a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex,
marriage, and responsibility"
(Fiedler 26). Looking at Stephen King's Pet
Sematary (1983) from
within this context suggests an interpretation that
seems to reveal a good
deal about how that novel may work as a gothic tale,
for in American gothic
fiction, the male's escape from the domestic is
often into a nightmare
such as that typified by the night journey of
Hawthorne's Young Goodman
Brown.
Burton
Hatlen has argued persuasively
that when supernatural evil appears in King's
novels, it usually functions
as a visible manifestation of personal and social
forces that otherwise
tend to remain hidden (Hatlen, see especially 83).
In Pet Sematary,
the Wendigo may be seen as a supernatural
manifestation of Dr. Louis Creed's
desire to escape responsibility for holding his
family together. When the
dying student, Pascow, warns Louis not to go into
the Indian Territory
of the Micmac Burial Ground, he emphasizes that the
price of crossing the
border will be the loss of all that Louis loves. The
warning presupposes
the temptation, the secret desire that Louis does
not know he has felt
already. At the root of this desire is the hope for
a personal exemption
from mortality. Louis entertains a wish to escape
death throughout the
novel, resisting it before Gage's death and giving
in to it afterwards.
Once he turns himself over to the Wendigo in the
attempt to bring Gage
back to life, Louis works for the destruction of his
family, though without
conscious understanding of what he is doing. And one
of the things that
makes this novel so horrifying is that,
unconsciously, Louis has wanted
this destruction all along.
I need to be
very clear at the
outset that I do not believe Louis's true
desire was to destroy
his family; I agree with King's statement that in
this novel he created
a most sympathetic group of characters (Bare
Bones 100). Rather,
my argument will suggest that Louis, like most
people, contains conflicting
desires. Consciously, he loves and wants to preserve
his family, but unconsciously
he rebels against their dependence upon him,
especially against the feeling
that their needs restrain him from realizing
something essential in himself.
And this unconscious rebellion is, at its deeper
levels, connected directly
with his fear of death. In Love and Will,
Rollo May argues that
human mortality is at the root of our ability to
love, and he quotes Abraham
Maslow to that effect: "Death, and its ever present
possibility makes love,
passionate love, more possible. I wonder if we could
love passionately,
if ecstasy would be possible at all, if we knew we'd
never die" (May 98).
In Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, the
young protagonist, George
Willard, when he becomes aware of his own mortality,
finds that he wishes
to draw near to other people at a spiritual level
(Anderson 235, 240-1).
Louis Creed's experience demonstrates the opposing
movement: to achieve
immortality one may have to surrender the power of
loving.
In this
essay, I will develop
a reading of Pet Sematary that shows how we
can make sense of the
novel as a story of the escape and objectification
of Louis's repressed
desire for exemption from death. I will develop this
interpretation by
focusing on the Wendigo, showing how it objectifies
Louis's repressed desires,
what those desires are, and how they are revealed in
the novel. It will
be helpful to examine how the Wendigo, the novel's
principal monster, appears
and functions before we look into Louis's repressed
desires.
The Wendigo
appears in two quite
different realms in Pet Sematary. Louis
first meets it in the dream
land beyond the deadfall, where its forms are
somewhat vague and mythical.
He later meets it in the ordinary world, where it
inhabits the body of
his dead two-year-old son, Gage. The dream land
occurs in a physical setting
as well as in Louis's dreams. It is the realm of the
Indian Woods, where
the Micmac Burial Ground is. King sets up this
wilderness carefully. It
is said to be haunted, to evade ownership, to be a
place where one can
easily get lost, to have vague, perhaps non-existent
boundaries. Pascow
tells Louis to remain on the pastoral side, where
the scenery is beautiful,
family is unified, and even children learn to accept
death as final (87).
When Louis sees the Wendigo in the wilderness and
again later in a nightmare,
it is a grotesque, laughing god, a face with
up-tilted, yellowish-gray,
gleaming eyes, mouth drawn down in a rictus, lower
lip turned out, blackish-brown,
worn down teeth, ram's horns for ears, black pulsing
veins in the lips,
flared nostrils expelling white vapors, a long,
pointed, dirty-yellow,
scaled and peeling tongue, with a white worm
underneath it (362, 390).
