Special Issue #2

EDITED BY: DAWN KEETLEY & ELIZABETH ERWIN

Fall 2020
Issue 2

COVER ART BY:

CAROLYN GERK
OF VELVET HAND DESIGNS

VISIT HER SHOP

05 27 43

DAWN KEETLEY MELODY BETH
BLACKMORE KATTELMAN
PREFACE
THE PHALLIC MOTHER RAGING BUTCH: ANNIE
IN WONDERLAND AND WILKES, FEMALE

A FIGHT FOR MASCULINITY, AND
MASCULINITY ANGER

16 36 52

HARRIET AVALON A. AD FREDLINE
STILLEY MANLY
REVOLUTION AT THE
"OPERATION HOBBLE": DIAL M FOR MISERY: WILKES FARM:
MASCULINE FEAR GENDER
VERSUS FEMALE DEVIANCY AND POWER
MONSTROSITY IN ESSENTIALISM AND STRUGGLES IN MISERY
MISERY THE HOLLOWNESS OF

ANNIE WILKES

60 79

LAURA R. PHIL
KREMMEL HOBBINS-WHITE

BEDPANS AND BROKEN MISERY: A TYPICAL
ANKLES: NURSING NINETIES HORROR?

PRACTICES IN MISERY 89

MARC OLIVIER

MISERY'S TYPEWRITER

69 98

CODY PARISH & TAYLOR HUGHES
KRISTEN ANN
LEER MISERY CHASTAIN
CANNOT BE DEAD:
"I'LL BE SEEING YOU": ANNIE WILKES AND
TRAUMA AS UNCANNY FAN REJECTION OF
CHARACTER DEATH
HORROR IN MISERY

108 118 138

SEZÍN KOEHLER ERIC J. DAWN KEETLEY
LAWRENCE
MISERY’S INFLUENCE: RACE AND
MISERY, HOSTEL, AND BLUMHOUSE’S DELIVERED
TORTURE PORN

GENDER-FLIPPED TOXIC FAN
CULTURE IN MISERY

127 151

KRISTEN A. LEER CONTRIBUTORS
&

CODY PARISH

FROM MISERY TO SYMPATHY:
REDEEMING ANNIE WILKES IN

CASTLE ROCK

PREFACE –
30 YEARS OF MISERY

Dawn Keetley

Stephen King published Misery on June 8, 1987, and he has claimed that the novel is,
first and foremost, about the compulsions of cocaine use. King was a self-confessed
“heavy user” of cocaine from about 1978 to 1986, and he famously confessed in an
interview with Rolling Stone that “Misery is a book about cocaine. Annie
Wilkes is cocaine. She was my number-one fan.”[i] In his memoir, On Writing, King
claims that the creation of Annie actually inspired him to quit drugs and alcohol: “Annie
was coke, Annie was booze, and I decided I was tired of being Annie’s pet
writer.”[ii] Like Paul Sheldon, King was able to jettison Annie from his life.

Jack Wilhelmi of Screen Rant interprets King’s equation of Annie and cocaine as
highlighting not only King’s personal “struggles with addiction” but also “the seductive
quality of drugs and how it can make someone feel like they can accomplish
something—like writing a novel—even under duress.” It does indeed seem as if King’s
comment points toward a powerful ambivalence toward cocaine, and toward Annie. He
wants to “quit” Annie, but she exerts a strong pull. On the one hand, King’s Annie is
undeniably violent and coercive—a force one would certainly want to overcome. She
kidnaps her favorite writer, Paul Sheldon, feeds him full of drugs, leaves him to starve
when she decides to take off, cuts off his foot and his thumb, and forces him to write yet
another romance novel which he doesn’t want to write. On the other hand, though, Paul
finds himself powerfully pulled into the novel that Annie, his nemesis, forces him to
write. Indeed, he feels that it is his best novel about Misery Chastain. In other words,
Annie is a double-edged sword: she is dangerous but empowering—like a drug.

It’s also telling that under the “influence” of Annie, Paul burns his “literary” novel—
called Fast Cars in King’s novel—and then writes his best romance novel. The

5

seductive power of drugs lies on the side of genre fiction not prestigious (and possibly
pretentious) literary fiction. Hence the pull of drugs for a writer who is through-and-
through opposed to literary pretensions. King loves and respects genre fiction and has
never apologized for that: “I’ve spoken out my whole life against the idea of dismissing
whole areas of fiction by saying it’s ‘genre’ and therefore can’t be seen as
literature.”[iii] For King, the allure of drugs seems connected with the allure of genre.
Three years after the publication of King’s novel, Rob Reiner directed his critically-
acclaimed adaptation, of which King himself has said, “Misery is a great
film.”[iv] Notably Kathy Bates won the Academy Award for Best Actress at the
63rd Academy Awards, making Misery the only King adaptation to have won an
Academy Award.
Check out the trailer for Misery:

The film remains largely true to the novel in its presentation of events. The single
significant change was in the infamous hobbling scene. Whereas in the novel, Annie

6

cuts off Paul’s foot (and later his thumb), in the film, she crushes his ankles with a
sledgehammer. Screen Rant reports that there were two factors driving this change:
“One, there was concern over the level of gore that would be called for if they staged
King’s original scene, and two, Rob Reiner and crew wanted Paul to emerge victorious
at the end of the film, and felt that Paul losing his foot was too harsh a penalty for him to
have to deal with going forward.” Indeed, in the DVD commentary for the film, Reiner
explains, “We wanted Paul Sheldon at the end of this movie to emerge victorious over
Annie Wilkes, and if he wound up without a foot — even if he winds up beating her and
she dies — then he maybe paid too high a price for that.”[v]

There’s even more to it than that, though; Yahoo news discovered that Misery’s
producers had trouble keeping talent involved because of the novel’s amputation scene.
George Roy Hill, originally on board to direct, pulled out because he claimed he could
not imagine calling “Action!” on that scene. Both Bette Middler and Warren Beatty
refused to be involved because of the amputation scene. Beatty’s point was that, while
he “had no trouble losing his feet at the ankles,” he knew “that if you did that the guy
would be crippled for life and would be a loser.”[vi]

The changes from novel to film occur primarily in the representation of Paul’s internal
world, which takes center stage in the novel but which is vastly attenuated in the film. In
Reiner’s adaptation, Paul mostly just adapts his behavior to Annie: he begs, fears,
placates and, ultimately, violently fights back. In the novel, King creates a rich imaginary
world for Paul that gets interwoven with numerous excerpts from the Misery novel he’s
writing. The latter is set mostly in Africa, drawing on the late Victorian imperialist
adventure fiction of H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines [1885] and She [1887]).
As Misery is drawn into danger in strange lands with powerful gods, so too is Paul. In
his mind, Annie becomes herself a powerful African idol, a goddess—one so powerful,
he almost believes she can’t be killed. “You couldn’t kill the goddess,” he thinks at the
end, even after she’s dead.[vii] In the novel, in general, Paul’s efforts to overcome, to

7

master, Annie–what he thinks of her–are much clearer. And, in some ways, this cuts
into his status as the almost complete victim that he is in the film.

Because the film, in particular, crystallizes the drama as a claustrophobic struggle
between Annie Wilkes and Paul Sheldon, much of the criticism on the novel and its
adaption has, not surprisingly, centered on this relationship. And, even though King has
claimed that Annie Wilkes should be read through his own struggle with cocaine, most
critics have read both the novel and the film for the ways in which they disclose the
layers of gender, sexuality, and power in which its central relationship of writer and
reader is inexorably embedded.

Indeed, the critical consensus about Annie is that she represents a desired, feared, and
hated figure of the feminine.[viii] Douglass Keesey has argued that Annie is the
castrating mother figure, the stifling and emasculating threat of dependency. He goes
on to explore how Misery is “a masochistic wish-fulfillment fantasy in which a man flirts
with the idea of total dependency and vulnerability only to master his fear of weakness
and to prove his manhood in an act of sadistic triumph over a female body.”[ix] King’s
novel abounds with images of Annie’s “rape” and castration of Paul—imagery muted in
the film not least in the fact that the more obvious “castration” of the foot amputation is
replaced by a hobbling. In the film, Annie leaves Paul intact; in the novel, she cuts off
pieces of him; she is the exemplar of the “phallic mother” who, in her power over him
“resuscitates [Paul’s] will to live.”[x] Because of Annie, Keesey claims, Paul is able to
move beyond masochism, castration anxiety, and fantasies of dependency to “a sense
of masculine entitlement”—although he remains haunted, even after he has killed
Annie, by “renewed fears that the mother may castrate him.”[xi] In this reading, then, the
novel is about Paul’s reclamation of a masculinity that nonetheless remains precarious
even through his final killing of Annie.

