A game of hide and seek in Stephen King’s “A Good Marriage.” (2010) By Dr Jessica Folio, University of Reunion Island.
Jessica Folio analyses Stephen King’s short story, “A Good Marriage,” and suggests that he focuses on the intricacies of the female mind in order to cast a light on modern marriage and uses the game of hide and seek as a metaphor to enable an understanding of relationships and identity.
Stephen King has been involved in a game of hide and seek with his “Constant Reader” for over thirty-eight years.[1] This game is focused on unveiling and exploring his characters’ and the readers’ repressed childhood fears, or the letting out of the uncanny.[2] King’s characters and settings are often familiar, and so reinforce the Gothic convention of dealing with domestic themes threatened by transgressive forces such as deprave sexuality and violence. The theme of entrapment is also important, as highlighted by Barbara Welter, for instance, who describes the Gothic wife as “a hostage in the home” (Welter 15).
In his short story, “A Good Marriage,” King focuses on the intricacies of the female mind in order to cast a light on modern marriage. The narrative reveals the fake foundations of apparently harmonious American family life. Married for twenty-seven years, home-maker Darcellen Masden, and her accountant husband, Bob Anderson apparently share “a good marriage, one of the 50% or so” (266-67). In addition to being an accountant, Bob works with Darcy dealing in rare coins. King represents marital stability in everyday ways by stressing their simple, uneventful, enduring relationship: the medication taken for Bob’s thinning hair; the concessions the couple makes as time goes by; their support of each other through illness; the reassurance of Bob’s physical presence; and Darcy’s memories connected to smells and objects.[3] The couple has two children who also seem to have fulfilled lives: their son, Donnie, runs his own ad firm with a friend, and their daughter, Petra, dedicates much of her time to her wedding preparations.
Darcy discovers Bob’s secret identity
The united and stable American family soon starts to disintegrate, however, with Darcy’s discovery of Bob’s secret identity. Indeed, she finds out that he is the serial killer, Beadie, who has a long history of torturing and killing women. In total, he is responsible for eleven torture-killings. He also taunts the police by sending them some of his victims’ personal documents accompanied by cheerful notes. The women’s bodies are hidden in ravines or in cellars. For instance, Bob/Beadie’s seventh victim, Stacey Moore, is found by her husband in the cellar of their house: “her head had been stuffed into a bin of the sweet corn the Moores sold at their roadside Route 106 farmstand. She was naked, her hands bound behind her back, her buttocks and thighs bitten in a dozen places” (285).
King’s focus on the game of hide and seek enables understanding of relationships and identity. Not only does it help to disclose the less-than-perfect underpinnings of American family life but it also promotes analysis of Bob’s deviant behavior, mainly by considering his childhood. The reference to “hiding” also links to the depth model utilized in psychoanalytical theory, of finding out what lies behind the mask of reality, or beyond the looking-glass. King’s reference to Lewis Carroll’s novel -suggested by thirteen references to “mirrors”- also serves as a reminder of the Lacanian mirror stage. In psychoanalytic terms, the game of hide and seek represents the return of the repressed.
Although Bob seems on the surface to love Darcy, his love can be interpreted in terms of dominance and possessiveness. His hand stroking her face and hair appears not as a sign of love but of possession. To rephrase Leslie Fiedler, King substitutes terror for love as a central theme of this marriage.[4] Bob’s need for control is further suggested by his tendency to call his wife at the same time while away on business trips. He knows her habits and perceives the smallest changes in her voice over the phone. For example, her voice changes after she discovers Bob’s serial killer identity, and she cannot conceal from him this fact with a lie about her dead sister.[5] Bob’s hidden collection of sadomasochistic pornographic magazines also helps to reveal the real balance of power between husband and wife.
Even a symbol of the couple’s love, the small oak box Darcy gives to Bob for Christmas, is corrupted when he uses it to conceal the evidence of his dual identity. In this box, Bob keeps trophies from one of his victims, Marjorie Duvall, and stores her blood donor card, library card and driver’s license. The cards are stored in a precise order, which arguably serves as an indicator of how Bob defines an individual: the vital fluid, the intellectual tastes and the manual abilities. These markers of Marjorie Duvall’s identity are held together by elastic and stored in the small oak box, which further suggests a masculine attempt to stifle and confine the feminine.