This realm, then, is a physically existing dream
land, like Goodman Brown's
forest, where the dark man waits to welcome erring
humans into his fellowship.
And like Hawthorne's forest, the Indian Woods exists
at two levels, as
an actual place and as the realm of nightmares,
where humanity's darker
fears take physical form and from which they
threaten to escape if encouraged.
Within the
world of the novel,
the Wendigo is physically confined to the wilderness
unless someone buries
a dead being, especially a human being, at the
Micmac Burial Ground. Then,
the Wendigo may send a physical manifestation of
itself into the outer
world by inhabiting the body of the dead one. If the
dead one is human,
the Wendigo's power in the ordinary world is
increased. What is this Wendigo?
What rules apply to it? What does it want,
especially of Louis Creed?
"You saved
Norma's life, and
I wanted to do something for you, and that place
turned my good wish to
its own evil purpose. It has a power . . . and I
think that power goes
through phases, same as the moon. It's been full of
power before, and I'm
ascared it's coming around to full again. I'm
ascared it used me to get
at you through your son" (275). This is Jud
Crandall's theory about the
power centered in the Micmac Burial Ground. Jud is
trying at this point
to persuade Louis not to attempt the resurrection of
Gage. Jud believes
that those who come back are not the same as those
who are buried, that
in fact the revenants are demons. The story Jud
tells about the burial
and return during World War II of Tim Baterman is
intended to illustrate
this point.
Jud's theory
and demonstration
provide a clear and direct explanation of the
Wendigo's purposes. Jud believes
that at some point in Micmac history, this burial
ground was abandoned,
apparently because its sacredness was reversed as a
result of burying victims
of cannibalism there (156-7). Jud's experience with
the revenant Tim Baterman
suggests that the Wendigo wants human bodies to be
buried in the unholy
burial ground. The one time this has happened in
Jud's experience, a demon
was loosed temporarily on the community. This demon
did little physical
harm, though it drove Baterman's father to madness
and suicide. The evil
that Jud remembers most vividly was that the demon
revealed what it knew,
the bad things about the people it met, information
that destroyed or threatened
to destroy trust and love between husband and wife,
parent and child (271-2).
The Wendigo
seems to be a personification
of evil, and its purpose, like evil in numerous
stories from Shakespeare
to William Blatty, is to undermine some essential
aspect of the faith that
makes life meaningful and preserves people from
despair. Though the Wendigo
is confined to the Indian Woods, except when it can
inhabit a dead body,
its influence seems nevertheless to extend beyond
that area. At various
points in the story, that power is felt to draw Jud
and Louis to bury Church,
to influence the truck driver who kills Louis's son,
to help Louis send
his wife, Rachel, and their daughter, Ellie, to
Chicago so they cannot
interfere with his plans to resurrect Gage, to
prevent Jud from interfering
with this plan, and finally to draw Rachel back to
her death at the hands
of the demon/Gage.
Once one sees what
may
be the extent of the Wendigo's power over distance
and its knowledge of
persons and events, one wonders about how Louis
becomes involved with it.
At what point does he come under its influence? Does
it nurture him from
his birth, laying out a fate for him that must lead
to his final encounter
with the demon/Rachel? Or does it become interested
in him only when he
arrives in Ludlow? Why does it not continuously draw
likely victims to
it and use them in the way it arranges the fate of
Louis Creed? These questions
imply that we might consider the Wendigo not as the
cause of Louis's fate,
but as the agent of his repressed wishes. The
Wendigo becomes active because
Louis comes to it; its power depends upon human
agents coming to it with
purposes of their own, just as Jud did. And when
they do, it makes real
the secret purposes lurking beneath the consciously
acknowledged ones.
When Jud says that the Wendigo turns his good wish
to its own evil purposes,
he may mean that it gives Jud's own evil wishes
power over his good wishes.
This view of
the Wendigo is consistent
with what may be its best known earlier appearance
in Algernon Blackwood's
story. There, the Wendigo is "the Call of the Wild
personified, which some
natures hear to their own destruction" (Blackwood
196), one of the "savage
and formidable Potencies lurking behind the souls of
men, not evil perhaps
in themselves, yet instinctively hostile to humanity
as it exists" (Blackwood
205). In Blackwood, the Wendigo is a spirit of
wildness that allows the
supernatural satisfaction of the uncivilized side of
masculine desire.