King’s Misery is, indeed, a dark parable of the fight between the sexes predicated on
sexual violence. Early in the novel, Paul remembers Annie’s rescue of him from his

8

wrecked car as a form of rape: “she raped him full of her air again”; his first real
memory, Paul thinks, was “being raped back into life by the woman’s stinking
breath.”[xii] What Paul apprehends as Annie’s rape of him—which ushers him, utterly
dependent, into her power—is balanced by Paul’s liberating “rape” of her in his last,
desperate attempt to escape. At one point, he is lying on top of her, “like a man who
means to commit rape,” and then he thinks, as he crams the wet and burned pages of
his final Misery novel in her mouth, “I’m gonna rape you because all I can do is the
worst I can do.”[xiii] In her intriguing reading, Kathleen Lant explores how this violent
and sexualized power struggle between Paul and Annie is also about the relationship
between writer and reader. She claims: “What is most appalling about King’s view of the
creative enterprise is that the powerful agent in the act is male and that the passive
recipient of the act is female.”[xiv] King does indeed dramatize the writer-reader
relationship as an act of rape.[xv] While Rob Reiner’s film certainly renders palpable the
violence between Annie and Paul, it is less obviously a sexual violence, and Paul
remains more distinctly a victim than himself an antagonist.

Just like most of the extant critical work on Misery, our first cluster of essays takes up
the gender politics at work in the film. In “‘Operation Hobble’: Masculine Fear versus
Female Monstrosity in Misery,” Harriet Stilley locates King’s novel and Rob Reiner’s
film within a backlash against second-wave feminism. Misery, Stilley, writes, exemplifies
the narrative strategy of conflating the “concept of the female monster within a narrative
of white masculinity perpetually in ‘crisis’.” Annie’s “monstrosity,” Stilley argues, is coded
as distinctly feminine. She is the nightmare “phallic” and “castrating” mother entangled
with the equally nightmarish female reader/creator. And while masculine power of all
kinds (including literary) is re-asserted at the end, Annie’s disruptive and monstrous
presence lingers.

Melody Blackmore, in “The Phallic Mother in Wonderland and a Fight for Masculinity,”
reads the struggle for power between Paul and Annie-as-castrating mother as Paul

9

Sheldon’s hallucination. His Annie, moreover, resonates with the unpredictable Duchess
from Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1885). Annie as mother (like
Carroll’s Duchess) battles in Paul’s head with the law of the Father (Sherriff Buster),
until he realizes he will not be saved and must re-emasculate himself.

In “Dial M for Misery: Gender Essentialism and the Hollowness of Annie
Wilkes,” Avalon A. Manly moves the conversation away from the complicated
gendered and sexual dynamic that binds Annie and Paul (and that is mostly centered in
Paul’s psyche) and explores Annie Wilkes’ own experience of gender identity. Manly
picks up on the moment when Paul discovers that Annie’s phone only looks the part: it’s
actually empty, its contents hollowed out. Manly compares the phone to Annie herself—
struggling to maintain a façade of impossible femininity, clinging to Misery Chastain as a
substitute, a cover for her own hollowness. Annie’s desperate love of Misery, as well as
her violence and rage, is about her failure to be the kind of “real woman” her society
demands.

Like Manly, in “Raging Butch: Annie Wilkes, Female Masculinity, and Anger,” Beth
Kattelman also explores Annie’s failure to meet the norms of femininity. Indeed, she
directly tackles the fact that there have been scant attempts to explain Annie Wilkes; the
overwhelming focus of criticism has been on Annie as Paul sees her. But why is Annie
the way she is? Kattelman’s provocative and compelling answer gets not only at Annie’s
gender but her sexuality. She argues that Annie is a “suppressed, queer, ‘butch’
woman, one whose maltreatment at the hands of society has fostered a deep-seated
anger.” She does, after all, love Liberace.

AD Fredline, in “Revolution at the Wilkes Farm: Deviancy and Power Struggle
in Misery,” also offers a new interpretation that removes us from Paul Sheldon’s singular
and dominant perspective on Annie. Fredline considers Misery through the lens of
theories of deviance, arguing that the film represents an exercise in demonstrating how

10

power creates (and re-creates) deviance: “the struggle for power between Annie and
Paul serves as a microcosm of the broader social conflict between deviant and non-
deviant identities, showcasing the deviant label’s core interchangeability and instability.”
In the end, Fredline argues that neither Annie nor Paul is inherently deviant, disclosing
the latter to be an exclusively socially-constructed concept.

In “Bedpans and Broken Ankles: Nursing Practices in Misery,” Laura R. Kremmel offers
yet another new interpretation of Annie Wilkes, focusing on her role as nurse. Misery is,
Kremmel argues, an important entry in the emerging canon of “medical horror.”
Kremmel describes the enormous power Annie accrues as nurse, one that is not
separate from but bound up with her equally important reading practices. Annie’s
profession, and her deep dedication to it, demonstrate “how easily the power with which
patients entrust their doctors and nurses might become the power of a kidnapper over
their hostage—a villain over their victim.”

Cody Parish and Kristen Ann Leer, in “‘I’ll be seeing you’: Trauma as Uncanny Horror
in Misery,” turn the focus of this issue back to Paul, although they read beyond the
sexualized dynamic binding Paul and Annie. Specifically, they turn to the after-effects of
Paul’s encounter with his “number one fan.” They argue that Misery exploits the way
that post-traumatic stress disorder can be a powerful source of horror in horror
narratives. Trauma has the ability to “possess” its sufferers, creating the “haunting
power” of traumatic memory, which recalls Sigmund Freud’s notion of “the uncanny.” As
Parish and Leer argue, the uncanny in Misery “refers specifically to the blurring of the
real and imaginary for the post-traumatic survivor, i.e., Paul, who has difficulty
distinguishing between the two planes of perception in the months following his rescue.”
Much of the weight of Parish and Leer’s argument falls on the terrifying final scenes of
the film in which Paul continues to “see” Annie—or so his traumatized brain would have
him believe.

11

If Kremmel argues that Misery reflects “medical horror,” and Parish and Leer explore the
ways that the uncanny and trauma are integral to horror, Phil Hobbins-White,
in “Misery: A Typical Nineties Horror?” continues the exploration of Rob Reiner’s film as
horror by locating it within the terrain of 1990s US horror films. Simon Brown has
pointed out that Misery “tapped into a growing generic trend away from outright horror,
gore, and supernatural monsters” and “toward suspense.”[xvi] And Hobbins-White
explores how Misery embodies nineties horror through the development of character
(notably of the antagonists), the creation of backstory and motives, the use of thriller
conventions, and the postmodernist style typical of horror in the nineties.

In “Misery’s Typewriter,” an excerpt from his book, Household Horror: Cinematic Fear
and the Secret Life of Everyday Objects (Indiana University Press, 2020), Marc
Olivier explores how Paul Sheldon’s typewriter connects Misery to the other objects of
the horror film tradition, not least Jack Torrance’s famous typewriter in The
Shining (Stanley Kubrick, 1980). In Olivier’s reading, the typewriter adds new depth to
the gendered relationship between Paul and Annie.

Fan culture has been integral to the horror tradition since its inception. Taylor Hughes,
in “Misery Chastain Cannot Be Dead: Annie Wilkes and Fan Rejection of Character
Death,” places Annie’s intense grief over the death of Misery Chastain—indeed, her
refusal to accept that death—within a tradition of fan denial of character death that goes
back at least as far as the death of Sherlock Holmes. Hughes discusses both the
psychological meanings of fan grief as well as how methods of coping with it have
evolved over time. Could Annie have channeled her grief (and psychotic rage) into
fanfiction and online communities of support? In “Gender-flipped Toxic Fan Culture
in Misery,” Sezín Koehler discusses how Reiner’s film “essentially predicted toxic fan
culture, except in gender-flipped form, long before we had the internet and social
media.” The only difference, Koehler argues, is that the “real-life Annie Wilkeses, who
stalk, threaten, and assault tend to be men, and it is often female creatives who are

12

their targets.” Koehler intriguingly suggests that the greater access fans have had to
celebrities during COVID-19 lockdowns might actually lessen the idealization that
seems to breed so much violence in fan culture.

Misery has had a long reach not only in terms of fan culture but also in its influence on
subsequent horror film and television, and the three final essays in this special issue all
consider the influence of Rob Reiner’s film on 21st-century horror. In “Misery, Hostel,
and Torture Porn,” Eric J. Lawrence makes the argument that Misery is part of the long
cinematic tradition of presenting characters in dire, constrained situations that led, in
post 9/11 America, to the horror subgenre known as “torture porn.” Lawrence
specifically draws some very intriguing lines of connection between Misery and Eli
Roth’s Hostel (2005) and Hostel: Part II (2007) and between Annie and some of the
more infamous of torturers who avail themselves of Elite Hunting’s services in Roth’s
films.

