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Though I haven’t done official research, for years I’ve thought of Rose Madder (1995) as underappreciated among King’s novels, just based on conversations with fellow academics and other friends. I can think of some reasons for it getting less attention than it deserves. It came during a very uneven period of King’s career in which it seemed that masterpieces—or at least strong works of character, social commentary, and improving writerly technique—alternated in no predictable way with ambitious disasters: for instance, Misery followed by The Tommyknockers. Above all, attention during that period focused increasingly on the Dark Tower books and the tendrils they sent out to unite the series with King’s other fiction. While Rose Madder is connected to the Dark Tower metaworld, the connection is easy to miss, unlike in Insomnia, his novel before Rose Madder. And who knows how important it is to Rose Madder’s fame that, unlike most of King’s best novels and many of his lesser works, Rose Madder has never been filmed? (A film is rumored to be in production, but this talk goes back at least to 2011.)
Yet I remembered Rose Madder fondly and usually listed it among my choices for King’s best work. For one thing, the novel is worth attention as a follow-up to the “eclipse” novels, Gerald’s Game and Dolores Claiborne—the climax of what TV Tropes says some fans call “the abused wife trilogy.” Although the two earlier books clearly are a pair, Rose Madder continues both King’s concern with gender issues and attempts to write realistic female characters, unlike the eponymous heroine of Carrie, who, King admitted in many interviews, lives out the stereotypes of females as victim and female as threat without ever reaching a sane median. The main conflict in Rose Madder is the escape of Rose Daniels (nee McClendon) from a marriage full of beatings by her husband, a police officer who pulls out all the stops to find her. The sustained effects of domestic abuse and the recovery from it are similar in all three works, but Rose Madder is arguably the best. In both degree and tone, the effects seem both more profound and less melodramatic. They are further reaching, permeating every aspect of Rose’s life, including difficulty knowing what she really wants and fear of everyday encounters. Yet the flowering of her stronger emotions takes much longer than in the two eclipse books and happens much more realistically.
The novel also shows a sound attempt to get past the Magical Negro that had, sadly, supplied most of the racial diversity in King’s earlier works (for instance, Mother Abigail in The Stand)—making Rose Madder interesting as a precursor of Bag of Bones. (And as part of an overall arc in which King’s depiction of African Americans regresses in some ways in Mr. Mercedes, but that’s another essay.) Rose Madder does feature a goddess’s servant who appears to Rose McClendon as Wendy Yarrow, a black woman whom her police-officer husband has beaten up and raped on duty and then murdered when she complained to authorities. OK, as the ages-old associate of a goddess, she’s literally magical, and the servant aspect is very troubling. On the other hand, the figure (actually named Dorcas) is not really Wendy Yarrow, just as Rose McClendon is not actually the goddess she thinks of as Rose Madder although the two look similar and are clearly doubles. As in It and some other works by King, the supernatural elements have to appear in forms that are taken from the human individuals’ minds and hence are familiar, an approach that has always seemed convincing to me.
Apart from that one character, King, who can be very fat phobic, won me over with the character of Gert Kinshaw, a tall and, yes, fat African-American woman who trains some of the residents of the battered-women’s shelter in the martial arts—not to actually save lives, she thinks, but to rebuild confidence. He had me at someone who is fat and competent, but his understanding of what minimal martial-arts training can and can’t do for women sealed it.
Yet, while these and more aspects of Rose Madder held up very well, there was one major area in which I was very disappointed: the depiction of the abusive husband Rose suddenly escapes from, Norman Daniels. As realistic a character as Rose is (albeit with extremely good luck, some perhaps supernatural), Norman is over the top in a way that undermines his half of the social content of Rose Madder, leaving it an exploration of abuse and recovery but no use at all in examining why people do the abuse. Over the years, I had forgotten the extent of Norman Daniels’s pathology. Not only is he a wife beater and a biter, but he has already engineered one premeditated murder before she leaves and continues to murder almost casually as he stalks her. And Norman’s father not only beat him when he was growing up but also molested him. As a result—well, the best interpretation is that he reenacts his own sexual abuse and then expresses his anger by biting men in a certain area. The interpretation that I wish I could rule out but for which there is some evidence is that the molestation turned Norman gay, while his hatred of gays as a stigmatized class, at least as much as anger at his father, turns his attentions into violence. (Support of this is a minor character, Ramon Sanders, who even more clearly seems to have been turned gay by molestation.)
