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Margaret White is Carrie’s controlling and ultra-religious mother. She restricts Carrie’s world and instills in her fears regarding her own body, sex, and other behaviors and topics Margaret deems immoral. Margaret’s extreme opinions about other people and her tendency to share them in an aggressive and unrelenting manner guarantee her isolation, as people find these traits to be off-putting. She has created a world in which there are no dissenting opinions, and prayer is her main form of communication. It is also her most powerful form of punishment against her daughter. For example, when she locks Carrie in the closet to pray, she makes Carrie’s world even smaller and guarantees that she will suffer the same isolation as Margaret does.

There are many aspects to the Christian faith, but Margaret zeroes in on the scriptures regarding original sin and judgment. Though her parents did not raise her to believe in this harsh version of Christianity, she views the roadhouse that they ran as a den of iniquity and believes that all sexual acts and the people who engage in them are evil, and she never ceases to punish herself for her own weaknesses in that regard. She is as repentant about those weaknesses of those acts as she is about the pleasure that they gave her, and she is determined that her daughter never go down that same path to sin.

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