What evidence is there of uncivilized yearnings in
Louis?
Louis's
supernatural experiences
begin the day he consents to the castration of
Church, the family cat.
When the subject of castration first comes up, Louis
is shown to be unsure
why he canceled Church's first appointment in
Chicago: "It wasn't anything
as simple or as stupid as equating his masculinity
with that of his daughter's
tom, nor even his resentment at the idea that Church
would have to be castrated
so the fat housewife next door wouldn't need to be
troubled with twisting
down the lids of her plastic garbage cans--those
things had been part of
it, but most of it had been a vague but strong
feeling that it would destroy
something in Church that he himself valued--that it
would put out the go-to-hell
look in the cat's green eyes" (29). The spirit of
wildness would be gone,
and Church would lose that part of himself that is
most vulnerable to the
call of the Wendigo in Blackwood's tale, the
wanderlust (Blackwood 196).
In this instance, the masculine cat's freedom to
roam is a threat to a
feminine sense of order. It is interesting that in
Maurice Sendak's Where
the Wild Things Are, a book King alludes to
more than once in Pet
Sematary (e.g. 76, 82), Max, the main
character, wears a cat suit on
his journey away from a restraining mother and into
the land of the wild
things, some of whom look a little like the Wendigo.
After the move to
Maine, Church's freedom becomes a threat to Rachel
and Ellie's desire for
continuing stability in their family, for they begin
to fear that Church
will wander onto the dangerous road and be killed.
Immediately after first
discussing this threat with Jud and remembering his
earlier feelings about
the prospect of castration, Louis returns to his
sleeping family on their
first night in their new home and thinks interesting
thoughts. Seeing his
family asleep, he goes to Gage in particular, where
his heart fills "with
a love for the boy so strong that it seemed almost
dangerous," and then,
in his sleep, he dreams of himself and Gage--without
the women--in Disney
World (31). When he later announces his willingness
to let Church be castrated,
he finds he has put his finger on what Rachel really
wants, and there is
at least a hint of resentment in his recognition
that their fairly serious
fight over what he should tell Ellie about death
seems to have resolved
itself by settling their disagreement about whether
Church should be castrated
(65-6).
Further
meanings emerge from
this issue after Church is castrated, particularly
when we compare Louis's
observations of Church after the operation with his
earlier reactions upon
visiting the deadfall on the day after Pascow's
dream warning not to pass
beyond it--which is also Church's "last day as a
card-carrying tomcat and
ladykiller" (99). When Louis visits the deadfall he
experiences multiple,
internal voices. The voices of his family and of
Pascow require him to
behave responsibly by restraining his wanderlust; in
the tone of a slave
master or foreman, this voice orders him not to
climb the deadfall. Another
voice seems to acquiesce with "Okay, boss"
(99-100). But a silent
agent, his resisting unconscious, sends him right up
the deadfall, just
far enough so he can glimpse a path beyond it. It is
clear that he wants
to exercise his masculine freedom to cross borders
and leave civilization
behind, and it should be clear that something in him
believes there is
a paradise of bachelors, rather like his vision of
Disney World, that he
might reach by this route. When Church returns home
from his surgery, Ellie's
welcome and her exclusive attention--which includes
a severe rebuke to
Gage for trying to touch the cat--may remind us of
Rachel's sexual reward
to Louis for agreeing to allow the castration (101).
And Louis is saddened,
not only by the change in Church, but by the fact
that the women seem to
notice no change at all (101-2). To them, Church is
just as he is supposed
to be, but to Louis it is clear that Church no
longer wants to go outside
or to cross the road. This is what Louis sees his
women demanding of him,
that he not cross the deadfall, that he not go
outside the boundaries they
have set for him. Though the months preceding Gage's
death include the
best sexual relations of the Creed's marriage, there
is something in Louis
that chafes at this, that does not like the fact
that the women have had
their way at the expense of something vital in
himself and in Church.
This look at
Louis's response
to Church's castration makes fairly clear his
repressed anger toward Ellie
and Rachel as well as its main cause in his sense of
being hampered, restrained,
unmanned by their demands for domestic stability.