Why, oh why couldn’t King have made this guy a run-of-the-mill wife beater? I know that one answer is simply that some characters appear to the authors, who have little or no conscious choice if they want to keep writing authentic work. But I see some possible reasons for it as a choice. One is genre: the roots of contemporary American commercial horror novels in the gothic call for larger-than-life villains, and in many novels, including The Dead Zone and The Dark Half, King had already gone way beyond wife beaters (who primarily figured as minor characters, such as in Cujo) to serial killers. Perhaps, also, a more formidable abuse history seemed necessary to explain a more formidable adversary—though the fact that he is a first-rate police officer with great detective instincts seems to make him formidable enough, just as domestic violence and anal rape with an object seem to me to be horrible enough without serial murder. For whatever reason, Norman’s complex of pathologies in a novel that is two-thirds a realistic drama of escape and recovery from domestic abuse seems to muddle the message in a very problematic way. As with serial killers, thinking of spouse abusers as a unique species of monster is taking the easy way out. It doesn’t help us understand how to stop them, or what cultural as well as personal forces produce them, or how much even the best of us has in common with them.
Norman Daniels’s character seems gratuitous in another way as well: the unrelenting combination of homophobia, misogyny, and racism makes him an equal-opportunity hater. While this is far from impossible, unfortunately, it also muddles the thematic message and allows the readers to think, “That could never be me.” As so clearly seen in King’s characters such as Harold Lauder in The Stand or Annie Wilkes in Misery, most of his human bad guys (as opposed to the arch supernatural villain, the Dark Man) have their own affections and talents, human goodness that goes wrong but is never totally erased. In fact, the goodness often is turned to bad ends or loses out to them, making the whole character sad as well as condemnable. In the villain of Rose Madder, King’s deft touch slips.
On the other hand, the aspect of the novel that stood up the best—and stood up with the best of King’s writing—is the supernatural element, a minority of the book in terms of pages but a major source of motivation and plot resolution. Soon after her escape to a distant city, living in a battered women’s shelter, Rose finds herself called to buy a dusty, not particularly well-executed painting she finds in a pawn shop. It shows the remains of a temple and a woman facing away from the viewer, whom Rose names Rose Madder, after the color of the garment she wears. At first, Rose thinks of that woman to gain confidence in all the new and stressful situations that an escaping battered wife encounters; later, Rose finds that she can step into the painting, in which Rose Madder turns out to be a fading, half-crazed goddess, dangerous but willing to help Rose McClendon after Rose does an errand for her.
While I admire the scope and many individual touches of the Dark Tower books, these parts of Rose Madder seem to me to offer some of King’s most truly mythopoeic work—not just constructing a new myth system but touching some of the deepest human crevices where all myth touches us. Some of the connections are explicit, but even those undergo creative twists. Just as Rose McClendon and Rose Madder are doubles, so are Norman and Erinyes, a bull in the labyrinth of the painting. (King points out the link of a nickname for police before pigs or the fuzz: a bull.) Most of the facts around the bull remind readers of the Minotaur of Crete, but his name is taken from that of the Furies, female chthonic spirits of vengeance. And the goddess Rose Madder is clearly a spirit of vengeance: her motto is, “I repay.” In addition, the world in the painting alludes to the Greek underworld with a river of waters that cause forgetfulness.
My favorite mythopoeic figure in that painting world is a tree that bears fruit that Rose is instructed to pluck seeds from but never taste, warned not to even put her fingers in her mouth afterwards. It is called a pomegranate tree, reminding readers of Persephone, but the fruit are not earthly pomegranates. Rose McClendon thinks of the two trees in Eden, although the fruit of this tree brings death rather than life or knowledge. Then for a third turn, in the epilogue she plants a seed in our world and gets results highly reminiscent of William Blake’s poem “A Poison Tree,” in his Songs of Experience. But who is Rose’s “foe” now that Norman is dead? Does she become less angry because the tree leeches her anger off to feed itself? Will no one ever eat its fruit, or—? One good sign of true myth, I think, is that it creates some answers but always more questions.
