Summary: Part 1, Section 3

“Carrie went into the house and closed the door behind her.”

Margaret works at the local laundry so the house is empty when Carrie comes home early. The only thing Carrie hears when she enters the house is the ticking of the Black Forest cuckoo clock in the living room, and the first thing she sees is the painting of Jesus that hangs in the hallway. It is entitled The Unseen Guest. The house is filled with pictures of Jesus and illustrations of Bible stories, some tranquil and others terrifying. As Carrie changes out of the heavy, outdated clothes her mother makes her wear, she thinks about how unselfconscious the models are in the magazines she sees at school. She looks at her face in the mirror and is disgusted by her reflection. The mirror cracks.

On Friday night, Sue Snell and Tommy Ross make love in the back of his car. They have been intimate for two weeks now and Sue only enjoys it a little. She admits to Tommy that she did a shameful thing earlier and worries that he will not love her if she is the kind of person who would be so cruel. Tommy asks Sue if she plans to apologize, and she asks him if he hates being popular. He responds that it’s not important, because high school is not important. They make love again and Sue enjoys it this time. Tommy asks her if she will go to prom with him.

Margaret comes home early on Friday after getting a call from school. Carrie is upset with Margaret for not preparing her for starting her period, but before Carrie can tell Margaret about the morning’s events her mother backhands her across the jaw and knocks her down. Chanting aloud about Adam and Eve and the birth of Cain, Margaret kicks Carrie in the backside until they reach the altar set up in an old bedroom, where Margaret forces Carrie to her knees and begins to pray. Carrie threatens to make the stones come again, and then yells an obscenity at her mother, who locks her in the closet and leaves her there for seven hours.

After Margaret lets Carrie out of the closet, they listen to hymns on the record player as Margaret crochets and Carrie sews a dress from a wine-colored fabric. Her mother does not allow her to wear true red. Carrie recalls the fear in her mother’s eyes when she mentioned the stones, and all the other times her mother sent her to the closet to pray. She flexes her mind to make the sewing machine whir and then goes to bed.

An excerpt from The Shadow Exploded details Margaret’s background. Her parents ran a roadhouse not far from Chamberlain, and her father was killed in a shooting incident there when Margaret was nearly 30. Margaret called her mother and new stepfather adulterers but did not leave their home until she met Ralph White. One month after Margaret married Ralph she went to the hospital, and when Margaret’s mother tried to find out what was wrong, Margaret raved about an angel with a sword. Her mother suspected that Margaret had had a miscarriage and was surprised later to receive a letter from Margaret claiming that her marriage to Ralph was “sinless.”

Analysis: Part 1, Section 3

After a long walk alone with her thoughts, Carrie resumes examining herself at a surface-level once she arrives at home. She starts with her outer shell, her clothes, which are heavy and unattractive. When she looks for a contrast to her dull wardrobe, she thinks not of her real-life peers but of models on the two-dimensional pages of a magazine. Perhaps she aspires to be like these models because she does not know them, and more importantly, they don’t know her either. Unlike the girls in the locker room, Carrie can stare at them without them staring back. As she looks at her own reflection with disgust, she causes the mirror to crack, making herself the “unseen guest” like Jesus.

Carrie is not typically home by herself, and when Margaret returns, she fills the entire house with her fury over the commencement of Carrie’s completely normal and utterly inevitable menstrual cycle. She shows no concern regarding Carrie’s suffering at the hands of her peers, nor does Margaret acknowledge that her refusal to discuss basic biology with her nearly adult daughter is precisely what set Carrie up for that torment. Margaret’s only goal is for Carrie to atone for becoming a woman, and the excerpt from The Shadow Exploded indicates that Margaret spends much of her life atoning for her own womanhood. She scourges herself, urging Carrie to treasure the memories of her own scourging, and beats and kicks Carrie in order to ensure that Carrie has plenty of painful memories to call upon.

If Carrie did not previously equate the forbidden color red with womanly blood, she surely does now as she sews her almost-red dress. With her rant about the birth of Cain, which was proof of Adam and Eve’s original sin of intercourse, Margaret has begun to illuminate the treacherous path that Carrie’s “sinful” womanhood will lead her down. However, Carrie displays her growing sense of agency when she makes the sewing machine whir in her mother’s presence.

In Carrie’s home, sexual pleasure is considered a sin, but Sue Snell has recently become sexually active, another milestone on the way to womanhood and a stark contrast to Margaret’s “sinless” marriage and Carrie’s cluelessness about the female body. While Sue has not enjoyed much pleasure from her lovemaking up until this point, she begins to exhibit her emotional maturity when she confides in Tommy despite her concern that she will be tainted in his eyes. The honest exchange that follows is perhaps what allows Sue to finally feel comfortable enough to enjoy physical intimacy with Tommy.