Louis's resentment may
well be the cause of Church's death; if we believe
that the Wendigo expresses
Louis's unconscious will, then the cat's wandering
may be the Wendigo's
carrying out of Louis's wishes to remove a
reflection of the self he resists
becoming, to punish Ellie for hurting Gage, and to
punish both Ellie and
Rachel for having their ways with him. That he feels
hostility toward Ellie
and Rachel becomes especially obvious on the morning
after he and Jud bury
Church. On that morning, some of Louis's restrained
desires break loose
(142-3). The women are away in Chicago. Louis
believes Church is dead and
buried, having no clear notion as yet that the cat
will come back. He declines
to return Rachel's phone call, unwilling to deal
with her mother, with
her, and with Ellie. He imagines hurting them with
the news of Church's
death. He enjoys making an elaborate meatloaf
sandwich and thinking about
how they would react to his smelling like a pig and
eating like a pig were
they there. In violation of Rachel's wishes, he
drinks his milk directly
from the carton, and then goes to bed "without even
washing his teeth"
(143). Kept from the women, this childish behavior
cannot offend them,
yet he enjoys it precisely because it would offend
them if they knew. Jud
also represses anger toward his wife, a resentment
that is mirrored in
the Creed marriage.
We get a
glimpse of the dark
side of Jud when his wife, Norma, has her heart
attack on Halloween. Jud
is asking Louis to examine her because she has been
refusing, out of fear,
to see a doctor about her chest pains. He says, "If
we can catch her one
night, gang up on her, I think--" (106). Here Jud
breaks off, and something
secret and never spoken passes between the men. Jud
was talking about forcing
her to be examined, but something else entered his
mind. Louis is never
able to account for this: "All he could remember for
sure was that curiosity
changed swiftly to a feeling that somewhere
something had gone badly wrong"
(106). They are looking at something true in each
other's eyes when Norma
has the attack. This "something" remains unexplained
until two incidents
come together at the end of the story. One incident
is Jud's confession--as
part of the tale of Tim Baterman--that he was
sexually unfaithful to Norma.
This is paired with the revelation, probably true,
by demon/Gage just before
he kills Jud that Norma was joyously and mockingly
unfaithful to Jud with
all of his friends (381). Taken together, these
events suggest that Jud
has unconsciously suspected Norma's behavior, that
his image of ganging
up on her to examine her recalls this suspicion, and
that it may lead directly
to Norma's heart attack, assisted by the Wendigo.
The attack, in turn,
allows Louis to save her, which allows Jud to be
grateful enough to feel
good about leading him to resurrect Church. This
gratitude, in turn, is
revealed to have a dark side, since bringing back
Church serves Louis in
his own self-destruction and, therefore, is the dark
side of what Jud would
want for the "son" who saved his unfaithful wife
when Jud wanted her dead.
This spiralling of motivations points toward the
terrifying inevitability
of the Wendigo's enacting dark wishes. Consciously,
Norma and Jud have
kept their infidelities and suspicions from each
other and, thereby, have
preserved a happy marriage, but when the power of
the Wendigo is loosed,
it magnifies and realizes repressed desires.
These events
are mirrored almost
precisely in Louis's marriage. He too has been
sexually unfaithful to Rachel,
in an incident that he represses (103). And he has
good reason to believe
Rachel has had other lovers, though probably before
their marriage, because
she claims to have learned at Girl Scouts the
masturbation technique she
shows him in the bathtub the evening after his
agreement to castrate Church
(81). Louis feels resentment of Rachel and Ellie on
several grounds, but
his core problem has to do with mortality, as is
shown in his elaboration
of the Disney World fantasy.
When Louis
and his family first
arrive at Ludlow, they are under considerable
stress, having driven from
Chicago to Maine--a new home and new job--with the
cat, five-year-old Ellie,
and not quite two-year-old Gage in their crowded
station wagon. As Louis
feels this stress, he has a momentary vision of
escape (16). He envisions
abandoning his family in a restaurant, while he
flees to Orlando to become
a medic at Disney World. In his vision, Disney World
is a cartoon land
where characters
Mickey Mouse are immortal. This vision returns
repeatedly in the novel, especially when Louis is
under stress with his
family, and it achieves its fullest realization
during the early morning
hours after he has planted the dead Gage in the
Micmac Burial Ground (374-6).