In “From Misery to Sympathy: Redeeming Annie Wilkes in Castle Rock,” Kristen Ann
Leer and Cody Parish explore the backstory that season two of Hulu’s original horror
series Castle Rock (2019) creates for Annie Wilkes. This essay returns, at first, to the
preoccupation of earlier essays like those of Harriet Stilley and Melody Blackmore. Like
Stilley and Blackmore, Leer and Parish point out that Reiner’s Misery unambiguously
shapes Annie as “monster”—specifically drawing on Barbara Creed’s notion of the
“monstrous-feminine.” In Hulu’s Castle Rock, however, Annie’s history is humanized,
depicted in ways that encourage sympathy in viewers. Castle Rock gives Annie a
traumatic childhood and a daughter, transforming her into a nurturing rather than a
monstrous mother figure—although, even in Castle Rock, there is nothing
uncomplicated about Annie’s mothering.

Finally, in “Misery’s Influence: Race and Blumhouse’s Delivered,” Dawn Keetley reads
how Delivered (Emma Tammi, 2020), one of the features in Blumhouse’s original Into

13

the Dark horror anthology series for Hulu, tells a different incarnation of Misery’s story—
one that is about race in the 21st-century US. Also influenced by 1990s interloper films
such as Single White Female (Barbet Schroeder, 1992) and The Hand That Rocks the
Cradle (Curtis Hanson, 1992), Delivered features a disturbed white woman who
insinuates herself into the life of the pregnant Black protagonist, Valerie (Natalie Paul).
Drawing on multiple elements of Misery, Delivered tells the story of a different kind of
captivity than the one Paul Sheldon endured. Valerie is captive to a ubiquitous
whiteness that erases her experience, a captivity that Delivered suggests is on a
continuum with slavery.

We hope you enjoy these essays celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of Misery’s
release—and we hope the conversation about the film continues. Certainly, it seems
clear that its influence on the horror tradition is still going strong.

Notes:
[i] Greene
[ii] King, On Writing, 98.
[iii] Greene.
[iv] Greene.
[v] Watkins.
[vi] Ibid.
[vii] King, Misery, 348.
[viii] See Keesey, Lant, Robinson, and Sudan.
[ix] Keesey, 56-7.
[x] Keesey, 59.
[xi] Keesey, 64, 67.
[xii] King, Misery, 5, 7.
[xiii] King, 329.
[xiv] Lant, 96.

14

[xv] Ibid., 99.
[xvi] Brown, 102-3.

____________________________________________________________________
Works Cited:
Brown, Simon. Screening Stephen King: Adaptation and the Horror Genre in Film and

Television. University of Texas Press, 2018.
Greene, Andy. “Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, 31 Oct.

2014.
Keesey, Douglas. “‘Your Legs Must Be Singing Grand Opera’: Masculinity, Masochism,

and Stephen King’s Misery.” American Imago: Psychoanalysis and the Human
Sciences, vol. 59, no. 1, 2002, pp. 53–71.
Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “The Rape of Constant Reader: Stephen King’s Construction
of the Female Reader and Violation of the Female Body in Misery.” Journal of
Popular Culture, vol. 30, no. 4, 1997, pp. 89-115.
King, Stephen. Misery. 1987. Scribner, 2016.
—. On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft. 2000. Scribner, 2020.
Misery. Directed by Rob Reiner, Columbia Pictures, 1990.
Robinson, Sally, “Traumas of Embodiment: White Male Authorship in Crisis.” Marked
Men: White Masculinity in Crisis, by Sally Robinson, Columbia University Press,
2000, pp. 87–127.
Sudan, Rajani. “Company Loves Misery.” Camera Obscura, vol. 10, no. 3 (30), 1992,
pp. 58-75.
Watkins, Gwynne. “The Gruesome Inside Story of ‘Misery’s’ Terrifying Ankle-Bashing
Scene.” Yahoo! 22 Oct. 2015.
Wilhelmi, Jack. “How Stephen King’s Real Life Inspired Misery in Surprising
Ways.” Screen Rant, 4 May 2020.

15

OPERATION HOBBLE:
MASCULINE FEAR VERSUS
FEMALE MONSTROSITY IN ROB

REINER’S MISERY

Harriet Stilley
When protagonist Paul Sheldon proclaims that he is “in trouble,” that “this woman” –
namely, psychotic super-fan Annie Wilkes – “is not right,” he invokes insidious, if not
invidious, questions regarding the role gender plays in the articulation of horror. Indeed,
Stephen King’s fictional universe abounds with vehemently unhappy, violently unhinged,
and villainously uncanny female characters–from Misery’s “number one” sadistic nurse to
Carrie White and her “unutterably evil” mother, Mrs. Massey, the “decaying… woman
from Room 217,” and Dolores Claiborne, “another… goddam nasty… bitch.” [1] This type
of monstrous female sexual difference has habitually haunted the horror genre since its
very inception, but arguably reaches new heights in the works of King as the culmination
of male anxiety, antipathy, and abjection amidst the various social, economic, and
demographic changes that transformed the post-war American landscape; in particular,
the advent of Second-wave feminism.

Figure 1 “You crazy bitch.” Academy Award-winning actress Kathy Bates as Annie Wilkes (left) and Dolores Claiborne (right).

16

The resurgence of feminism in the 1960s and 1970s – the era in which King notably first
emerges as a published novelist – arose principally as a response to the polarized
“masculine” and “feminine” registers of being which monopolized American culture
during the post-WWII domestic revival. Such reified gender demarcations, assured
within culturally restricted principles of order and hierarchy, specifically endorsed the
male domestication and rationalization of women so as to ensure that “feminine” would
remain a synonym for “submissive,” in contrast to an axiomatically empowered, active,
and forceful masculinity. However, as the modern women’s movement began to
challenge men’s domination of the workplace, those regulating fictions that
consolidated and naturalized socioeconomic, phallocentric supremacies were shown to
be increasingly anachronistic, if not profoundly phantasmagorical–ultimately predicated
on a series of politically sanctioned and socially practiced mechanisms of oppression.
The female admission to an historically all-male public sphere, in other words, openly
affronted men’s economic and social privilege for the first time, and in so doing,
repealed the oppositional vulnerabilities and weaknesses upon which normative
masculinity’s traditional, virile values depended. It is no surprise, then, the extent to
which – as a direct result of the gelding impact of post-sixties progressive liberalism on
those previously dominant patriarchal paradigms – women were literally and literarily
rebuked as the physical purveyors of feminizing forces and values that destroyed
national life and, moreover, displaced the male ego.

Considered most commonly as the “wrong sort” of women – that is, ambitious, assertive,
amoral, or aberrant – female villains like Carrie White, Mrs. Massey, Dolores Claiborne,
and of course, Annie Wilkes, thus become the allegorical incarnate of what Sandra
Gilbert and Susan Gubar termed “the male dread of women,” and specifically cognate
metaphors for the “destabilizing function of female expression free of patriarchal
constraints.”[2] In explicit terms, this “uneasy masculine shrinking away from the future
of female equality”[3] invokes female monstrosity in King’s fiction. Indeed, one of the
most significant facets of the author’s canon is how the “woman-as-monster” is
accordingly exploited as an instrument of this conservative agenda; exposed, as Lisa

17

Appignanesi suggests, by society’s persistent efforts to conceptualize women as either
“mad, bad, or sad.”[4] The sociohistorical implications of positioning the woman as
monster in contemporary film adaptations of King’s works should therefore be read as
intimately connected to more extensive hostilities toward women, derived directly from
the concomitant threat of non-phallic sexuality and the potentially castrating force that
woman, as sexual Other, represents. For feminist film critic Barbara Creed, this concept
of the “monstrous-feminine” – as instructed within phallocentric ideology – signifies a
specific kind of abject inversion, a state of being that “violates cultural categories,
disrespects organizing principles, and generally serves to present a chaotic alternative to
the place of order and meaning.”[5] The abjection associated with and created by the
feminine monster is, in other words, effectively produced at the border that separates
those who assume their “proper” (gender) roles from those who do not. If we take Rob
Reiner’s film adaptation of Misery (1990) as exemplary, we can see the myriad ways that
the dialectic between Annie Wilkes’ (Kathy Bates) feminine monstrosity and Paul
Sheldon’s (James Caan) masculine misery portends the destruction of an entire order of
cultural politics, ultimately allowing for an unusually prolonged sadistic reversal, but one
which, very importantly, nevertheless still leads in the end to a triumphant
hypostatization of masculinity.

Figure 2 “An oddball situation.” Severely wounded and completely immobilised after a car crash, Paul is entirely dependent on
Annie for basic assistance. This role reversal of the “active” female subject and the “passive” male object forms the basis for the
film

18

To gain a better understanding of how Misery ingeniously conflates this concept of the

female monster with a narrative of white masculinity perpetually in “crisis,” we must first

look beyond just the fact that Annie the antagonist is a monstrous woman, and focus,

instead, on the ways in which her modes of monstrosity are coded as distinctly feminine.

