Spoilers ahead for Stephen King’s novel Rose Madder.
Earlier this month, I broke my long fast from fiction and picked up a novella. I stopped reading fiction last year after I finished The Shining by Stephen King because it utterly wrecked me. I couldn’t stop thinking about it. I even had dreams (not nightmares, dreams) about the characters that made me feel as though, somehow, the novel was real. I knew it wasn’t, but my emotional reaction to it caught me entirely off guard. And it was so heavy, that I could not pick up another novel, by King or anyone else, for months.
But that ended earlier this month when I decided I wanted to return to the realm of horror fiction. I’ve been watching American Horror Story and it’s reminded me just how much I love reading horror. So, I opted for his novella The Mist, and I consumed it in less than three days. I think it may have been less than one full day, though due to working full time, I had to read it in two separate sittings. It was absolutely phenomenal. Not scary, as his stuff usually isn’t, but intense and with fabulous character development.
What could I do from there but pick up another novel? Not quite wanting to dive into the Bible-length novel The Stand, I opted instead for Rose Madder. This was a novel I was less familiar with and, based on the premise on the back cover, it sounded as though it would be a much more thrilling story. Less supernatural, much more realistic and, therefore, terrifying. And the first half of the novel absolutely engrossed me. I related so very much to Rosie McLendon, the protagonist, a survivor of an abusive marriage and a woman who suffered a miscarriage. The novel is about her attempting to flee from her controlling, possessive, abusive police officer husband.
Like I said, the first half was wonderful. But the second half was beyond disappointing and just…forced. Rose Madder is the name of a painting that Rosie finds in a pawn shop when she goes to pawn her supposedly diamond ring. Turns out the ring is not a diamond at all, it’s zirconia, and the band it sits in is worth more than the gem itself. She loves the painting, though; feels drawn to it, and so trades the ring for it. And the painting starts to give her confidence, allowing her to do things she would have been far too scared to do otherwise. (Like go on a date with a guy named Billy.) And all of that I found intriguing. I know I have certainly found inspiration and strength from a piece of art, be it a book or a character from a movie. (I cannot begin to express how much Rey from the Star Wars sequel trilogy has been a source of strength for me.)
But the painting isn’t an ordinary painting. It’s a portal. The woman in the painting is a mythical being of some kind, one who ends up being irrevocably linked to Rosie throughout the rest of the novel. See, Rosie’s husband, Norman, has come looking for her and he intends to kill. The man is on a murderous rampage and, as the novel unfolds, he begins to shift, change, morph into something not quite human. Rosie and Norman are “connected” in a way that defies understanding. Call it telepathy. Call it the supernatural. Call it fate. They have similar dreams at similar times, but from their own perspectives. And while I abhor the glorification of how abuse connects victims to their abusers, I wasn’t entirely put off by this premise because Rosie begins to change as well. She starts to not only be inspired by the woman in the painting (whose face she cannot see), but she finds herself believing that she is, in some way, part of the painting herself. And I found this to be a beautiful, albeit flawed, way of seeing a victim’s process of healing.
As the reader, we know that Norman is going to come very close to finding Rosie, if he doesn’t actually find her. I was prepared for a confrontation between them, and I was prepared for it to be either underwhelming or iconic. I wasn’t sure which it would be. But in the last two acts of the novel, King takes the story in a direction that infuriated me beyond belief. I can acknowledge that it was highly creative, and I think I see what he was attempting to accomplish, but it utterly ruined the ending of the book.
Like I said, the painting is a portal. Earlier in the novel, Rosie “falls” into the painting and performs a service for the woman in the painting, who she calls Rose Madder. Rose thanks her for the service and promises to “repay” her. Rosie then falls out of the painting. This section of the novel takes up at least fifty pages or more, and while it does allow the narrator to build the world that exists inside the painting, it also feels as though King is trying much to hard to make this feel supernatural/dangerous/mysterious. It’s so heavy handed.