In the conscious vision preceding sleep, he and the
restored Gage have
run away, and they work together as medics at Disney
World. They go on
forever staving off temporarily the deaths of
others, and remain immune
themselves, having faced down in New England their
fantasy symbol of death,
"Oz the Gweat and Tewwible." Their Oz is, instead,
"that gentle faker from
Nebraska." Rachel and Ellie are pointedly not
in this vision. The
dark side of his paradise comes into Louis's
consciousness when he falls
asleep: "His dreams of Disney World had seemed to
blend naturally and with
a deadly ease into dreams of that thing. He dreamed
it had touched him,
spoiling all good dreams forever, rotting all good
intentions. It was the
Wendigo, and it had turned him into not just a
cannibal but the father
of cannibals" (390). In his dream, he is gathered at
the burial ground
with all those he knows who have been connected with
the cemetery, and
all are touched there by the Wendigo and transformed
into their dark opposite
selves.
Both Jud and
Louis repress hostility
toward their women that sometimes comes to the
surface. The Wendigo, too,
is often particularly offensive to women; see for
example, Jud's mother's
reaction to the resurrected Spot (162) and Norma's
reaction to the returned
Tim Baterman (268). Noticing this pattern also helps
to make sense of Jud's
oracular pronouncement about the Micmac Burial
Ground after the burial
of Church. Jud, under the influence of the Wendigo,
falsely counsels Louis
not to ask questions about what they have done, to "accept
what's done,
Louis, and follow your heart" (141). In the
process he says, "And the
things that are in a man's heart--it don't do him
much good to talk about
those things, does it? . . . No, . . . It don't. . .
. They are secret
things. Women are supposed to be the ones good at
keeping secrets, and
I guess they do keep a few, but any woman who knows
anything at all would
tell you she's never really seen into a man's heart.
The soil of a man's
heart is stonier, Louis--like the soil up there in
the old Micmac burying
ground. Bedrock's close. A man grows what he can . .
. and he tends it"
(141). From an ordinary point of view, these
statements make little sense.
There are secret things in a man's heart that he
ought to follow without
questioning? He especially should not talk about
these things with women?
A man's heart is like the Micmac Burial Ground, but
a woman's heart is
different? It is hard to make sense of these ideas
except as advice to
let repressed desires grow despite the opposition of
women and without
rational consideration of meanings and consequences,
to preserve at any
cost the masculine wish to transgress boundaries.
And it is hard to avoid
reading this as advice to tend the resentments that
float up as loosened
stones from the bedrock of hard and cold, repressed
desires. Such advice
undercuts the concluding statement to accept what's
done and follow one's
heart. One can accept death and move on; most would
consider this sane.
Or one can accept what Louis does not yet know he is
accepting, the possibility
of giving immortality to his repressed resentments
by turning them loose
on the world, especially his family, in the form of
demon revenants. Which
heart is he to follow? Couched clearly in terms that
affirm masculine assertion,
Jud's mediation of the Wendigo's "will" recommends
letting the dark heart
of repressed desire loose. Louis carries this
message home, acts it out
in the absence of his family, and goes to bed
without even washing his
teeth.
We can see
in Louis's heart,
then, repressed desires to harm Church (after his
castration), Rachel,
and Ellie, desires that the Wendigo helps to enact.
But does Louis also
harbor secret aggression toward Gage and Jud, the
remaining two main victims
of the Wendigo?
In Louis's
Disney World fantasy,
Gage is always a child. The dream takes place in a
stopped time, where
the son never grows up. This fantasy is opposed,
therefore, to his dream
of Gage's perfect life, in which the boy grows into
an Olympic champion--a
dream filled with hostility toward Rachel and her
family (275-78). Why
Louis secretly does not want Gage to grow up is made
fairly obvious in
the story. Children grow up to replace their
parents. Norma says that aging
and death are something one must accept (33), but
there is something in
Louis, and also in Rachel, and Ellie, that resists
accepting. When Ellie
returns excited from her first day at kindergarten,
Louis sees sadness
in Rachel's eyes, and he feels a moment of panic: "We're
really going
to get old, he thought. It's really true.