A nurse by profession, Annie is closely tied to the maternal-feminine sphere from the

film’s outset, breathing life into Paul in the opening scenes and indulging him “like a

baby” throughout the course of the plot. Despite “tending to [him] nearly twenty-four

hours a day,” the highly stylized, maternalistic quality of Annie’s control over Paul carries

particularly menacing overtones, however, as nurturance soon distorts into a

cannibalizing, castrating mother compulsion. Indeed, discussing how Annie force-feeds

Paul food and drugs intravenously, before eventually re-breaking his legs “to make sure

[he] could never run away” from her, Sally Robinson candidly describes the infantilizing

and effeminizing aspects of Annie’s caregiving as a “horrible embodiment of the

maternal function,” one that cares

and cherishes while

“simultaneously threatening

castration at every turn.”[6] Tony

Magistrale similarly calls attention

to Annie’s unjustified, if not

uncanny maternalism, arguing

that, as an “unmoored being” –

completely “bereft of [any actual]

social or familial bonds” – her

pathological femaleness

uncomfortably unsettles the

phallogocentric foundations of

patriarchal discourse by

corrupting the identification of

Figure 3 “It’s best to remain immobile.” James Caan as the besieged and woman as mother.[7] As the
(quite literally) bed-bound Paul Sheldon.

19

“nightmare phallic mother,”[8] Annie thus not only perverts culturally accepted notions
of “proper” womanhood or domesticity through her faux-wholesomeness, but further
exhibits a grotesquely gestative femininity that functions to hinder Paul by preventing
him from healing, while also masochistically binding the male author to her sole female
dominance, literalized in her statement: “you better hope nothing happens to me.
Because if I die, you die.”

Withheld in a helpless state of total emasculation, Paul’s physically imposed inertia can
be viewed, to this end, as a cinematic manifestation of the male’s “infantile dread of
maternal autonomy.”[9] Specifically, in forcefully confining Paul to her home
environment, Annie arguably arrogates the masculine prerogative by inverting the
traditional exclusion of women from certain male public spaces and fundamentally
refigures the domesticized and violent isolation and alienation of women as a powerful
threat that stifles and subordinates men. Her victimization of Paul is not just “a
gendered violation,” but also “a violation of gender,” one that articulates fully and
explicitly “the crisis of cultural politics as it is played out within a crisis of
masculinity.”[10]

This analysis extends, of course, to the inevitably male sphere of creativity and Annie’s
principal role in the film as Paul Sheldon’s “number one fan.” Indeed, one of the most
horrifying facets of the film’s gendered conflict resides in Annie’s power as audience and
the larger cultural trauma caused by such a female audience, “whose insatiable demands
threaten to destroy authentic cultural value in their relentless pursuit of the ‘fix’ of
popular romances.” As Kathleen Margaret Lant explains, “if writing, power, and
masculinity are for Paul associated with his power to assert, enter, control, and
dominate,” then the fact that Annie has rule over all in this relationship demonstrates
the extent to which she manages to “[pervert] and [deform] the essentially heterosexual
relationship between writer and reader.”[11] Annie’s inability to accept the role of
passive female consumer, and constant endeavours to usurp Paul’s masculine power to
produce, in other words, are indicative of an essential erosion of the dichotomies –

20

between the serious/popular, masculine/feminine, maker/monster – on which cultural
hierarchy depends. The manner in which the film analogizes this struggle over cultural
legitimacy in somatic terms significantly links Paul’s bodily vulnerability with his creative
impotency, and, thus, effectively entrenches his gender crisis in a portrait of “white male
authorship under siege.”[12]

In this respect, it is important to recognize the ways in which Annie’s attachment to Paul
is, from the outset,
purposely represented
as a desire to introject
her ego-ideal by
“invading” him; first
physically, through
injections and spoon-
feedings, and then
psychically, by forcing
him to burn his first
“serious” literary

Figure 4 “I never meant for it to become my life.” Held hostage by his “number one

manuscript and then to fan,” Paul is forced to resurrect Annie’s beloved heroine by writing Misery’s Return.
continue to “make up
new [Misery Chastain] stories.” Paul in point of fact locates his writerly dissatisfaction
within his celebrity status as a commercial writer, exclaiming “I haven’t been a writer
since I got in the Misery business.” By imperilling the creative dynamic by which Paul
operates, and inevitably imposing her consumerist desire onto his efforts in a process of
palimpsestic displacement, Annie therefore putatively “demotes him from creator to
created.”[13] It is, as such, worthwhile pointing out here the ways in which the film sets
up a parallel between Annie’s alleged “creativity” and Gilbert and Gubar’s
conceptualization of the indignant creative spirit that is “the mad woman in the attic.”
According to Gilbert and Gubar, these types of (mad)women are “accidents of nature,
deformities meant to repel, but in their freakishness, they possess unhealthy energies,

21

powerful and dangerous acts.”[14] Committed only to her “own private ends,” Annie’s
creative madness, figured explicitly as an “unhealthy” monstrosity, is nowhere more
apparent than in her own encoded “artwork,” specifically her Memory Lane scrapbook,
which conceals the “dangerous acts” of her murderous nursing career.[15]

Figure 5 “Angel of Death.” Annie’s Memory Lane scrapbook consists primarily of newspaper clippings from
her nursing career, including her arrest and murder trial following a series of mysterious infant deaths.

Of course, even while offering a compelling source for Paul to read, the fact that Annie’s
“text” is a mere biographical pasteboard production, with little more depth than a
gruesome true crime magazine, significantly problematizes the initially subversive
discourse of the film centred upon the monstrous-feminine and her threat to patriarchal
control. In fact, following the work of Linda Williams, it becomes clear that the
horrifyingly sensationalized nature of Annie’s artwork, comprised mainly of her silent
image, succeeds in securing the female’s objectified and abject status within “patriarchal
structures of seeing.”[16] From this perspective, Annie cannot and does not function as a
representative for the assertive female self since her body, in line with Laura Mulvey’s
feminist film theory, “is being read as an emblem of another’s, a male’s pleasure, not as
a proclamation of self-identity.”[17] Put simply, Annie is “still tied to her place as bearer
of meaning, not maker of meaning,” and thereby bound to a symbolic order in which
woman is reduced to the obvious oppositional archetypal against which man principally

22

measures his superior manhood and essential humanity.[18] Rather than interpreting
Annie’s “intrusive and violating presence” on screen as indicative of her
“domination,”[19] it hence becomes necessary to acknowledge the ways in which Paul’s
point-of-view frequently guides the camera across Annie’s phallic and fibrous female
form, and in so doing engenders a strong affinity and identification between the
audience and the scrutinizing male gaze.

For Douglas Keesey, the crucial point here is that Paul assigns Annie the phallus only so

that he may “identify with it and appropriate it for himself.”[20] In psychoanalytic terms,

Paul thus “allays his castration anxiety” first through a “festishistic idealization of Annie

as phallic mother,” and then through “an attempt to castrate the phallic mother as proof

of his superior potency.”[21] His ordeal is,

as such, reimagined as a test of masculine

omnipotence, through which patriarchal

systems of moral and social order can be

reaffirmed. Coupled with the film’s

representation of a seemingly feminized,

“vulnerably embodied male authorship in

crisis,” then, is a newly reconstructed

“masculinization of the writing process,”

epitomized in Paul’s utilization of the

typewriter as a tangible weapon to finally

overcome the female monster.[22] With

this in mind, it is important to recognize

that, while the presence of the monstrous-

feminine in Misery does challenge the

view that the male is almost always

situated in an active, sadistic position and

the female in a passive, masochistic one,

Figure 6 “Think of me as your inspiration.” Annie’s existence still speaks to us more

23

about male anxieties and fears than female desire, feminine subjectivity, or feminist
creativity. That is to say, even as the film appears to offer a transgressive rebellion
against gendered norms, in effectively “remasculinizing writing as an embodied process,
a process embodied as male,” the presence of the monstrous-feminine is accordingly
stylized within particular androcentric codes that protect male dominant power
structures.[23] As Paul explains, “Annie Wilkes, that whole experience, helped me,”
ultimately providing him with the means to finally write a “serious” novel that he can be
proud of. Annie’s story, on the other hand – like Frankenstein’s female monster before
her – is destroyed before completion. In the classic gothic manner, the eruption of
unlicensed (female) desire is, then, castigated, contained, and controlled by governing
(male) systems of limitation. Yet given that the spectre of Annie – and the gendered
anxieties and tensions that she evokes – still remains at the close, Misery nonetheless
suggests that, beneath its (re)assertion of masculinity, is an expression of woman’s
enduring power in difference–because “without it, what else is there…?”

Notes:
[1] King, Misery, 14; King, Carrie, 257; King, The Shining, 237; King, Dolores
Claiborne, 155.
[2] Gilbert and Gubar, 28.
[3] King, Danse Macabre, 170.
[4] Appignanesi, 1.
[5] Creed, 2.
[6] Robinson, 118.
[7] Magistrale, 71.
[8] Robinson, 118-19.
[9] Gilbert and Gubar, 28.
[10] Robinson, 114.
[11] Lant, 175.
[12] Robinson, 117.

24

[13] Lant, 171.
[14] Gilbert and Gubar, 29.
[15] Ibid.
[16] Williams, 83.
[17] Mulvey, 7.
[18] Ibid.
[19] Magistrale, 65.
[20] Keesey, 57.
[21] Ibid, 58.
[22] Robinson, 115.
[23] Ibid.