A game of hide and seek
For many years, the delusional and psychotic[6] Bob played a game of hiding his devious nature to others and to himself, refusing to take the blame for his atrocious acts. He chose for his double identity to transform the initials of a dead childhood friend, Brian Delahanty, (B.D) in the phonetic name, Beadie. He hides himself behind his ghost friend’s supposed voice in his head or behind misspellings in his notes to the police. The twisted use of grammar echoes his twisted mind and his willingness to mask his identity. In addition to misinforming the police force, Bob is himself misguided when he misinterprets female behavior. He misreads their signals as he is convinced that women are the ones who seduce him whereas detective Holt Ramsey, who visits Darcy at the end of the story, insists that Bob is the one who preys on them. The simple marriage and stable family serves a stage to conceal Bob’s lustful nature.
The game of hide and seek also implies particular treatment of space which further reinforces the gender dichotomy in King’s story. Darcy is depicted as being in the kitchen, in the garage or in the bedroom. If the kitchen appears as a feminized space, a place of sharing and of communication between husband and wife or between mother and son, the garage is represented as a male domain: “the garage was mostly his domain, after all. She only went there to get her car out and that only on bad-weather days” (267). The garage arguably represents the world of the Phallus[7] and it is here that Darcy finds out her husband’s double identity when innocently searching for batteries for the TV remote control. “Bob’s just-short-of-maniacal neatness” (268) should make this search easy, but instead Darcy stumbles over a cardboard box that reveals the terrifying truth of Bob’s double identity. Perhaps Bob deliberately left this box in the way, especially since his murderous confession to Darcy brings him some relief.
Darcy’s journey to truth involves a number of stages. First, she discovers a pile of her own catalogues under a worktable that conceal Bob’s collection of pornographic, sadomasochistic magazines which in turn suggest his repressed deviant sexual urges. Darcy’s attempt to rationalize and even justify these magazines by regarding them as “male investigation” (270) is far from convincing. Second, Darcy discovers that the magazines hide a secret compartment, “a hidey-hole eight inches long, a foot high, and maybe eighteen inches deep” (275) containing the little oak box of murder trophies. The emphasis on the depth as well as the elongated form of the hidey hole reinforces the phallic space of the garage. The garage’s neatness and even purity, since it is devoid of the usual stains found in garages such as oil and other fluids, help to suggest that the garage is Bob’s sanctuary, or a sanctified place where he praises the two-headed mythological figure, Janus.
This figure of Janus highlights the underlying theme of ‘the double’ that runs throughout the narrative as the god Janus is commonly represented as a two-faced god, looking both to the future and the past. Bob’s dual nature is repeatedly emphasized: “they were his eyes … and they weren’t” (304). The theme of the double is reinforced when on Bob’s discovery of a 1955 double-date wheat penny, Darcy “saw him again (after that brief, loving lapse) for what he was: the Darker husband. Gollum, with his precious” (313). On his death, however, Bob’s concealed identity hides not only a monster but also nothingness, or blackness: “all were nothing but camouflage. He was a shell. There was nothing inside but howling emptiness” (315). His perfect civility -stable family and personal neatness- conceals the worst monstrosity: “his insanity was like an underground sea. There was a layer of rock over it, and a layer of soil over the rock; flowers grew there. You could stroll through them and never know the madwater was there… but it was. It always had been” (296).
The analysis of space extends from the garage to the bedroom where Darcy concentrates all of her fears following the discovery of her husband’s hidden life. At night, she keeps the bedroom lamp on so she can sleep, her fear of the darkness suggesting her regression to a childhood state in which light apparently keeps nightmares at bay. Darcy turns the clock away from her as well, which further reinforces her need to escape from the present and regress
into the past. The bedroom also becomes an unreal space after Bob’s confession: Bob asks Darcy to forgive him, promising to kill himself if he regresses, which she pretends to do for their children’s sake, even asking him to bury Marjorie Duvall’s ID cards in the woods. The couple seems committed to concealing the murders, and Darcy no longer wants to talk about them. Darcy’s silence places Bob’s deviancy outside the logos (speech) and can be understood as prophetic of Bob’s eventual death which will make him eternally speechless.
Importantly, however, Bob does not consider himself sick or crazy. For him, the murders are justified because his victims are supposedly ‘easy girls’ who entice men, and the murder are also the result of his irrepressible urges that neither his magazines nor internet sites are able to quell. The murders appear as an auxiliary of abreaction, a cathartic method to attain the purgation of his repressed desires.[8] They are also explained by Bob’s unresolved childhood issues. Bob blames his violence on best childhood friend, Brian Delahanty, who was killed in an accident fourteen years prior to the story. He blames Brian for infecting his mind and sowing the seeds of his deviant behavior, as BD or Beadie. Bob also claims to experience amnesia at the time of the proper killings when BD takes charge. Bob recalls a childhood memory involving a group of school girls taunting him and his friends. The girls enticed the boys, then rejected them. Bob’s anger at being rejected remains with him, resurges and is transferred to the women he kills. The murders are a mark of a return of the repressed and a sign of regression to infancy.