No one's going to make
an exception for us" (35). Only moments later
as he carries the sleeping
Gage to bed, he feels his first terror in the novel:
"such a premonition
of horror and darkness struck him that he
stopped--stopped cold. . . .
He held the baby tighter, almost clutching him, and
Gage stirred uncomfortably"
(35). At Norma's funeral, Louis reflects with some
bitterness on how the
old are replaced and forgotten: "God save the
past, Louis thought
and shivered for no good reason other than that the
day would come when
he would be every bit [as?] unfamiliar to his own
blood--if Ellie or Gage
produced kids and he lived to see them" (215). He
tells Ellie that one
reason old people die is to make room for the young,
and Ellie responds,
"I'm never going to get married or do sex and have
babies! Then maybe it'll
never happen to me! It's awful! It's m-m-mean!"
(215). It
is interesting that the child who so completely
expresses Louis's secret
longing survives to the end of the novel.
Whether
Louis represses hostility
toward Jud that may lead to his death seems more
difficult to establish.
It is suggestive that demon/Gage passes up an easy
opportunity to kill
Louis in his sleep, going instead to kill Jud and
await Rachel, but there
is much other interesting though indirect evidence
to suggest that part
of Louis wants Jud dead. "Louis Creed, who had lost
his father at three
and who had never known a grandfather, never
expected to find a father
as he entered his middle age, but that was exactly
what happened" (15).
This is how the novel opens. Because Louis sees Jud
as his father, we may
infer that he would harbor toward Jud the same
repressed feelings he imagines
Gage harbors toward his father, a desire to replace
him. After Gage's death,
when Jud tries to persuade Louis against
resurrecting the boy, Jud confesses
his fear that by taking Louis to the cemetery with
Church, he may have
helped cause Gage's death (275). Because Louis both
wanted and did
not want Gage's death, he has a cause for anger
against Jud insofar as
he believes Jud's fear justified. And Jud's story of
the resurrection of
Tim Baterman shows the revenant son bringing about
the death of his father.
This sort of evidence reveals that the theme of
sons' resentment toward
their fathers is present but muted in the story. Why
it should be muted
is suggested by Joseph Reino in his discussions of
the father/son motif
in King's early novels. King's father abandoned the
family when King was
two, and Reino connects this biographical event with
motifs in King's fiction,
such as the vanished father and the overcurious
child (Reino 1-8). Louis
lost his father at three, and Gage dies when he is
two, repeating this
separation from two points of view. It is reasonable
to assume that the
feelings that arise from King's early loss of his
father would not spill
easily and directly into his novels, and so it may
not be surprising that
the feelings of the abandoned son are not directly
present in the book.
However, the book is replete with the themes of
abandonment and of resentment
toward father figures outside the relationship
between Jud and Louis.
Consider for
example Irwin Goldman's
abandonment of his daughter, Rachel, at the deathbed
of the older daughter,
Zelda. Remember how Ellie comes apart as her father
ignores the warnings
of her dreams and then sends her away. And,
especially, consider Louis's
relationship with his father-in-law. Irwin plays
almost too obviously the
Freudian role of master of the primal horde,
opposing Louis's marrying
Rachel, trying to buy him off, making him feel
guilty about their premarital
sex, and later blaming him for Gage's death and
Rachel's suffering, viciously
beating Louis, and toppling Gage's coffin at the
viewing. In both of the
major crises in their relationship, Irwin touches
real causes for guilt
that Louis feels--forbidden sex with Rachel and
hostility toward Rachel
and Gage--while at the same time making outrageous
suggestions that justify
converting Louis's guilt to anger toward Irwin. When
Irwin seems about
to transform himself from the evil father into a
good father, the Wendigo
in Louis must struggle to maintain the hatred that
helps keep him determined
to resurrect Gage. It appears that were Louis able
to reconcile with his
father-in-law, he might successfully move toward
rejoining those of his
friends and family from whom he has cut himself off
and, thereby, resist
the urge to bring Gage back (297-99).