Works Cited:
Appignanesi, Lisa. Mad, Bad and Sad: A History of Women and the Mind Doctors from

1800 to the Present. Hachette, 2011.
Creed, Barbara. The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge,

2015.
Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and

the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. Yale University Press, 2000.
Keesey, Douglas. “‘Your Legs Must Be Singing Grand Opera’: Masculinity, Masochism,

and Stephen King’s Misery.” American Imago, vol. 59, no. 1, 2002, pp. 53-71.
King, Stephen. Carrie. Doubleday, 1974.
—. Danse Macabre. Everest House, 1991.
—. Dolores Claireborne. Viking, 1992.
—. Misery. Viking, 1987.
—. The Shining. Doubleday, 1977.

25

Lant, Kathleen Margaret. “The Rape of Constant Reader: Stephen King’s Construction of
the Female Reader and Violation of the Female Body in Misery.” Contributions to
the Study of Popular Culture, edited by Kathleen Margaret Lant and Theresa
Thompson, Greenwood, 1998, pp. 159-81.

Magistrale, Tony. Hollywood’s Stephen King. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
Misery. Directed by Rob Reiner, Columbia Pictures, 1990.
Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1975, pp. 6-

18.
Robinson, Sally. Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis. Columbia University Press,

2000.
Williams, Linda. “When the Woman Looks.” Re-Vision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism,

edited by Mary Anne Doane, Patricia Mellencamp, and Linda Williams. University
Publications of America, 1984, pp. 83-99.

26

THE PHALLIC MOTHER IN
WONDERLAND AND A FIGHT FOR

MASCULINITY

Melody Blackmore

“the horror film stages and re-stages a constant repudiation of the maternal figure”
– Barbara Creed[i]

Rob Reiner’s film adaptation of the classic Stephen King novel Misery sees an
obsessed violent woman terrorize a harmless man, yet this tale is not all that it seems,
with a non-traditional female role played by Kathy Bates in her momentous performance
as the monstrous madwoman, Annie Wilkes. Films often represent females, especially
the mother, negatively, positioning them as the abject in the socio-cultural and
patriarchal arena. Barbara Creed argues that the horror film shows the “terror of self
disintegration, of losing oneself or ego, often represented cinematically by a screen
which becomes black, signifying obliteration of self.” [ii] Horror films and psychoanalysis
go well together for this very reason: psychoanalysis provides a means of
understanding the cultural roles and anxieties represented in the monstrous assumption
of power in horror. In Reiner’s Misery, Annie Wilkes is placed as castrating mother and
Paul Sheldon as regressed needy child in this exploration of phallic power and male
dominance. It was Freud (1905) who elaborated the importance of child psychosexual
stages as a source of both pleasure and tension. The stages (oral, anal, phallic, latency,
genital) are crucial to personality development and assist with controlling the id in
socially accepted ways. Misery focuses predominantly on the phallic stage and the male
fear of the aggressive female and her threat of castration.

The film tells the story of best-selling author Paul Sheldon, famous for his romance
books featuring Victorian heroine Misery Chastain, heading home from Silver Creek
after finishing a new book as a means to leave Misery behind and move on to a different

27

chapter of his career. However, Paul has a car accident due to the heavy snow, and his
rescuer Annie Wilkes then keeps him locked away, forcing him to write a new Misery
book for her, his number one fan. This essay will interpret Misery as a tale of male
identity crisis and of phallic fear and regression. After the accident, Paul descends into a
hallucinatory Wonderland and regresses back to his own childishness towards the
mother – a figure of authority as well as a way for him to restructure his lost self. Annie
plays the phallic, castrating “Duchess,” who both nurtures and violently castrates – a
good, yet bad mother and a figure of maternal abjection. Paul must deal with his identity
issues by regaining masculine power over her, but not before Annie castrates both him
and his identity in a bid to seize phallic power and keep Paul with her forever.

Wonderland

The opening scene in Misery shows Paul leaving Silver Creek Lodge after finishing his
newest book. He has concluded his famous Misery books and is journeying onto the
next chapter of his life – an uncertain time and one he is unconsciously afraid to begin.
The severe weather causes Paul to crash, however, and viewers see a flashback to
Paul having a discussion with his editor about ending Misery and moving on with
different books. From this moment, I suggest that Paul’s rescue is an hallucination – a
Wonderland that he enters – a desire and need to regress and deal with his identity
issues around separating from Misery. Paul’s fear is disguised as a desire to return to
the mother and regress to a state of dependency. Unfortunately, this wish for
Wonderland is not purely pleasurable, but also becomes a descent into a nightmare,
where the mother is violently phallic and horrifically castrating.

Duchess – Good Mother, Bad Mother

Annie states that she is Paul’s number one fan – something a mother is to a child.
Mothers will often praise and support their children, imparting confusing morals to them,

28

much as the Duchess in Lewis Carroll’s 1865 novel Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland
does: “Flamingos and mustard both bite. And the moral of that is – ‘Birds of a feather

flock together.’”[iii] It is often not until adulthood that we find our mother’s morals to

make sense or hold

true. On the one

hand, both Annie

and the Duchess

reflect the concept of

the the good

nurturing mother –

nursing Paul back to

Figure 1 Annie’s “child,” Misery the pig health, feeding him,
and caring for him.

Yet, both are also far from being the loving and caring mother: they castrate and place

fear into the hearts of children. As Samuelsson writes: “The qualities which the Duchess

as a mother should possess, such as warmth, love and care, are non-existent…the

Duchess is rather more closely linked to a cunning and violent female than

mother.” [iv] Annie and the Duchess cause confusion because they can switch between

cheerful and kind to sudden outbursts of violence – they are both good and bad mother.

The Duchess violently shakes her baby yet sings a lullaby:

“Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes,
He only does it to annoy,
Because he knows it teases.”[v]

Another thing Annie and the Duchess have in common is that the Duchess in Alice in
Wonderland has a baby that turns out to be a pig, and, in Misery, Annie introduces Paul

29

to her pet pig, Misery, which is like her own child. The disorientation caused by the
competing good mother and bad mother can threaten identity and cause loss of self.
Melanie Klein claims that the baby projects their own destructive drives onto the
maternal breast, and so the bad mother is the bearer of sadistic projections.[vi] Paul’s
fears are being projected onto Annie: he needs her good nature and caregiving, but his
violent projections have also caused her to become a bad, phallic mother.

Phallic Mother

As Creed mentions, motherly authority is the first authority: “Maternal authority is the
trustee of that mapping of the self’s clean and proper body; it is distinguished from
paternal laws within which, with the phallic phase and acquisition of language, the
destiny of man will take shape.” ix Also, according to Creed, the phallic mother hides and
conceals the phallus, and because it is not as obvious as the male’s phallus, she is
fantastically endowed. This fantasy of the phallus leads to castration anxiety. Annie is a
phallic mother to Paul: she nurses him, feeds him, shaves him, but also threatens to
castrate him and causes anxiety – she has the power and the phallic maternal authority,
and, as Mowery warns, beware the mother as master: “…the nourishment she offers is
not freely given; it is as paralyzing, as fixating, as freezing as the father’s law.” [vii]
In the 1980s and 1990s, phallic women were shown in many films to be sexually
desirable: for instance, Sharon Stone (Total Recall 1990); Glenn Close (Fatal
Attraction 1987); Julia Cotton (Hellraiser 1987); and Daryl Hannah (Blade
Runner 1982). All were sensual and sexually attractive. Annie, however, is not sexually
attractive, nor is she sensual; she is as “ugly as the Duchess,” an object of abjection.

Abjection

“All human societies have a conception of the monstrous-feminine, of what it is about
woman that is shocking, terrifying, horrific, abject.”[viii]

30

In Powers of Horror, Julia Kristeva argues that the mother is a figure of abjection and
often represented as the monstrous-feminine, a figure that threatens identity and order
because it does not respect borders or societal rules. Annie is an abject figure: she
makes pig noises, overeats, and crosses societal boundaries throughout the film. When
Annie talks with Paul after he empties his bladder, she sloshes it around carelessly,
making both the viewer and Paul recoil. Annie also appears masculine, crossing gender
boundaries: she can lift a man from a car wreck, and she dresses plainly. She is the
monstrous madwoman, with an intrusive inability to respect borders. The borders that
Annie crosses resonate with Creed: “The place of the abject is the ‘place where
meaning collapses’…the place where ‘I’ am not. The abject threatens life; it must be
‘radically excluded’…from the place of the living subject, propelled away from the body
and deposited on the other side of an imaginary border which separates the self from
that which threatens the self.” Creed continues that the particular form of maternal
abjection is experienced by all individuals “at the time of their earliest attempts to break
away from, the mother.”[ix] Paul wishes to separate from his abject maternal figure in
order to regain his own independence, and Misery thus shows us that abjection plays a
significant role in the mother/son crisis.

