themonstrousfeminine:“The route to mature femininity Miss Collins offers Carrie, pictured as t
themonstrousfeminine:“The route to mature femininity Miss Collins offers Carrie, pictured as the road to the Senior Prom, consists of tactful grooming tips on make-up, hair styling, dress, and posture, which eventually allow Carrie to assume Sue’s place along side Tommy on prom night. Carrie’s femininity is a posture she assumes by dressing up, putting on, adding to her body. The feminine position Miss Collins holds out, and which Carrie eagerly tries to adopt, stresses her body’s external surface, her image. Indeed, all of the scenes associated with the girl’s physical transformation are played in front of mirrors so that we do not see Carrie herself, but her reflected image. In the initial scene with Miss Collins in the school washroom, where Carrie is encouraged to scrutinize those aspects of her body which might be enhanced through the addition of color and curl, the teacher says, “See that? That’s a pretty girl.” Speaking in the third person, she distances Carrie from her own image…Scenes where Carrie tests shades of lip stick in a drugstore and applies make-up the night of the prom are similarly framed through the girl’s mirror reflection, alerting us to the fact that Carrie’s “femininity” is a surface alteration designed to mask the true horror of her body. The separation of visual image from physical body that the mirror reflection creates is akin to the effect Carrie achieves by making up. Through the blush, eye-shadow, lipstick, and curls she dons, Carrie builds up the surface of her body, as if to cover over what lurks beneath…”HORROR, FEMININITY, AND CARRIE’S MONSTROUS PUBERTY, Shelley Stamp Lindsey -- source link