Above all, King gets the mythopoeic tone right—the look and feel of powers vastly beyond human that follow their own logic. Wonderfully, King does under- rather than over-explain, but the events and information seem to chime together in ways that give them an integrity that is better than any logical connections. That may well be one reason I prefer this to the systematic myth of the Dark Tower books. We are not told how the two worlds connect and how they differ or why the goddess is growing ill, senile, and dangerous. The connections are emotional rhymes: Rose Madder’s offer of power and Rose McClendon’s as-yet-untapped power, the vengeance Norman and the Bull want and the vengeance that Rose Madder wants and Rose McClendon needs and deserves.
The gender issues work out—or don’t work out, but evoke our responses—in the mythic material as well. Some people have said that Rose Madder is antimale because the goddess calls all men “beasts.” However, this view overlooks a great deal of evidence. First, although the haters in the neighborhood say that everyone who runs the women’s shelter is a lesbian, the only ones whose sexuality we know are heterosexual. Most of all, Rose dares speak up to the goddess about the term, and the goddess thereafter refers to Rose’s boyfriend as “your friend,” not “your beast.” Still, there seems to be something swimming at the bottom of this myth, something about toxic masculinity—and the goddess merely shows that there is toxic femininity as well.
One clue may be an otherwise odd detail, one of those mythic elements that one gnaws and gnaws for frequent insight but no real solution. The goddess tells Rose that the bull Erinyes is one-eyed but blind; he can locate her, however, by smell. Then Norman wears a latex mask of Ferdinand the bull, and as it transforms him, it not only becomes his skin but also narrows his vision to one eyehole. My first thought was to connect the bull to the Cyclops Polyphemus, the anthropophagy of the latter echoing Norman’s tendency to bite his wife and his other victims. And I like that association. But why one eye and blind? Presumably not a reference to the 2014 song “One Eye Blind” in a 1990s novel! Finally I wondered, could it be a reference to the male member itself? Giants and monsters as versions of a phallus is not a new idea—it shows up at least back to Orgoglio in Spenser’s The Faerie Queene and much more recently in Clive Barker’s story “Rawhead Rex,” in Books of Blood. (See “Clive on Rawhead Rex” at Revelations, the official Clive Barker site.) It stands up; it has one eye, but it’s blind. However, clearly the bull in the novel is not a condemnation of all male sexuality any more than Rose Madder shows that all women think of men as beasts. In fact, one of Norman Daniels’s too many pathologies is that he’s become incapable of an erection without doing some kind of biting first.
I suspect that a full working out of the mythos of Rose Madder would prove to be very heteronormative: masculinity and femininity are complementary, and either without the other becomes monstrous. However, maybe it’s not that restrictive. When Normal Daniels is masquerading as a feminist, paraplegic war veteran, one of the bumper stickers he puts on his wheelchair says, “I am a man who respects women” and another says, “R-E-S-P-E-C-T, find out what it means to me.” For him, of course, the slogans are pure camouflage and deeply ironic. For that reason, however, they can serve as indicators of King’s core values in Rose Madder—that no matter what type of relationship, from professional to intimate, it must be based on mutual respect. Another irony in the novel, then, is that all those who refer to the women at the shelter as lesbians have themselves confused respect and sex. The women at the shelter really share the former, and Norman Daniels completely lacks respect for anyone else.
At any rate, one of the many useful aspects of myths, and of stories in general, is that they can have effects and be put to uses that are determined as much by the receiver as by the writer or the tradition. Because of the character of Rose McClendon—a real woman, who overcomes abuse to hold an interesting job and to finally learn how to live with a man as an equal—and because of the mythopoesis of the novel, Rose Madder deserves to be read and reread and even re-reread.
Bernadette L. Bosky lives in Yonkers, New York.
Works Cited
Barker, Clive, and Phil and Sarah Stokes. “Clive on Rawhead Rex.” Revelations. <www.clivebarker.info/rawheadrex.html> Accessed May 9, 2017.
King, Stephen. Rose Madder (1995). New York: Signet Books, 1996.
“Rose Madder.” Literature section, TV Tropes. <tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Literature/RoseMadder>. Accessed May 9, 2017.
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