Castration

Annie’s castrating violence becomes a real threat when she discovers that Misery is
dead – “You dirty bird” – and her anger and violence become all too apparent. Yet, just
as the Duchess from Alice in Wonderland returns from croquet in a pleasant mood, so
does Annie return from her temper tantrum calm and pleasant. Paul’s attempts to
diminish his castration anxiety through the idealization of the phallic mother soon
becomes a need to castrate her and reclaim his own masculinity, however. But many of
his attempts fail at first; for instance, when he requests a different typing paper in a bid
to control the situation and get Annie to leave so that he can attempt escape, she drops
the paper onto his legs, reminding him of her castrating power. As Keesey argues:

31

“Paul’s fixation on images of dismemberment can be understood as an attempt to move
beyond castration anxiety to a sense of masculine entitlement.”[x]

Both Annie’s fear of losing Paul and his efforts to leave his room to steal a knife lead to

THAT FOOT SCENE!—the Kimberley diamond mines tale of “hobbling” that Annie

recalls whilst she

sets up one of

the most horrific

scenes in horror.
Annie’s crippling
blows to Paul’s

feet can be

interpreted as a

castration that

serves as both

punishment and

confirmation that Figure 2 Annie hobbles Paul
he won’t leave.

From this point on, Paul realises that he must separate from Annie by seizing back his

power. His attempt to manipulate, control, escape, or to drug her has failed; he must

take back his masculinity, even if that means weight-lifting typewriters!

Masculinity

Throughout the film, the Sheriff of Silver Creek, Buster, searches for Paul: he is the law,
or, should I say, the Father-of-the-Law. Abject horror images will often show a split
between maternal and paternal authority, and the Sheriff in Misery is the symbolic
Father, the way for the child to separate from the mother and to safely repress her.
Unfortunately for Sherriff Buster, he fails, and Annie destroys him with a shot gun. This
is the moment that Paul realises it is time that he must disavow Annie and destroy her

32

himself. As soon as Annie forced Paul to burn his manuscript, his already fragile identity
was broken and diminished along with his male power. Annie phallically seized it and
constantly threatened him– or performed castration on Paul to keep him at a loss and in
fear. Yet Paul had hope, in the form of the-Father-of-the-Law (Sheriff Buster), and when
this was destroyed, Paul seized back his male dominance on his own.

The car accident, the hallucinatory trip to his own Wonderland, the Duchess-like phallic
mother in Annie, and Paul’s masochistic fantasy of his male psyche being stripped of
independence, all come to a head towards the end of the film. Keesey claims that “Paul
fantasizes a phallic other from whom he can seize strength, as a masochist identifies
with the sadist’s powers.”[xi] Paul has been living a masochistic nightmare with sadistic
Annie, yet the end involves Paul himself becoming the sadist in order to triumph and
separate from the phallic mother. This leads him to orally rape Annie, by shoving the
burning manuscript down her throat as they fight – “Eat it till you choke, you sick,
twisted fuck!” As Keesey notes: “…striking Annie with the typewriter and making her eat
his manuscript becomes the triumphant assertion of his male identity and superiority.”
Ultimately, though, it is the pig ornament that kills Annie, as Paul lands the final blow in
the fight for power, for separateness, for identity, for masculinity. The pig adds a nice
metaphorical touch: Annie as a child killer, is killed by a pig, which has signalled a
child—both for the Duchess and for Annie.

Misery shows that patriarchal power remains and that men must deal with their fears of
castration and the phallic power of women by reclaiming their own masculine influence.
Paul’s Misery Chastain threatened his masculinity, and he suffered a fear of separation
from her, causing a descent into Wonderland, a regression to mother and a nightmare
about regaining identity and virility.

33

Notes:
[i] Creed, 63.

[ii] Creed, 64.
[iii] Carroll, 79.
[iv] Samuelsson, 12.
[v] Carroll, 54.
[vi] Klein.
[vii] Creed, 51.
[viii] Mowery, 6.
[ix] Creed, 44.
[x] Keesey, 64
[xi] Keesey, 60.

Works cited:
Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass. 1865

& 1871. Penguin, 1998.
Creed, Barbara. “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” Screen,

vol. 27, no.1, January/February 1986, pp. 44–71,
https://doi.org/10.1093/screen/27.1.44.
Freud, Sigmund. Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality. 1905. Verso, 2017.
Keesey, Douglas. “‘Your Legs Must Be Singing Grand Opera’: Masculinity, Masochism,
and Stephen King’s Misery.” American Imago, vol. 59, no. 1, 2002, pp. 53-71.
Klein, Melanie. Envy and Gratitude and Other Works, 1946-1963. 3rd ed. Vintage, 1997.
Misery. Directed by Rob Reiner, Castle Rock Entertainment, 1990.
Mowery, Diane. “The Pharse of the Phallic Pheminine: Beyond the ‘Nurturing Mother’ in
Feminist Composition Pedagogy.” Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the
Conference on College Composition and Communication, San Diego, CA,

34

1993. ERIC, Institute of Educational
Sciences, https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED359534.pdf.
Samuelsson, Emma. “A Psychological Approach to the Wicked Women in Lewis
Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland and Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.” Thesis, Lund
University, 2013,
http://lup.lub.lu.se/luur/download?func=downloadFile&recordOId=4286049&fileOI
d=4286066.

35

DIAL M FOR MISERY: GENDER
ESSENTIALISM AND THE

HOLLOWNESS OF ANNIE WILKES

Avalon A. Manly
There is a moment in the rising action of 1990’s Misery when protagonist Paul Sheldon
(James Caan), trapped and tortured by “number-one fan” Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates),
breaks out of his room and finds, to his great relief, a phone on the living room table.
It’s an old-fashioned rotary phone, with solid black casing, and Paul dials eagerly – only
to realize that not only is it not connected, it’s empty. Entirely empty. The phone
contains no wires, no machinery, no inner workings; it’s just a relic of a bygone era, a
hollow black box in the shape of something useful.

Figure 1 Annie’s hollow phone

Apart from spurring Paul to more desperate measures in his quest for escape, the empty
phone also gives us a helpful conceit to parse Annie’s twisted conceptions of femininity

36

and womanhood throughout the film. Misery presents a woman overcome with a
desperate need for control over her life: she has never been able to be the kind of
woman that she – and society – believes she ought to be, and her reaction is to lash out,
violently. (Extra-cannonical stories like Castle Rock suggest that her first foray into
murder was as a young teen, around puberty.) Annie Wilkes is a manifestation of the
ubiquity of gender essentialism in American storytelling – that is, the presumption that,
because she is a woman, Annie should have certain traits, markers, or qualities that
render her appropriately feminine, and that not being feminine in those exact ways is
inherently an aberration.

So what happens when Annie Wilkes does not fit the mold? She, like the phone, is
empty: she works to present a facade of a womanhood so unattainable it drives her
mad. Her gender is performative in the same way the phone casing is: both play at a
function impossible for either to execute. Annie’s ideas of what it means to be a woman
are, ultimately, hollow, and her story defies stereotypes in both genre and convention. It
is perhaps this gendered subversion, alongside Bates’ chilling portrayal of Annie Wilkes,
to which the film owes its lasting success.

To understand Annie, we must first understand the genre to which her story belongs.
Perhaps the principal trope of horror is that of the Final Girl–the protagonist who suffers,
struggles, and ultimately survives whatever brutalities the narrative throws at her.
In Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film, Carol Clover points
out that, in struggling and surviving, the Final Girl often takes upon herself
stereotypically masculine behaviors, like perpetrating violence, and thereby invites
viewers to identify with a looser category of femininity–one that is simultaneously
masculine and feminine. Horror has long occupied this liminal space, wherein gender is
both essentialized and deconstructed in a narrative that becomes a vehicle of cultural
examination. To survive, the Final Girl must be pure and violent; her womanhood is

37

unstitched from traditional femininity in pursuit of outlasting monsters, most of whom
present as masculine.

Misery, though, turns this trope on its head: Annie Wilkes is a female monster, not a
Final Girl, and her femininity is compromised by Paul Sheldon’s role as protagonist. She
is not the hero of this story, and so her version of femininity is not one that invites us, as
Clover describes it, to sympathize with expanded categories of womanhood. Despite
this, Annie is a feminine character in many ways: a caretaker and former nurse, clad in
dresses throughout the film, and with a strong–one might say obsessive–affinity for
romance novels. She is also unhinged in her violence and need for control. Annie is
feminine and she is monstrous. She is also desperate in her inner life for a kind of
femininity that she cannot achieve–that of Misery Chastain, Paul Sheldon’s fictional
creation.

