Family Nightmares

     I thought the idea of how the family was twisted in The Shining was the most interesting aspect of it. Since we have been studying the inner evils of ourselves, even though the horrors of the house stood out the most, the reality of what the family was going through before they arrived and while the house was preying on their darkest moments seemed a larger part of the message of the story.

     I liked the idea of breaking down each family member into the ideals of their family position and  the way it resembled the signs of domestic violence, being an interesting and large part of Jack's past. Now Jack is suppose to be the head of the household and he is at that. He shows he is in control and has power over Wendy and Danny, but perhaps much of this is due to them fearing him and due to his past. Wendy, being the woman of the house and with the roles in women still leaning more towards family than being independent, she sort of serves the family, especially Jack. The timidness of Wendy and how she keeps an eye on Jack all the time shows how she fears him. Already knowing of his past of drinking and violence, she notices the signs coming back and admits to herself that ""The most frightening thing, vaporous and unmentioned, perhaps unmentionable, was that all of Jack's drinking symptoms had come back, one by one…all but the drink itself." The main thing that stands out here is the unmentioned/unmentionable part. Wendy doesn't dare talk about the horrible things Jack has done due to his temper out of fear he will find out and hurt her. She also notes how "he got irritated over little things. He would unconsciously start snapping his fingers in a nervous rhythm when things got to quiet. Increased profanity. She began to worry about his temper too." Increased anger and verbal abuse, while not acknowledged enough as abuse even though it is a high form of it, are some telling signs of domestic abuse besides the most obvious sign of fear in partners. Alcoholism also is involved in many domestic violence cases, though I'm not sure if it is the majority.

Going back to how "hush hush" most victims are in these situations, another factor that prevents people from how serious and common domestic violence is, when Jack broke Danny's arm, no one in the family made a big deal of it, even though the was the undertone that it had been more than an "accident." Wendy tried to play it off as an accident, but the strange thing was when Jack openly admitted that he "meant to do it. I guess someplace inside I really did mean to do that to him. Or something even worse." This openness strays from normal signs of harassment, but instead shows that while Jack was doing this to Danny, he had some control over it. The Overlook Hotel plays much with the mind so it leaves me to wonder if the intention was to reveal that the choices each family member made were purely reasonable to them and less because of what the hotel was doing to them. Danny, being the child who are known to say whatever is one their mind, is one of the only people who confronts Jack head on about his violent tendencies when he asks him "you'd never hurt Mommy, would you, Daddy?" "No." "Or me?" "No." Silence again, spinning out." Being an only child as well as knowing of the divorce has already taken a hold of his childhood, so being onto the violent tendencies coming for Jack shows the strain in family relations. It appears that Danny does not trust Jack. The story is already threatening enough before you add the supernatural elements, which is what makes me believe the real story lies in the reality of it instead of the ghost story.

    The disguise of the perfect family. How much do we hide about it to the world? How much of ourselves do we hide from our families?


     Finding the inspiration or connection the author, Stephen King, has with their work has always interested me so I did some research in a biography of Stephen King to see if his own past and childhood could reflect why he wrote such stories, including The Shining. It turns out the King's father deserted his family at a young age, leaving his mother to take care of the family. He never said if his father had an alcohol problem, but he does reveal that while writing The Shining, he himself was battling being an alcoholic. A little while after his father had left,  at the age of six he punctured his eardrums, which he said he could never forget the pain of it. I wondered if in his mind he connected the two and while the rest of his life was a decent one, children can feel and experience many things that affect the rest of their lives. This may be the psychologist in me, but I do feel that the pain and negativity put out in the lack of a father figure combined with a connection to the pain of his multiple injuries could be the premise for his beginning writing, as well as the violence and horror style. His earlier works tend to focus on the horrors of being a child, parental neglect, and abuse, which fall very well along the lines of Danny and the others in The Shining. In his later novels, shift more towards the pain and loneliness of being an adult. King explains that meaning and purpose of his books are not a dance of death at all, not really. There is a third lever here, as well. It is, at bottom, a dance of dreams. It's a way of awakening the child inside, who never dies but only sleeps ever more deeply. If the horror story is rehearsal for death, then its strict moralities make it also a reaffirmation of life and good will and simple imagination - just one more pipeline to the infinite." So it seems his childhood is very important to his writing and that it's also about taking the darkness and learning from it to be good. Do you think the attack on Jack as the father figure and his fate reflects King's deeper feelings about his father? How much of Jack do you think could reflect King himself? Could he be reflecting the evils in himself instead?

It just seemed like a startling revelation, but brilliant cover at the same time for a horror story. To me, King was actually showing that the reality of our own family flaws and decay can be more frightening and strange than the supernatural. While the spooks were a huge part of the past of the hotel, they really represented the human mishaps from the people who used to be in the hotel. King has used the nightmares of dreams and spirits to hide the actual horror of the novel, the horror and fear a family can have just from realizing themselves and facing the 'ghosts of their past. Do you think people really deal with their pasts? No matter what amount of therapy given, can we really let go of some of the worst things about us or that have happened to us, or do we just hide them away until the right thing causes us to break?



King, Stephen. The Shining. New York, New York: Pocket Books, 1977. Print.