Sexual Violence

Abstract

King came under fire—especially early in his career—for the nature of his female characters. There is an entire book of literary criticism dedicated to negative representations of women in King’s work, Imagining the Worst: Stephen King and the Representation of Women,¹ a collection of essays edited by Kathleen Margaret Lant and Teresa Thompson; as Lant and Thompson argue in their introduction, “Although King must be praised for [his] accurate and potent rendition of Everyman in the late twentieth century, his representations of Everywoman often provoke hostility as well as admiration” (4). As Magistrale sums up the criticisms of King’s female characters in his chapter on “Challenging Gender Stereotypes: King’s Evolving Women” in Stephen King: America’s Storyteller, “During the first two decades of his career, several feminist scholars observed that the roles King traditionally allotted women in his fiction and specifically female sexuality itself were patronizingly restrictive and frequently negative” (131), drawing on the critique of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro, who argued that “it’s disheartening when a writer with so much talent and strength of vision is not able to develop a believable woman character between the ages of seventeen and sixty” (qtd. in Magistrale, “Challenging” 131). King acknowledged this weakness, saying in a 1983 interview that this criticism is “the most justifiable of all those leveled at me” (qtd. in Magistrale, “Challenging” 132).