Throughout the film,
audiences are met with
Annie’s obsession with
Paul’s books – specifically,
the Misery series about a
Victorian woman and the
romances that punctuate
her adventures. In fact,
Annie is so deeply attached Figure 2 Annie and Misery the pig in a show of devotion to Paul’s books: “She just

makes me smile so”

to the Misery novels that she
patterns her conceptions of womanhood after the titular character and attempts to live
a facsimile of Misery’s life: she maintains her small farm, provides (in her own terrifying
way) for Paul, doesn’t swear, and cultivates a detached, alien Victorian sensibility in a
house cluttered with tchotchkes and scored by Liberache. She has named her pet pig
Misery, and claims that “everything changed” after she brought both the sow and
Misery’s portrayal of womanhood into her life.

38

Annie’s conception of Misery Chastain haunts her because, while she tries, she cannot
live it. She becomes obsessed with Paul’s fictionalized version of womanhood because
her own, lived reality does not align with what she believes it means to be feminine–and
when Misery is threatened, she reacts as if it were her own life in jeopardy: “I don’t want
her spirit!” she yells at Paul upon learning of the character’s death, “I want her, and you
murdered her!” Annie cannot conceive of Misery dying, because she rejects every
version of Paul’s storytelling that is not squarely centered on Misery–on Misery as the
woman that Annie strives to be. She wears Misery’s stories like a veil between her and
the world; if she can continue to consume Misery’s narrative, perhaps Annie never has to
face the reality that she is neither Misery nor a woman like her. Annie is not the soft,
romanticized kind of woman that Misery is – at one point she even declares that she is
“not a movie-star type,” something we must note as ironic, as a stereotypically slender
“movie-star type,” or a Victorian woman like Misery, would likely not have been able to
do many of the things that Annie actually does throughout her narrative, including
fireman-carrying a fully-grown man up a hill in a blizzard. Importantly, she
also cannot be Misery, because Misery and the womanhood that Misery represents is
not and never was real.

Figure 3 Annie revels in Misery’s stories explicitly because she desires to But it is not necessarily maddening
be like her, and is tormented by the reality that she can never be that Annie aspires to a life like
Misery’s. Lots of fans adopt
personality traits or quirks of their
favorite fictional characters.
What is maddening–part of what
drives Annie into the wilderness of
her own mind–is that Misery’s
existence is entirely unattainable for
a woman in the real world. Not only
does she belong to a fictional
century dead and gone, but Misery

39

is also a fictional conception of what it means to be a woman, authored by not one but
two men–the fictional Paul Sheldon and the actual Stephen King. Annie is trapped in a
house of cards; she wants to be and cannot be Misery, and she requires Paul to feed
that fantasy as she continues to internalize her inarticulate frustration at not being
Misery. On some level, she knows that her love for Misery is a fantasy into which she
escapes from a reality that fails to align neatly with Misery’s: “Misery made me so happy,
made me forget all my problems…”

In his book Ghostland, Colin Dickey provides a concise example of the way gender
essentialism like Misery’s and Annie’s can haunt in its own right: Merchant’s House
Museum in Manhattan was once home to Gertrude Tredwell, Seabury Tredwell’s
youngest daughter. She never married and “lived out her life in the house on Fourth
Street, her siblings dying one by one until only she remained” (4). The house is
preserved today precisely as it was in the years that Tredwell aged alone within its walls.
In what is now a museum, people routinely claim to see her specter. Gertrude Tredwell
has become an enduring New York ghost story, and Dickey believes he knows why:
“Tredwell embodies a set of ideas – and anxieties – about women, domesticity, and
modernity.” Annie Wilkes, like Tredwell, “frustrates our assumptions” about how women
“should act” (6). Tredwell did not embody or express womanhood in the way her society
believed she should, and so she haunts the place where she was never appropriately
feminine; similarly, Annie cannot meet the impossible standard of womanhood set forth
by Misery Chastain, and instead of haunting those around her, she lashes out
monstrously, with spectacular violence. Misery may not be a ghost story, but she, and
her captive Paul Sheldon, are haunted by gender essentialism in American storytelling.
We get only one glimpse of Annie that may suggest that she knows as well as we do
that her mannerisms are an inauthentic projection of who she wishes she could be. It’s
brief, incongruous, and belies the persona she works to project to Paul and the world: in
it, we find Annie laying in her bed, eating Cheetos from the bag, an open two-liter bottle
of Coke beside her, watching a dating reality TV show. In this brief shot, Annie is

40

suddenly more complex; she is more than an obsessed fan or a delusional would-be
Misery: she is also a person, living in the late twentieth century, consuming its media
and its flavors with glee. While she snacks on Cheetos, she feeds Paul a balanced, home
cooked meal; in this moment, Annie is not a quintessential, homegrown Victorian
romance protagonist–she is just a person, preserving her cultivated image to Paul while
taking off her costume in private.

Figure 4 Annie alone, for the moment not performing Misery, seems entirely herself for just these few moments of the film

Annie Wilkes is not only a stand-in for the obsession and madness of a woman who
cannot actualize herself according to the standards of femininity that society (and Paul
Sheldon and Misery) puts forth. She is also a vicious and menacing stand-in for the
author’s own struggle with substance abuse. In a Halloween day interview with Rolling
Stone’s Andy Greene in 2014, Stephen King speaks about his history of addiction and
says, “Misery is a book about cocaine. Annie Wilkes is cocaine. She was my number-one
fan.” We can see King’s metaphor in Annie’s obsessive, manic, violent reactionism; we
see it also in her frenzied desperation for control over her circumstances and Misery’s
story. We see it in the story of Annie’s life: she was a good student and landed a
successful job, where she was promoted with honors–until her inability to manage that

41

life surfaces in a string of murders. We see it, also, in the way the story almost revels in
Paul Sheldon’s pain–the masochism of an author processing regret in a way that Annie
never quite accomplishes.

When Paul finds the phone in the living room and discovers that it is hollowed out, he
mutters to himself that Annie is a “crazy bitch.” She, like the phone, is a nonfunctioning
symbol of function: the phone should work. It ought to fulfill its design, but it can’t,
because it’s empty. Annie, too, cannot function, because all the bits and pieces that
would make her whole–a stable identity that does not depend on a fictional romance
protagonist, for instance–are missing. She cannot be a person, let alone whatever it
might mean to be a “real” woman, and so she succumbs to the monster within. That she
finally explodes in a show of physical (read: traditionally masculine) violence, covered in
blood and choking on the ashes of Misery’s Return, is therefore not without a certain
dark poetry.

Works Cited:
Clover, Carol J. Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film.

Princeton University Press, 1992.
Dickey, Colin. Ghostland: an American History in Haunted Places. Viking, 2017.
Greene, Andy. “Stephen King: The Rolling Stone Interview.” Rolling Stone, 25 June 2018.

42

RAGING BUTCH: ANNIE WILKES,
F E M A L E M A S C U L I N I T Y, A N D
ANGER

Beth Kattelman

Kathy Bates’s compelling performance as Annie Wilkes in Rob Reiner’s Misery solidified
her reputation as a great actress and earned her an Oscar. Her frightening portrayal
fixed the image of the “number one fan” in the minds of viewers and ensured that
filmgoers would never look at a sledgehammer in the same way again. Annie Wilkes is a
fascinating character who can be read in many ways. Stephen King has claimed that she
is a metaphor for his addiction to cocaine; she has been analyzed as a female
representative of the gothic villain; and feminist critics have noted that she reflects
King’s misogyny. There have been few studies, however, that address the inciting factors
behind Annie’s actions. She is often dismissed as merely “monstrous” or insane, but that
is too simplistic a reading of this fascinating character. I believe a unique perspective on
Annie’s psychology and worldview can be gained by reading her as a suppressed, queer,
“butch” woman, one whose maltreatment at the hands of society has fostered a deep-
seated anger.

The terms “butch” and “femme” originated in the early-twentieth-century lesbian
subculture as a way to delineate sexual roles, with the butch as the dominant partner
and the femme as the submissive partner. Since then, however, these terms have taken
on a broader meaning that is more related to how one performs gender than to whom
one sleeps with or what role one takes in bed. In this broader context, I believe that the
term “butch” can be useful in explicating Annie Wilkes. (Here I am dealing with the
character as portrayed by Kathy Bates in the film, not Lizzy Caplan’s portrayal of Wilkes
in the online series Castle Rock.) Even though she is not identified outright as a
homosexual, Annie exhibits many of the characteristics that the (patriarchally-
influenced) general public associates with butch lesbians: she is ungraceful, brawny,

43

wears comfortable shoes, dresses in dowdy clothes, and has a rather short, austere
hairdo. In a word, she is “mannish” and is visually coded as butch. She also performs
actions that situate her in the category of a stereotypical butch woman. Not least, she is
muscular, as evidenced by when she flings Paul onto her back and totes him up the hill
to her car.

In addition, she is not at all

nervous or squeamish

when it comes to dealing

with mangled, broken

bodies. In fact, she takes

great pride in her ability to

wrestle Paul’s body back

into shape. As she says

cheerfully, “Your shoulder Figure 1 Annie hefts Paul over her shoulder after his accident
was pretty badly dislocated. It

was a little stubborn, but I finally popped it back in.” According to the codes established

by patriarchal society, Annie is more man than woman, and this unacceptable boundary-

crossing makes her a prime target for ridicule and censure.