Jud and
Irwin, then, are opposed
father figures in Louis's mind--the good father and
the evil father. Louis's
compulsion to resurrect Gage seems to entail
resisting the good father
and preserving the evil father, or so it works out
when Irwin tries to
become a good father. There is, then, a kind of
logic to the death of Jud,
the good father figure. This logic is supported by
other events as well.
In his dreams on the night after re-burying Gage,
Louis deals in two ways
with the divided father. In the Disney World
fantasy, Oz the Great and
Terrible is the evil father, associated with the
mystery of eternal death
(344), that Louis and Gage keep at bay, having
overcome him, so that for
them, Oz is only the ordinary showman of Frank
Baum's novel (374-76). In
the nightmare that follows, Louis becomes the evil
father, "not just a
cannibal but the father of cannibals" (390). Like
Ligeia, in Edgar Allan
Poe's story, by overcoming death, Louis becomes
death from a mortal
point of view (Heller 119-20). In this nightmare,
Jud and several other
men appear with the animals and people they have
reburied, and all are
equated with Louis, cannibals and fathers of
cannibals. Jud is among them,
thus transformed from good to evil father.
Interestingly, Rachel is the
only woman in this nightmare. Her appearance is not
only prophetic of her
death, which may occur even as Louis dreams it, but
it also indicates how
completely Louis has replaced Irwin, for the dream
also shows that Louis
will become his wife's father in her second birth.
Like Stoker's Dracula,
Louis dreams himself the immortal father of a
predator horde, and also
like Dracula, Louis has found a means of
reproduction that does not require
women and that seems to promise an end to death,
monstrous and false though
this proves to be.
Louis cannot
have what he "really"
wants, which might be described as the fantasy of
Maurice Sendak's Where
the Wild Things Are. In that fantasy, the boy
can freely cross impossible
borders to the land of monsters, romp with them, and
return home to find
his supper ready for him. Were Louis's consciously
chosen and repressed
desires reconcilable, then such a male paradise
might be possible. He might
be able to live forever, indulge his wanderlust to
enjoy freedom from restraints,
and still maintain a loving, secure family. In his
reality, these desires
do not mesh, and he must restrain some of them. The
Wendigo, in effect,
reverses these restraints, revealing that the
freedom of rejecting civilization,
adulthood, and mortality is an empty and barren
terror, a waste land not
unlike T. S. Eliot's, to which the book alludes
directly in the description
and function of the Micmac Burial Ground and
indirectly in several paraphrases
and echoes of Eliot's poetry (e.g. 372). In Louis's
world, one overcomes
Death, the evil father, by becoming the evil father,
a father of cannibals.
Louis's
repressed hostilities,
when they become manifest, reveal a resentment
toward parents, children,
and women, which might be read as a rejection of
human relationships and
of physical existence itself. At the center of these
hatreds is a resistance
to boundaries and limits, especially the confines of
human mortality. Louis
resents Rachel because she restrains his wanderlust.
Behind this is the
deeper outrage at the human situation, expressed by
Ellie when she protests
against the old dying to make way for the young.
This is vexation at mortality
itself, a state for which elements of the
Judeo-Christian tradition try
to hold women responsible. Gail Griffin finds a
similar anger in Stoker's
Dracula. She says that male dominated
cultures tend to project the
fear of the inner animal onto women; "woman inspires
man with fear of his
own carnal contingence which he projects upon her"
(Griffin 143). The repressed
desire that is turned loose in this novel may be
characterized as a masculine
fear of the mortal, physical body, of which
women--with their multiple
associations with the production and early care of
that body--have become
symbols. And associated with women in this regard
are sexuality and fathers,
father-gods who, through sexual union with mortal
women, beget mortal sons
and then abandon their sons to death. Huck Finn and
Captain Ahab and Louis
Creed hate their absent fathers and flee their
would-be mothers and wives,
to go where the wild things are, to escape
domestication and death. Each
in his own way, these men ignore Ishmael's realistic
advice to accept the
universal thump and to comfort each other in this
brief life with a loving
hand upon the shoulder.
I would like
close this essay
by reflecting upon some of the oddities of this
novel and its history.
Among the oddities are its structure, its ending,
and a series of what
appear to be interesting editorial errors. These
oddities may connect with
King's professed reluctance to publish Pet
Sematary.
