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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 such as 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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