In Misery Annie Wilkes is visually and aurally coded as mannish from the first instance
that Paul sees and hears her. As he slowly regains consciousness, Annie says, “I’m your
number one fan.” In this moment, her voice is distorted; the pitch is artificially lowered,
making it sound more male than female. The spoken line is also processed with heavy
reverb. The low pitch and distortion add a menacing quality that establishes Annie as
potentially monstrous right from the start. As Paul continues to come out of his fog, the
voice slowly shifts into a higher pitch, one that matches Kathy Bates’s regular speaking
voice, and then we see Annie enter the frame. She is initially shot from an extremely low

44

angle—mimicking Paul’s
perspective—giving her a looming,
Godzilla-like quality. The low-angle
shot is used to convey Annie’s
power, and it also subtly signifies
and enhances her monstrousness.
One gets a feeling that at any
moment she could come smashing
down on Paul, something that
literally happens later in the film.

As the film progresses, we quickly discover that Annie Wilkes is a lonely character who
has little contact with the outside world. She lives in an isolated farmhouse, and there is
no indication that she has any family or friends. Apparently, she has cut herself off from
others as much as possible, an assumption that is later confirmed by the fact that she
does not have a working telephone in her home. In fact, during the course of the film we
only see Annie directly interact with three people: a motorist in town who angers her,
the sheriff who comes to her house, and, of course, Paul Sheldon. In her initial
interactions with Paul and the sheriff, Annie tries her best to seem normal and cheerful,
but she is unable to maintain that façade. No matter how hard she tries, eventually her
true mental state breaks through, and she unleashes the suppressed rage and violence
that is triggered whenever her worldview is challenged or when she feels threatened. It
soon becomes clear that Annie suffers from a mental illness, one that several
professionals who have examined the character from a psychological perspective have
suggested is borderline personality disorder, a pathology that includes an intense fear
of abandonment, a pattern of unstable relationships, threats of suicide or self-injury,
inappropriate, intense anger, sarcasm, and wide mood swings.[i] Annie Wilkes certainly
exhibits all of these behaviors through the course of the film. But was Annie born crazy?
Or is there some other reason she has ended up this way? I propose that one possible

45

explanation for Annie’s deep rage is the abuse that she has suffered because she
presents as “butch” to the world. Annie’s mannish comportment makes her a target for
ridicule and derision—and this lifetime of mistreatment has taken a mental toll on her.
As Stephen King himself admits, Annie Wilkes sees herself as, “a beleaguered woman
trying to survive in a hostile world filled with cockadoodie brats.”[ii]

Butch/Queer
Annie’s size and lack of grace place her squarely in the category of a “butch” woman.
The label is usually applied as a pejorative to females who transgress expected
boundaries of gender, and who are thus suspected of being lesbian. The “butch” label
signifies that there is something wrong with the individual to whom it is applied. As Jack
Halberstam notes in his influential book, Female Masculinity, “Butch is always a
misnomer—not male, not female, masculine but not male, female but not feminine, the
term serves as a placeholder for the unassimilable, for that which remains indefinable or
unspeakable within the many identifications that we make and that we claim.”[iii] Here
Halberstam recognizes that, because the butch female does not fit neatly into a
recognizable category, they are therefore unacceptable to society. No doubt Annie’s
“butchness” has made her a target of derision, and one can imagine the mockery she
has had to endure as the inhabitant of a misogynist world which judges women
primarily on their looks. Annie has never been thin enough, graceful enough, pretty
enough, soft-spoken enough, or polite enough. She is a challenge to gender norms, and
therefore she must be censured. The repeated meanness she has encountered—from
men, in particular—has sown resentment, and it is this mistreatment that is partly
responsible for creating the monster she has become. In fact, Annie occasionally drops
hints of her irritation at male mistreatment through the particular language she uses
when she chastises Paul, placing him in that universal category of “Man” along with all
of the other nameless men in the world who have mistreated, disappointed, or
disparaged her, “You’d just better start showing me a little more appreciation around
here Mr. Man.”

46

Of course, it is not just Annie’s fictional world that exhibits meanness toward women.
The misogyny that Annie Wilkes suffers bleeds from fiction into reality and is directly
demonstrated when critics commenting on the film feel the need include an unflattering
physical description of her and, by extension, Kathy Bates. Annie is variously described in
reviews as “repulsive,” “overweight,” “fat,” “plain,” and “piggy.” These descriptors are
used to emphasize the wrongness of this non-conforming female. Big, bold women are
transgressors, who must be chastised, whereas big, bold men are the norm. Contrast the
above descriptions of Annie, for example, with those that critics have applied to Howard
Stambler, antagonist of the film 10 Cloverfield Lane (2016), played by John
Goodman. Howard is often compared to Annie Wilkes because he is a large,
threatening figure who holds a young woman captive after he has rescued her from an
automobile accident. Checking through reviews for 10 Cloverfield Lane on the Rotten
Tomatoes web site, one is hard-pressed, however, to find a description of Howard that is
as unflattering as those heaped upon Annie Wilkes. While a few include physical
descriptions such as “portly, “overweight, or “middle-aged,” Howard is more often
described as “doomsday prepper,” “apocalypse prepper,” or “survivalist,” tags that allude
to his actions rather than his looks. He does not face anything close to the
condemnation that Annie (and, by extension, Kathy Bates) endures at the hands of film
critics.

The inability to live up to societal expectations of femininity and passivity can be a
source of shame and a catalyst for deep-seated anger and resentment in women. When
women are constantly subjected to unfair double-standards, it takes a toll. Feelings of
inadequacy are internalized, thus causing low self-esteem, which can eventually manifest
as misplaced aggression. As Soraya Chemaly explains in her book on women’s rage:

Being indignant is a powerful emotional response to insults and to threats
against dignity. It is a specific kind of anger rooted in believing that you are being
treated unfairly. A precondition for indignation is a secure sense of your worth
and an equally strong sense that some valuable standard or norm has been

47

violated. Subjecting someone to indignity involves making a person feel shame
or a loss of self-respect. It’s the core of humiliation, embarrassment, and loss of
face as well as pride. It is the bleeding edge of dehumanization and violence.[iv]

And violence in breeds violence out. Those who suffer indignity are sometimes destined
to pay it forward.

Because butchness is associated with lesbianism, Annie Wilkes has probably also been
the target of homophobia on various occasions. Although there is no evidence that
Wilkes is homosexual, any masculine presenting woman is automatically suspected of
being a “dyke.” But perhaps Annie is a closeted lesbian? Even though her butchness is
not proof of homosexuality, there are some other things in Misery that could be read as
allusions to Annie’s repressed lesbian tendencies. For example, while Annie does not
necessarily exhibit an overt sexual infatuation with Misery Chastain, her passion for the
character hints at same-sex desire, as evidenced in the scene in which she confronts Paul
for having killed her. In this scene Annie reacts with a disproportionate fury, screaming,
“I don’t want her spirit. I want her!” It is clear that Annie has developed an “unnatural”
attachment to the character, one that hints at subtle romantic overtones. In her
distorted world, Annie conflates Paul and Misery, and she is in love with them both. Her
love for Misery, though, came first.

Another element that contains a hint of Annie’s latent homosexuality can be found in
her obsession with Liberace, a celebrity whom one reviewer refers to as “every spinster’s
impossible dream boyfriend.”[v] In one shot we see a framed photo of Liberace
alongside a framed photo of Annie as a young girl, indicating that she considers him a
member of the family.

48

Liberace, a virtuoso
piano player, was one of
the most flamboyant
celebrities of his time;
he wore flashy costumes
and exhibited feminine
mannerisms.
Throughout his life, the
entertainer vehemently
denied that he was
homosexual, but eventually, after his death, his sexual preference was confirmed by
close friends. Annie’s love of Liberace tangentially aligns her with the homosexual world
by raising the specter of a queer icon. I do not mean to suggest here that anyone who
likes Liberace, or any other flamboyant celebrity, is homosexual. I merely find it
interesting that he is the celebrity that Reiner chose to include in the film. Liberace’s
presence in the narrative certainly adds subliminal references to same-sex desire if
nothing else. And, as Harry M. Benshoff notes, subtextual or connotative avenues are
“perhaps the most important way that homosexuality enters the [horror]
genre.”[vi] Whether or not Annie Wilkes is actually homosexual is really beside the
point. She is butch in her comportment, and this makes her queer in the eyes of society.
This queerness fosters the situation that plays itself out in Misery. Life has not been fair
to Annie Wilkes and the unfairness has fostered a deep sense of indignation in her, one
that is at the root of her anger and is the catalyst for her rage.

One of the most interesting things about films is that they open themselves up to many
readings. Stephen King has admitted that Misery is about his battle with substance
abuse, and it certainly can be read as a metaphor for that struggle. But Misery can also
be seen as an example of how the policing of gender norms, female body shaming, and
general misogyny can lead women to internalize anger that might explode in vicious

49