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“No eclipse lasts forever” : confronting gendered violence in Stephen King’s Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne

University of British Columbia

Gendered violence, particularly violence against women, is an issue that continues to haunt North American society today as demonstrated by the fact that #MeToo, a social movement dedicated to increasing visibility of the issue of violence against women, has gained astounding attention over the past three years. Similarly, the novels of American author Stephen King also aid in increasing the visibility of violence against women as a real issue, specifically his set of novels Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne. In Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne, King draws out his most striking representations of gendered violence thus far through protagonists Jessie Burlingame and Dolores Claiborne, respectively. In the novels, Jessie and Dolores experience sexual, physical, and domestic violence enforced by their husbands, fathers, and the patriarchal society in which they live. As a means of revealing the inherently violent nature of the technologies which construct and police gender norms along with the internal trauma that often results from patriarchal violence, King connects the two novels intertextually by invoking an element of the Gothic tradition: a solar eclipse. Between the two novels, the eclipse represents and thus opens up a psychic, liminal space between Jessie and Dolores uniting them in their shared traumas and encouraging the reader to reflect upon gendered violence as being an experience shared by many women. While Jessie and Dolores resort to using violence to retaliate against their abusers, it is only used as a last resort. As with #MeToo, rather than condoning violence as an appropriate response to patriarchal oppression, the novels advocate acknowledging, sharing, and eventually rewriting narratives of trauma as methods of non-violent retaliation. In this sense, King’s novels are a feminist intervention that might work alongside #MeToo to further emphasize the issue of violence against women as a contemporary issue and, perhaps, open up the space necessary for invoking social change. Drawing from the theoretical works of Kate Manne, Laurie Collier Hillstrom, Judith Butler, Cathy Caruth, and Greg Forter, this thesis seeks to examine the significance of the eclipse in Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne in relation to gender and its historically heteronormative construction in North American society, individual and social trauma, and the violence that results.

Text

2021-02-10

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/77271

English

University of British Columbia

UBCO

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/