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Puberty, Adolescence, and Coming of Age
Themes and Colors
LitCharts assigns a color and icon to each theme in Carrie, which you can use to track the themes throughout the work.
The stigma around female sexuality, especially the sexuality of teenage girls, is an important driver of Carrie’s plot. Carrie herself is taught from a young age to associate sexual desire with shame thanks to her mother Margaret, who believes that the development of a woman’s body during puberty is the result of sin. Carrie’s shame is the result of Margaret’s own shame, as seen when she admits later in the novel that she found sex with Carrie’s father Ralph pleasurable despite doing her best to avoid sleeping with him. Even so, despite Margaret’s harsh teachings, Carrie begins to let herself explore her own desire after being asked to the prom by her crush Tommy. Although her interactions with Tommy are quite innocent, never escalating beyond holding hands, Margaret views Carrie going to the dance at all as an unforgiveable sin.
In contrast to Carrie, Sue and Chris, the other two major female characters in the novel, are sexually active. While Sue’s sexual relationship with Tommy is healthy (albeit initially unfulfilling for Sue) and she feels little shame about it, Chris’s relationship with sexuality is more complicated: it is implied that she does not want to move into sex quickly with Billy and only does so because she feels coerced by him. Thus, both Carrie and Chris show how female sexuality can be used as a tool of abuse and oppression, whether by forcibly suppressing women’s sexuality (as in Carrie’s case), or by forcing women into sexual situations, ss Billy does to Chris. However, Sue’s relationship with her sexuality shows that women have the potential to embrace their sexuality and own it, rather than letting themselves be controlled by oppressive societal forces. In other words, the three teenage girls in Carrie fall across a spectrum of shame and coercion when it comes to their sexualities. Through their experiences, especially through the exaggerated shame Margaret imparts to Carrie, the novel suggests that, whether through sexual repression or sexual coercion, teenage girls face an uphill battle when it comes to accepting and expressing their sexuality.
Related Themes from Other Texts
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Female Sexuality and Shame ThemeTracker
The ThemeTracker below shows where, and to what degree, the theme of Female Sexuality and Shame appears in each chapter of Carrie. Click or tap on any chapter to read its Summary & Analysis.
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Female Sexuality and Shame Quotes in Carrie
Below you will find the important quotes in Carrie related to the theme of Female Sexuality and Shame.
Part 1: Pages 25-50
Quotes
She lowered her head and said something so softly I couldn’t hear it. When I asked her to repeat it, she looked at me defiantly and said that her momma had been bad when she made her and that was why she had [breasts]. She called them dirtypillows, as if it was all one word.
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Explanation and Analysis:
Part 1: Pages 50-91
Quotes
She was quite sure (or only hopeful) that she wasn’t that weak, not that liable to fall docilely into the complacent expectations of parents, friends, and even herself. But now there was this shower thing, where she had gone along and pitched in with high, savage glee. The word she was avoiding was expressed To Conform, in the infinitive, and it conjured up miserable images of hair in rollers, long afternoons in front of the ironing board in front of the soap operas while hubby was off busting heavies in an anonymous Office; [...] of fighting with desperate decorum to keep the Kleen Corners white, standing shoulder to shoulder with Terri Smith (Miss Potato Blossom of 1975) and Vicki Jones (Vice President of the Women’s League), armed with signs and petitions and sweet, slightly desperate smiles.
Part 1: Pages 91-117
Quotes
The mean tricks have been going on ever since grammar school. I wasn’t in on many of them, but I was on some. If I’d been in Carrie’s groups, I bet I would have been in on even more. It seemed liked…oh, a big laugh. Girls can be cat-mean about that sort of thing, and boys don’t really understand. The boys would tease Carrie for a little while and then forget, but the girls...it went on and on and on and I can’t even remember where it started any more. If I were Carrie, I couldn’t even face showing myself to the world. I’d just find a big rock and hide under it.
She was intimidated but not stopped. Because if she wanted to, she could send them all screaming into the streets. Mannequins toppling over, light fixtures falling, bolts of cloth shooting through the air in unwinding streamers. Like Samson in the temple, she could rain destruction on their heads if she so desired.
Part 2: Pages 141-170
Quotes
“There’s going to be a judgment!” Margaret White raved. “I wash my hands of it! I tried!”
“Pilate said that,” Carrie said.
And if he didn’t come, if she drew back and gave up? High school would be over in a month. Then what? A creeping, subterranean existence in this house, supported by Momma, watching game shows and soap operas all day on television at Mrs. Garrison’s house when she had Carrie In To Visit (Mrs. Garrison was eighty-six), walking down to the Center to get a malted after supper at the Kelly Fruit when it was deserted, getting fatter, losing hope, losing even the power to think?
No. Oh dear God, please no.
(please let it be a happy ending)
Billy’s car was old, dark, somehow sinister. The windshield was milky around the edges, as if a cataract was beginning to form. The seats were loose and unanchored. Beer bottles clicked and rolled in the back (her fraternity dates drank Budweiser; Billy and his friends drank Rheingold), and she had to place her feet around a huge, grease-clotted Craftsman toolkit without a lid. The tools inside were of many different makes, and she suspected that many of them were stolen. The car smelled of oil and gas. The sound of straight pipes came loudly and exhilaratingly through the thin floorboards. A row of dials slung under the dash registered amps, oil pressure, and tach (whatever that was). The back wheels were jacked and the hood seemed to point at the road.
They’ve forgotten her, you know. They’ve made her into some kind of symbol and forgotten that she was a real human being, as real as you reading this, with hopes and dreams and blah, blah, blah. Useless to tell you that, I suppose. Nothing can change her back now from something made out of newsprint into a person. But she was, and she hurt. More than any of us probably know, she hurt.
And so I’m sorry and I hope it was good for her, that prom. Until the terror began. I hope it was good and fine and wonderful and magic.
Part 2: Pages 238-277
Quotes
“I almost killed myself […] And Ralph wept and talked about atonement and I didn’t and then he was dead and the I thought God had visited me with cancer; that He was turning my female parts into something as black and rotten as my sinning soul. But that would have been too easy. The Lord works in mysterious ways His wonders to perform. I see that now. When the pains began I went and got a knife—this knife”—she held it up—“and waited for you to come so I could make my sacrifice. But I was weak and backsliding. I took this knife in hand again when you were three, and I backslid again. So now that devil has come home.”
He called her Charlie whenever he was pleased with her. It seemed to be, she thought with a cold blink of humor, a generic term for a good cunt.