The other side of the mirror
The terms “regression” and “infancy” are fundamental to the story that deals with revealing dark truths concealed in the darker side of the house, the marriage, or beyond appearances and on the other side of the mirror, which you can only penetrate if you believe in your own darker side. The emphasis on mirrors reinforces both the theme of double identity and the Lacanian mirror stage.[9] This stage is primary to identity formation and establishes a boundary between the self and the other, a stage that Bob seems to have failed. In his case, the connection was not made between his self and his reflection since his best friend Brian took the role of the Lacanian concept of imago. Bob’s identity is unclear and is confused with Brian’s. The process of abjection analyzed by Julia Kristeva as a necessary rejection by the child of the maternal in order to leave the semiotic and enter the symbolic stage is also revisited in King’s story. The symbiotic relation to the mother seems to be replaced by a close relationship between Brian and Bob. Moreover, Bob did not abject Brian, and so seems condemned as a result to be deprived of any stable identity.
The mirror stage is also important for understanding Darcy’s childhood. As a child, she played a game with mirrors, which she believed opened a door into another world, apparently resembling the one she lived in but diverging in its details: it was similar on the other side of the glass, but not the same, and if you looked long enough, you could begin to pick up on some of the differences” (290-91). Darcy’s mirror does not offer a perfect reflection but reveals differences. There is a play on perception: “what is similar is not the same” (290-91). The mirror does not give a mimetic or an inverted image of reality but a diverted one. A discrepancy exists between the Concrete and its Manifestation. The term “Concrete” is chosen to designate the material world we live in, whilst the Manifestation is its reflection seen in the mirror. In her imagination, Darcy steps, like Alice, through the looking-glass and finds out a distorted, subverted world in which her husband turns into the ogre from the classic fairy tales. Moreover, his carnivorous tendencies are transferred from women to children, when Bob bites off a child’s sexual organ.
Darcy also undergoes a regression to the mirror stage. As a child of five, she had already looked for “the Darker Girl” (291). In adulthood, the bathroom mirror becomes the door to her hidden self: “she shifted her gaze back to the wild-haired woman with the bloodshot, frightened eyes: the Darker Wife, in all her raddled glory. […] The Darker Wife was Mrs. Brian Delahanty” (307). The regression to the mirror stage is perceived but the recognition and identification process is distorted and involves displacement; the mirror does not show her reflection but her evil self. The identification is not made with her own self but with her darker self: She embraces her identity as “the monster’s wife. … This was the Darker Life, where every truth was written backward” (307-8). The game of hide and seek is equated with regression and backward writing is also a mark of this regression, as though the very connection between signifier and signified themselves was reversed.
The staircase is a place where Darcy entirely embraces her dark self. It is also the scene of Bob’s death. The staircase is an in-between space, which in psychoanalytic terms blurs the boundary between the Superego and the Id. Arguably, upstairs represents an all-knowing and powerful position, especially when Darcy pushes Bob down the stairs, as if to push back the darker reality into the depths of the Id. Darcy becomes a murderer herself, being as methodic as Bob, thinking of the minutest details. At the bottom of the stairs, Darcy chokes Bob on a plastic GLAD bag with a dishcloth in it, as well as cleaning any evidence from his mouth. She also cleans his car before selling it. She makes herself look innocent to the police by crying, not for her dead husband but for her children.
The game of hide and seek involves finding one’s place on the right side of the mirror and unifying the double perceived reality. Because Bob finds pleasure in stepping through the mirror taking on Beadie’s personality, the problematic of the double cannot be solved for him. Contrary to Bob, a reestablishment on the right side of the mirror is possible for Darcy. This possibility is demonstrated by her need to be alone after her husband’s funeral “to find herself again. To re-establish herself on the right side of the mirror” (322).