In
structure, the novel seems
to be divided into two roughly equal and distinct
parts. The first is an
almost pastoral narrative of a reasonably happy
family settling into their
new home in Maine. The second part--beginning with
Gage's death--fits almost
precisely the pattern of the overreacher plot so
ably described by Noël
Carroll in The Philosophy of Horror. This
plot includes the preparation
for an experiment (scientific or magical) that
usually includes a justification
for it, followed by the performance of the
experiment, the onset of the
monster it produces, and then one or more
confrontations between the monster
and opposing forces until the conflict has been
resolved in some way (118-120).
The overreacher plot is common to a large number of
horror stories, but
the long pastoral prologue may seem strange, even
after one sees that part
of what King does with this section is to set up the
family relations and
the repressed opposition to these relations that the
Wendigo will act out.
Among
possible editorial errors,
one of the most interesting is King's shifting of
the furniture of the
Creed bedroom. Sometimes they sleep in a double bed
(179), and sometimes
they sleep in two singles (31, 89). Another involves
how Norma Crandall
dies. First, it is a cerebral accident (194). Later,
Louis remembers it
as a heart attack (373). When Jud tells Louis that
the Micmac Burial Ground
forced him to take Louis there, he says, "mostly you
do it because you
want to. Or because you have to" (168), but later,
Louis remembers him
to have said, "but mostly you do it because once
you've been up there,
it's your place, and you belong to it" (178). Any of
these may be editorial
errors, or they may be subtle moves of various
kinds. For example, Louis's
memory lapses may reflect the shift in his
consciousness as he gives way
to his repressed desires. Taken together, though,
they at least suggest
unresolved ambivalences in King himself, nodes of
difficulty reflected
in the novel's two opposing parts and that appear as
well in the history
of the book that King has given in interviews and
essays.
King has
made his feelings about
Pet Sematary fairly clear. He has implied
that he was not able here,
as he was able in The Shining (1977), to
bring what frightens him
under control by writing about it (Bare Bones
15). He has stated
his own and his wife's reluctance to publish the
novel (Bare Bones
100). In a 1985 interview, he said, "If I had my way
about it, I still
would not have published Pet Sematary. I
don't like it. It's a terrible
book--not in terms of the writing, but it just
spirals down into darkness.
It seems to be saying nothing works and nothing is
worth it, and I don't
really believe that" (Bare Bones 144-5).
Douglas Winter reports
King saying that he did not enjoy writing the book
and would not have published
it except that a contract dispute obliged him to
(Winter 131-2).
The
suggestive apparent editorial
lapses, the reluctance to publish, the opinion that
the book "spirals down
into darkness"--these elements, of course, point
toward another anomaly
of King's plot. This story does not end when Louis
successfully destroys
demon/Gage. Driven to madness, Louis takes his dead
wife to the Micmac
Burial Ground. He is followed to the deadfall by
Steve Masterson, his associate
at the University of Maine medical clinic, a man who
is very much like
Louis in background and beliefs. Surely his name is
meant to suggest Stephen
King, and in interesting ways. Masterson feels drawn
to help Louis with
his task, but he resists this temptation and then
runs screaming out of
the world of this novel, never to return. He does
not see what is reserved
for the reader, the final image of Rachel's dead
hand on Louis's shoulder
and her final expression of affection for him. This
image, on the face
of it, seems to be without meaning and, therefore,
has led more than one
reader to ask why the book ends this way.
King's
preceding novels, in their
originally published versions, usually leave at
their ends a sane, reasonably
good remnant of the cast, a character or two who can
carry on in their
saddened worlds, to prepare for the promised next
appearance of horrors.
But at the end of this story, Louis returns from his
rumpus with the wild
things to find the monsters occupying his home. This
image seems to assert
that the horrors of Pet Sematary cannot be
set aside; the alternatives
are love and death or death alone. When the
dead really are gone,
and one accepts this, then one goes on, as Norma
Crandall says one must
with aging; otherwise "you ended up in a small room
writing letters home
with Crayolas" (33). If we refuse to accept death,
whether of loved ones
or of the self, if we will not let the dead be dead,
then there is only
that small, loveless, insane room, where the cold
hand falls upon the living
shoulder, and the dirt-filled voice says,
"Darling."
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Sources Cited and
Consulted
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