Then, jumping to the climax of the novel, Norman finds Rosie. He injures Billy, who is now in love with Rosie. Rosie and Billy go through the painting and Norman follows. Rose Madder hides Billy. Rosie leads Norman (who has become a kind of psychotic version of Erinyes) to Rose Madder, who brutally kills him, her way of paying Rosie back for the service she rendered. Then Rosie and Billy leave the painting. Norman is dead and gone. Rosie no longer has to live in fear. And if the novel had ended there, it might have been salvageable.
But it doesn’t.
Because Rose Madder charges Rose with “remembering the tree,” and this command feels completely out of the blue. Aren’t Rose and Rosie even at this point? But Rosie doesn’t know what this means and she’s not allowed to ask Rose for clarification. She and Billy are together. They’re in love. They get married. And all the while, Rosie is haunted by Rose Madder and “the tree” she’s supposed to remember. And the longer that goes by without the tree being remembered, the more Rosie begins to turn violent. Filled with rage, to the point of fantasizing about torturing Billy and murdering one of her coworkers. She doesn’t act on these impulses, but they become more frequent and harder to control.
How does she get them to stop? She remembers that she has a seed from one of the trees in the painting, and she goes to plant it in a state park where she and Billy went on their second date. It’s a tree that sheltered a vixen and her pups. This is, apparently, the tree that she was supposed to remember because, somehow, the vixen and Rose Madder are meant to be symbols of each other. It’s written as though this is some big reveal, like the final twist of the story that won’t slow down, but by the time I got there, I was so ready for it all to be over. Why create a story about a powerful, god-like being (Rose Madder) helping to save the victim of fourteen years of horrific physical and emotional abuse (Rosie McLendon) in supposed woman’s solidarity, if that act is going to be what starts to turn Rosie into the monster her husband was? And that’s not even considering the very awful ways in which mental illness are depicted in this novel.
A book that begins with so much promise ends with some of the worst writing I have read in a long time. It felt as though King was trying to access some of the magic that made The Shining so amazing, but didn’t really know how, and so came up with this jumble of a story that just got less and less enjoyable as it went along. Especially considering how much time we have to spend inside of Norman’s perspective, seeing how many people he kills to find Rosie, the emotional payoff at the end is simply not worth the investment. Not in the slightest.
Because here’s the thing: I’ve known so many men who are possessive and controlling. In fact, the vast majority of men I’ve known exhibit these behaviors on some level, especially the ones who think they’re more progressive than that. The toxicity, the arrogance, the sheer lack of consideration for the other person, are all very real traits that are, at this point, pretty much accepted as normal from men. Expected, even. I have lost count of the number of men I’ve cut out of my life for acting as though they were entitled to any part of me/my life or acted as though I somehow owed them my attention, my time, my consideration, or my body. And while these men have made me incredibly angry, even filling me with rage at some points, it has precisely been that anger that has allowed me to see that I was being disrespected and mistreated.
For Rosie’s anger to turn into something dangerous, something that nearly turns her into the monster she barely survived, is a level of misogynistic oversight that I cannot excuse or justify. The amount of judgment “angry” women face on a daily basis in basically every aspect of their lives is obscene. Yes, I am an angry woman. Yes, I am an angry feminist, and I have every right to be. No, I am not going to turn into a homicidal rage monster who wants to kill anyone who annoys me because of my anger. And I get that Rosie’s rage is linked to her not “remembering the tree,” but even that is problematic because it implies that she didn’t deserve to be saved by Rose Madder until she planted the seed. When Rosie had already done a great service for Rose Madder, and Rose killing Norman was supposed to be her repayment.
I cannot and will not support or condone a story that not only perpetuates the stigma that mental illness is why Norman abused his wife and killed a bunch of innocent people, but also paints women as being exactly what society has always painted us: hysterical. The whole narrative of the first half is built on the premise that Rosie isn’t not hysterical, that no victim of abuse ever is hysterical, and then it’s all shit on in the end because turns out, she kind of is hysterical. I just. I can’t.
All writers create poems, stories, novels, essays, that aren’t good at some point. I acknowledge that. This one hits me wrong, though, and it infuriates me. I don’t recommend this book to anyone, even though it is very well written at the line and paragraph levels.