The elderly detective Holt Ramsey, who questioned Bob for one of the murders, helps Darcy to reach closure by letting her know that Bob had been on the verge of getting caught. Holt also allows Darcy to liberate herself from her feeling of guilt by “giving her a pass” (334) to freedom and by extension to a unified self. Holt embraces Darcy and gives her a friendly kiss on her cheek, thereby re-establishing normal physical contact as opposed to Bob’s deviant love. The mirror eventually reflects a single reality: “she felt younger, lighter. She went to the mirror in the hall. In it she saw nothing but her own reflection, and that was good” (336). The game of hide and seek is resolved when oneness replaces in-betweenness. Darcy’s regression to her repressed urge for darkness is necessary in order to reconcile her body and her imago, to reach once and for all the Symbolic stage. A good marriage and a fulfilled life imply coming to terms with one’s darker side, and staying on the Symbolic side of the mirror. Mirrors are auxiliaries of ambivalence, analeptic doors to a double, monstrous side reality but also a path to oneness. Observing oneself in them parallels a therapy session.
The familial nucleus, however, is not reconstructed as Darcy is ultimately depicted as being alone, although with a reconstructed identity. King seems to emphasize feminine superiority and annihilate the patriarchal order which is powerless to come to terms with its repressed issues and gain oneness. The game of hide and seek running through the narrative also highlights King’s belief in the power of the child’s imagination: “I’m interested in the mythic power that childhood holds over our imagination, the raising of children into decent adults -and that means adults who have not lost touch with the essential qualities of childhood” (Magistrale, 7). Darcy has to immerse herself into and embrace her childhood beliefs to be able to confront and defeat her monstrous husband. Finally, the regression process to the mirror stage, the disclosure of the haunting past and of the return of the repressed are depicted as vital for the reconstruction of a stable identity, for a resolute attainment of the Symbolic, for a revelation and a reconciliation of the body with the agencies of the self.
Notes
[1]King identifies his “Constant Reader” as his faithful fans who have followed him along the years.
[2]Freud defines the uncanny as: “that species of the frightening that goes back to what was once well known and had long been familiar.” Sigmund Freud. “The Uncanny.” The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock, (New York: Penguin, 1919. 2003), 150. Several issues are here at stake: a compulsion to repeat as well as the return of the commonly known that had been repressed. It is that repression that explains why the familiar has turned into the unfamiliar.
[3]See p.265 in King’s text.
[4]Original quotation: “terror for love as a central theme of fiction.” (Fiedler 134).
[5] Darcy’s lie can be understood as a displacement from Beadie’s victims to her sister’s death. Indeed, an analeptic parenthesis is opened on her sister’s death, Brandolyn Masden, killed by a drunk snowmobiler as she was skiing. In a parallel manner, Bob’s best friend, B. D died struck by a delivery truck.
[6] Freud viewed the psychotic as a person who projects his libido from objects to his ego. The ego rejects an idea but during the delusion, this idea irrupts from the outside back into the ego. Bob rejects as much as he can his murderous desires but the sight of enticing women has those desires resurface into his ego. The psychotic subject considers he is sane and he interprets the world around him in terms of persecution and aggressiveness.
[7] The term “phallus” implies a fascination with power and male superiority. The elongated shapes visible in Bob’s garage place him as the domineering persona in the marriage: “big silver pipes […] crisscrossed the ceiling.” (268)
[8]The abreaction is “an emotional discharge whereby the subject liberates himself from the affect attached to the memory of a traumatic event in such a way that this affect is not able to become (or remain) pathogenic.” Laplanche, Jean and Pontalis, J.B. The Language of Psychoanalysis. (London: The Hogarth Press, 1973), p. 1.
[9] Jacques Lacan makes that stage correspond to the moment the child establishes the connection between his body and his own image in a mirror. It is the process of identification “where the child transforms itself into the image as it appears to the child (or imago) and assumes the identity of the imago.” Pile, Steve. The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity. (London: Routledge, 1996), p. 123.
Works Cited
Fiedler, Leslie A. Love and Death in the American Novel. Rev. ed. New York: Skin and Day, 1966.
Freud, Sigmund. “The Uncanny.” The Uncanny. Trans. David McLintock. 2003. New York: Penguin, 2003 [1919].
King, Stephen. “A Good Marriage.” Full Dark, No Stars. London: Hodder and Stoughton, (2010): 261-336.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: an Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia University Press, 1982.
Laplanche, J, & Pontalis. J.B. The Language of Psycho-Analysis. London: Hogarth Press, 1983
Magistrale, Tony. Stephen King: the Second Decade. Danse Macabre to the Dark Half. New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992
Pile, Steve. The Body and the City: Psychoanalysis, Space and Subjectivity. London: Routledge, 1996.
Welter, Barbara. “The Cult of True Womanhood. 1820-1860.” American Quarterly 18.2 (1966): 151-74.
American Studies Resource Centre 